He Took Me to Catch the Rat, But the Rat Was Him novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Under the Bridge

On New Year's Eve, Cathal drove me to the end of a dead street by the Delaware and shut off the engine.

Across the black water the Ben Franklin Bridge was strung with blue lights.

He sent his driver off to buy coffee and sat beside me in the back seat with his hands on his knees.

"Why do you want my father so badly?" I asked.

"I never asked you."

"I'm asking now."

He looked at the bridge for a while.

"My brother Fintan ran a house on Tulip Street," he said.

"Six years ago on the eleventh of February, somebody phoned the police from the payphone outside St. Colman's."

I went very still.

I sang in that church every Sunday of my life.

"The police went through the front door and down the cellar stairs," Cathal said.

"Fintan walked up out of the cellar with a gun in his hand."

"They shot him on the stairs," he said.

"He was thirty-one."

His voice did not change, and his hands did not move on his knees.

"Somebody sold him, Aisling."

"I'm going to find who made that call, and I'm going to kill him with my hands."

"It wasn't my father," I said.

"Your father vanished that week with forty-one thousand dollars."

"A thief isn't a rat," I said.

"Phelim says it's the same thing."

"And what do you say?"

"I say I'm tired," Cathal said.

He said it so quietly that I put my hand over his on his knee.

I did not know why I did.

His fingers turned and locked with mine, and the first firework went up over the river.

Red light opened across the windows.

It lit his face, and he was looking at me.

"This is the last time," I told him.

"You said that at Christmas," he said.

"You said once."

"Then count," I said, and I climbed into his lap.

I put one knee on either side of his thighs, with my coat open and my back against the front seat.

He kissed me hard.

The second firework burst, and green light ran across the roof.

His hands went under my dress and up the backs of my thighs.

He stopped.

"Aisling."

"Mm," I said.

"You've nothing on."

"You tore my last pair," I said.

"I went out like this in front of your driver, in a long coat, and he had no idea."

A rough laugh broke out of him.

"You're going to be the death of me."

"Not yet," I said.

His hand slid between my legs, and he groaned at what he found.

"You're drenched."

"I've been drenched since the Almond Street stoop," I said.

He pushed two fingers inside me, and I rocked down onto them with my forehead against his.

A gold firework went up and the whole car lit.

I moved on his hand and rubbed my clit against the heel of it.

Each thrust pushed a sound out of me, and I heard it get louder.

"Quiet," he said.

"There's a man at the end of the street."

I bit his shoulder through his coat.

It did not help.

He put his free hand over my mouth.

His palm was warm and dry and tasted of salt, and I kissed it.

Then I bit the meat of it just below the thumb.

"Fuck," he breathed.

"Do that again."

I bit again, harder.

He crooked his fingers inside me and found the place that made me jerk, and he held his hand over my mouth while I came.

I screamed into his palm, and the night split open red and white over the bridge.

He kept me there, shaking, with his fingers still moving, until I pushed his wrist away.

"Now you," I said, breathless.

I undid his belt and his zipper with clumsy hands.

He lifted his hips so I could free him, and I wrapped both hands around his cock.

It was thick and hot and heavy, and a drop of wetness gathered at the tip.

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