Shimmy Bang Sparkle(46)

I moved her bangs away from her forehead. “Want to show me what else you’ve got?”

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I do.”



She sat on her knees in front of a small table by the sofa. Pulling back the cloth that was over it, she revealed that it wasn’t a table underneath, but a safe about as big as a minifridge. And not just any safe either, but a Safeco 9000, one of my very favorites. She moved the dial to zero and got eye level with the combination wheel.

A rush ran through me. Until I’d met her, there was no rush like breaking into a safe. But now, to do it, in front of her? Christ. “How about I do that for you.”

She turned to me, her adorable feet pressing into the carpet. On both feet, two of her toes crossed over each other. “Really?”

“Really,” I said, and scooted closer.

She rocked back on her knees and sat on her calves. “Sure. Of course. Ruth tells me this one is really hard.”

Really hard was an understatement. Pain in the ass was closer. “You wanna learn?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I’m crap with combination locks.”

In my head, I called bullshit on that instantly. I was pretty sure she had the touch to do fucking everything, from lasagna to larceny. And the idea of teaching her something new, something she had no idea how to do, was intensely hot to me for some reason. I positioned myself behind her on the carpet, in front of the safe, with my arms around her. It was like that scene in Ghost, but way better. “Maybe you just didn’t have the right teacher.”

She turned and gave me that little smile. “Maybe so.”

“Maybe definitely.” I situated myself right behind her, so she was basically sitting in my lap. “Just a heads-up I’m probably going to get hard here in like two seconds, but just ignore it.”

“I’ll try,” she said, with a snicker.

“So. Put your hand like that.” I showed her what to do, middle finger at noon, thumb at six. She did as I’d shown her, and I took the opposite position, guiding the dial from above, at nine and three. “First thing you need to know is the safe you’re dealing with. Every safe is different; they don’t always go clockwise.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“You feel it out. So see when we go this way”—I turned it clockwise—“feel how there’s less resistance?”

She nodded, making her long curls slide against my chest. “So we go the other way?”

“Exactly. Then you just feel it out. It takes a lot of practice.” I guided the dial and closed my eyes. I placed my chin on her shoulder and focused on what I was feeling with my fingers. It wasn’t easy. What I was feeling with my body, and my heart, was even more powerful than my focus on the safe right then. But I’d done jobs with plenty of distraction, and I managed to tune in to the lock in spite of how badly I wanted her. The resistance got higher and higher, and I knew we’d hit the sweet spot. “Did you feel that?”

She paused. “I think so.”

“It’s like feeling for a pulse,” I told her, and pinched her left wrist between my left thumb and forefinger. She leaned back into me when I did it, and her breathing quickened. I moved the pad of my thumb over her pulse points, until I found the strongest one. “Everybody is different. I can feel yours there. If you do mine . . .” I let go of her hand, offering her my wrist. Her fingers pressed into my skin gently. “Mine’s not like yours.”

She nodded slowly, feeling for it. She started in the same place I had with her but then shifted her grip. Again and again, until she inhaled hard and her eyes popped open. “There it is!”

What killed me was that she was somehow surprised. Like there was a little girl in there somewhere, astonished at everything in the world. I wanted to live in that amazement with her so badly, and I wondered if maybe it would start to rub off. Or maybe it already had.

Returning my attention to the safe, I said, “Safes are like people,” and turned the dial counterclockwise. “Some of them are assholes; some of them are nice. Some want to keep their secrets, and some . . . are willing to share them. If they find the right person to tell them to.” I nestled my cheek against hers and savored the feeling of the two of us there, alone, in the universe. I felt so damned happy, I thought I might break down into an old-school man-cry.

Before the emotion really took over, she threw me a lifeline without knowing she had. “Show me,” she said, and loosened her grip on the dial.

So I did. I did my thing, and I held her close, and I told her what I was doing every step of the way. It was hard to know how long it took, because every minute with her was like being in a time warp. But when the safe opened, I didn’t feel the old rush that I usually felt. Instead, I felt disappointment. Because when it opened, she leaned forward and made a gap between us.

The rush of being close to her was more than busting into a Safeco 9000. I was falling for her, and falling hard. No fucking doubt about it.



She nested the empty takeout containers into stacks and sucked a droplet of sweet-and-sour sauce off her thumb. From the safe, she took a neat pile of notebooks and folders. On the top of the stack was a tattered old composition notebook, black and white, that had blue ballpoint pen filling in most of the white splotches. Between us on the carpet she placed a magazine page, the paper shiny and crinkled. On the top was the header for Rock&Gem, and in the middle was a photograph of the North Star. A promo photo like the one I’d seen on the brochure in the Texan’s office. Minus the cheese smudges, thank Jesus.