“No, you’re not.”
“No, I’m not,” he agreed. “But I want to be sorry.”
“No, you don’t.” She sounded downright amused by it.
He grinned. This. This was why he adored her. “No, I don’t.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I fucked someone I shouldn’t have fucked.”
There was a tiny pause. “If you’re not here for dinner in twenty minutes, I will come over there and pull you out of that shit hole you live in by your hair.”
Then she hung up on him.
This was not why he adored her.
* * *
Caty and Lisbeth lived in a bungalow not far from his place, a charming slate-blue one-story with a yellow door, which opened before Sullivan had a chance to knock. Caty stood there in all her big-haired blonde beauty, her low-cut purple top revealing the upper swells of her large breasts, her black leather collar latched around her throat as usual. Her skirt was pink tweed and short enough to reveal the knee-high lace-up boots she was wearing.
“Nice.” He nodded appreciatively, because good boys might be his kryptonite, but bad girls definitely had their charms too, and he knew Caty would take it as the compliment he meant it as. “It’s very Barbie Does Dallas.”
“Get in here,” Caty snarled, yanking him inside by the wrist.
“I missed you, too,” he said, unable to curb his smile.
“You’ve been an uptight little non-boner for over a year—a year!—and you’ve been avoiding me for weeks—weeks!—just because I tried to get you to give someone new a chance post-fuckface, and out of the blue you’re all ‘oh, I fucked someone, oh, it’s so dramatic’ and now you’re trying to be chill about it? Fucker!”
Lisbeth appeared at the far end of the hallway, small and brunette and slender in her quiet blouse and trousers, lovely in a sedate way. “Hello, Sullivan. How are you? Was it a pleasant drive?”
“It’s hot as balls out here.”
“Classy,” Caty sneered, and smacked him on the back of his head.
“I’m wearing a button-down.” He’d even taken a shower so he wouldn’t be all sweaty. “Ungrateful wench.”
“We’re having rigatoni with a white wine sauce,” Lisbeth said serenely. “Does that suit you?”
“Sounds delicious.” He followed the women into the kitchen, a bright, airy room thick with the scent of butter and herbs at the moment. “Smells delicious too.”
“Thank you.” She stirred something in a pot and gave him a soft smile. “Caty mentioned you’ve been busy at work. Trouble with a case?”
“I did not say he’s been busy at work,” Caty said hotly. “I said he was pretending to be busy at work to avoid me so he wouldn’t have to crawl out of that dank hole in the ground he’s squatting in.”
Lisbeth nodded. “Oh, that’s right.” She added salt to the sauce. “What’s the pretend trouble at work?”
“Oh, my God,” Caty groaned.
“It’s actual trouble these days. Boss Lady finally gave me a case of my own.”
Lisbeth smiled. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.”
“How’d you con Raina into that one?” Caty asked.
Sullivan nobly ignored that in favor of going to the fridge and peering inside. “I’m looking for a missing girl, and one of the leads I stumbled onto is a college guy who...” He stopped with his hand midair, reaching for string cheese. He wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence.
“Context,” Caty demanded. “Now.”
So he explained the whole mess, starting with the ineffectual blackmail and stumbling to a halt before he got any more specific about the sex than he already had. This wasn’t the kind of thing he would normally bite his tongue on—people in the kink community generally had very few boundaries when it came to discussing this sort of thing in a group—but something told him Tobias wouldn’t like it, so he kept his mouth shut.
When he’d finished, Lisbeth made a humming sound. “You’re right. He’s an inappropriate person to sleep with.”
“You’re telling me.” Sullivan licked a drop of wine from the lip of his glass.
“You don’t sound mad that he’s blackmailing you,” Caty said slowly.
“Oh, I’m mad.” He paused. “I was mad.” He peeled off another string of cheese and considered it thoughtfully. “I’m still mad if I think about it for too long, but it’s hard to be mad about it all the time because it’s sort of stupid. I mean, they might arrest me, but even if the apartment complex pressed charges for breaking and entering, what am I really going to get?”
“I’m not even sure they can file charges on behalf of a resident, especially if he hasn’t been determined to be missing yet. Hmm. I’d have to check. Either way, if you didn’t steal or vandalize anything, I’d say you’re fine,” Lisbeth said. “Slap on the wrist at most.”
“Exactly. And it might be neat to get arrested once. To see what it’s like, you know?”
“You’re so weird,” Caty said.
“Honestly, if it weren’t for how Raina would react, I’d say fuck it and see what he does.”
“Raina would shit a brick, wouldn’t she?” Caty asked.
“Yeah.” Sullivan slumped in his chair. “There’s the rub, as they say. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if I had to continue my training at another firm, but it’d eat up a lot of time, and I’m not ready to be on my own yet. Getting arrested would be more of a pain in the ass than anything else, but getting fired would cut.”
“So you’re letting him help,” Caty prompted, eyeballing him over her glass.
“Yeah, I’m letting him help. He’s not entirely useless, at least.”
“Uh-huh.”
Propping one hip against the counter and taking a sip of her wine, Lisbeth said, “Considering what the case means to you, sleeping with him does seem self-destructive.”
“That’s lawyer speak for stupid,” Caty said helpfully. “And it figures that after a year of non-boners, you’re getting actual boners for people you shouldn’t be getting boners for.”
“Boner? Really? What are you, fourteen?” Sullivan said.
“Boner, boner, boner.”
He swallowed the last bite of string cheese and threw the wrapper away. “How big a deal would you say un-negotiated kink with a newbie is, ethics-wise?”
Caty lifted a slow
