The entrance to the Reilly estate was a twelve foot wrought iron gate made of two rearing stallions, but Tessa did not take them to the entrance. It was a night of back alleys and secret doors, and so she led them over a fence and across the pastures. The fence caught her dress and sliced it up above her knee, but it was already in such shambles that it hardly mattered anyway. They looked like fleeing prisoners, or refugees, or souls that had crawled out of hell, and Tommy was stumbling and coughing and Tessa kept moving forward blindly, in a daze, her mind completely empty. She had forgotten about her ankle. In comparison, even if she had remembered, it would seem so trivial she could have hardly convinced herself to care. None of this was real. She would wake up tomorrow from this horrifying, insane nightmare and never have it again. The thought calmed her. Everything felt like a dream, anyway. The breeze sifted through the leaves of the massive trees on the edge of the pasture and the night was cool on her hot skin and as they rose up over a hill the huge house came into view, lying in the distance at the edge of the woods. She started descending downwards, on the sloping lawn, towards the lake and the stables, through the carefully manicured grass, Tommy trailing behind. She wondered if she should be helping him somehow, but she wondered it blankly, as if knowing even as she thought it that he wouldn't let her. He stopped suddenly when they reached the edge of the stream that cut through the fields of the property and flowed into the lake near the house. He lit another cigarette, stood motionless for a moment, then waded in, not bothering to remove his pants or his soaking red bandages, smoke drifting after him, and she stood at the bank, watching him move into the waist deep water. He was bathed in moonlight and water and blood, and he looked deadly, and he looked graceful, his features all shadows and edges, and he looked like the answer to all prayers, for danger and for everything else. She looked down at her hands, covered in dirt and mud and blood, and wondered if she had ever been so physically unclean in the past decade. Her face and ankle burned suddenly. Her arms didn't look like her own arms, her hands didn't feel like her own hands. He was looking up at the sky, his head tilted all the way back, looking like he had just been baptized in blood. Someone smarter than her, maybe, would have turned around and left him there. Tried to never think about him again, told her father she wanted no part in whatever business he had with a murdering gangster. His head was tilted back, his closely cut hair gleaming dully in the moonlight, smoke drifting out between his lips. Anyone who knew what was good for them would turn around and leave and never look back. But she sighed, unlaced her shoes and peeled off her socks and ruined dress, and joined him.
Her hair was so long it was trailing in the water by the time she reached him, standing in the middle of the stream and letting the current swirl around her. Her eyes were closed and her head was bowed, and he watched as she approached him. She looked how he felt, but he probably looked worse. He sank under the water and the sharp cold spread through him and struck his bones and his wounds like a thousand little bullets, making his brain buzz, and the moon was so bright and glowing in the sky that when he came back up he could see the water carrying the blood off him and washing it downstream, little trails of red. He kept the hand holding the cigarette above the water and used the other to scrub his arms and his face and his chest. He hated being dirty. Ever since the tunnels, he had hated it. He hated the blood, and the death, and the fire. It all followed him. His side and shoulder ached, everything ached, and he wanted to lie down under the water and never come back up. He held the cigarette out to her and she took it with a "thank you," and he wanted to laugh because of how absurd it was that she should be fucking thanking him. She took a long drag and released it with a long breath. Her underthings were clinging to her, and he looked at her, letting his eyes trail down her body and drink it in. She was beautifully shaped, small but well proportioned, with lovely breasts whose nipples he could see showing through the clinging white fabric. He thought about having her against him in the alley, the sound she had made. She took another deep pull, and he watched her lips wrap around the cigarette, and she flicked the ashes into the water. He took a step closer to her, put his hand up, knuckles brushing her red-smeared cheek. Her skin was so smooth, velvet like a horse's nose. Her almond eyes closed, lids fluttering like trapped wings.
"You're bleeding," he said, like he was noticing for the first time, so that he had an excuse, and she responded with a quiet "hmm".
Her body was thrumming and still all at once, like a hummingbird at rest. She understood them. They must get so tired. She was so tired. So tired she felt like she never needed to sleep again, so tired she was no longer tired at all anymore. She could hear his breaths over the quiet sound of the water, the current swirling around her hips and tugging gently at her remaining clothes, and she opened her eyes because she wanted to see his, to live in this one moment, even if it turned out it wasn't actually real after all. They stood there, breathing together, his hand against her face, soft and gentle. He had just killed two men with those hands. The gun was on the bank with her clothes, and she felt like her soul had been uncovered too, just like her, ripped out and laid bare somehow, in the swirling color of his eyes. He was looking at her, and it was worse than it had been in the hospital, when she had known his danger only because of instinct rather than terrifying, intimate experience. She had seen his face when he raised the gun, when he pulled the trigger. Not even the recoil had made him flinch. She wondered how many times he had done that, how many times it took for you to do that before you lift, point, shoot, like a reflex. His eyes looked like precious stones, sapphires and diamonds and opalite. His hair was wet and dripping gently down his face, their trails detailing the lines, and he was easily the most beautiful man, he was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, one hundred times over and over again. How unfair the world was to create something so beautiful only for it to exist to destroy. Does the deer appreciate the lion before it is torn to shreds? His hand was smooth and cool against her skin. She was no deer. She was no sheep. But she would still let herself be his prey. She took the last drag of the cigarette and let him cup her face and her cut stung and when she breathed the smoke out it was into his lungs and she had never, until that moment, been alive.
He tasted like blood and smelled like smoke and petrol but his mouth was so soft and warm and wet and she let him part her lips with his and they felt even better than they looked, and she felt dizzy like her head had been snipped right off her neck, like she had just breathed in twice her weight in white powder, and the rest of her body was buzzing and numb and the cigarette burned her fingers because she had forgotten she was holding it. He pulled back, slowly, and she dropped her forehead and rested it against his chest, felt it rise and fall, felt his heart beat. He took her hand in his larger one and led her out of the stream, and she put her ruined dress back on, sticking to her wet body, and they walked through the grass pasture to the stables, and neither said a word.