The Other Man

Sexy.  Another word she’d be called long before you ever got to pretty.

“I work with Heath,” she added when I just kept staring at her.  “May I come in?  I’d like to speak to you.  It won’t take a minute.”

The way she spoke had me reassessing her age, because I’d had her pegged as very young, but with a few words I was guessing closer to twenty-five than, say, eighteen.

“Um, sure, okay,” I said, stepping back.

She came inside briskly, and I noted with surprise that she was actually shorter than I was when she swept by.  She wasn’t short, more like average height, but something about her had made me assume, at first impression, that she was tall.

She struck me as a badass, I decided, and in my head badasses were just always tall.

“Let me go put on a robe,” I said, feeling awkward in just my minuscule top and lacy panties.

She’d been headed into my living room, but at that she stopped and snapped around.  Her eyes raked me, top to bottom.  “Whatever you prefer, but don’t cover up on my account.  I’ve seen it all.”

It felt like a dare, or an insult, an insinuation that if I did cover up, it was because I was self-conscious or maybe even ashamed of my body.

I was not, and by now I could tell this woman was not here for a friendly visit, so I stayed how I was.

Let her see that I was proud of my body.  I was forty-one, a mother of two grown men, but my skin was smooth and flawless and not one thing on me sagged.  I was toned, but still shapely in all the right places.  Due to countless hours of hard work, my body was as killer as it’d ever been, and this seemed like a situation where it suited me to use it.

She pursed her lips and strode into my living room.  She didn’t sit, but faced me, arms crossed over her chest, eyes level on my face.

There was another quiet spell while we just studied each other.

She was very attractive, in a tough girl kind of way, a way that women perhaps appreciated more than a lot of men.  Girl crush material would have been a good way to describe it, if she’d been more pleasant.

“I’m not sure what Heath has shared with you,” she began.  “But he and I are close.  We’re partners, but I see he didn’t tell you about me.  No matter.  Doesn’t change why I came here.  I have some things to share with you, about Heath that I think you need to hear.  He and I are very similar, so I can give you some good insight into why he acted the way he did with you.  He shouldn’t have left you hanging like that, and I’m here to correct it.”

I did not like the sound of that.  Not at all.

She continued, “Our backgrounds are nearly identical.  We were both recruited for a very small unit in the CIA before either of us were old enough to vote.”

Wow.  And she was still young.  So young.  God, how did the government recruit these kids so young?  I kept thinking; my mind stuck on that.

It seemed wrong and sad.

“Why?” I asked her.

“Why what?”

“Why did they recruit you so young?”

She smiled unpleasantly.  “It wasn’t random.  There’s only one reason for the choices of recruits in our particular program.  They found something, a talent, a skill, a specialization in each of us that made us valuable to them.”  The way she spoke was inherently sharp, every word very pointed, shaped to cut, though I didn’t understand why.

I thought at first that it was just the way of her and not a personal attack on me.

I was wrong, but I wouldn’t realize that until much later.

“What was it?”

“That made them recruit me?”

I nodded.

“The same reason they went after Heath.”  She paused, brows raised, as though waiting for my response.

I just stared back.  I wasn’t going to ask.  I didn’t know exactly where this was headed, but I knew I would’t like it.

“You know his story, right?”  The question was whittled into a very sharp, stabbing point.

I shook my head, hating the way that made her look at me, like I was less significant than she’d assumed.

“Oh,” she said, putting worlds of meaning into the word.  “Well, to oversimplify it, we were both very good at killing people from an early age.  By sixteen I was a hardened criminal, working for the same organization as Heath, one that employed individuals like us to do their dirty work.”

Well, hell, part of me had guessed that.  Something about him had always struck me as part military/part criminal, so this added up.

“The law caught up with Heath first,” she continued, “found him in the middle of a particularly gory killing.  Care to hear the details?”

I didn’t have time to answer or even figure out the ramifications of what she was asking.

“He was rather vigorously eviscerating this piece of work named Tony G., who was the top goon of a rival crime family.  Have you ever seen a human eviscerated?  It takes skill not to kill them quickly like that.  The poor bastard was still alive, what was left of him, but Heath wasn’t done.  He was determined to get some information out of the guy before he put him out of his misery.  You see, Heath was always quite talented at getting information out of people.”

By then I was shaking so hard that I knew she could see it, but she just kept talking.