Page 70 of Sirens
“You know it makes not one lick of sense for you to be gentlemanly about making me go first when you’re being all assholey about not speaking to me,” she said, hanging back on the threshold.
McGarvey only blinked at her.
“You really are a butthead, you know that?” she huffed, marching past him.
No sooner had she crested the top of the stairs and stepped out of her work shoes, McGarvey relieved her of her purse and began unbuttoning her coat with businesslike and brusque efficiency that for some damn reason made her nipples pucker within her bra.
“Okay, the butthead thing was uncalled for,” she said as he shucked her coat from her shoulders and transferred it to a hanger with a flourish. “Especially considering the ample provocation you suffered. By the way, I definitely need youto know that I had no earthly fucking idea what Myrtle was planning.”
She glanced at McGarvey, whose raised eyebrow managed to communicate an especially astonishingly large volume offuck you.
“All right, yes, I did technically ask her to create a diversion so Vee and I could sneak back into the Palace Hotel, but I didn’t steal anything, break anything, or even get caught this time!” Maggie reported, uncomfortably aware of the chirpy, cheerleader-esque edge her goth-lite high school self would have hissed at her in the hall for. “Anddude. You won’t even believe what I found.”
McGarvey’s fingers grazed her waist as he began to untuck her Sirens-issue t-shirt from the elastic waistband of her skirt, and, for some damn reason, she found her arms lifting. “Wait, rewind. First, you need to know aboutthe letter,” she said, dipping her voice into the salaciously sultry purr that always had her podcast listeners pumping eggplant pixels into the comments of her TikTok clips.
So McGarvey was, of course, totally fucking immune.
“Okay, TLDR version, Ethan Townsend’s great-great-great-great-grandfather apparently had some sort of joint shipping venture going on with some distant relative of Mayor Stewart’s, only it sounds like they may have actually been dealing inhumancargo, if you get what I’m sayin’.”
Feeling a draft, Maggie glanced down and was more than a little surprised to note that her corduroy skirt was puddled around her painted toes like the skirt of a Christmas tree. She stepped out of it and followed McGarvey down the hallway, talking as they walked.
“Anyway, Ethan was kind enough to dig through his family’s correspondence archive—like, what family even has that? I mean, the closest thing my family has would be that one drawerin the kitchen with all the old phone chargers and Chinese takeout menus where my mom would stuff letters from bill collectors she didn’t want my dad to find.”
Maggie’s spiky laugh had been meant to hook McGarvey with the relatability of the anecdote.
So why did she feel pierced?
“Whatever,” she said, wiggling away from the pinprick of darkness in her chest threatening to spread. “So Darby brings me this letter from Ethan’s great-great-great-great— Fuck it. Can we just call him Graddy? Or maybe Grandzaddy? I’m assuming he was probably also dashing in a non-verbal but meticulous Montana farm boy meets Marlboro Man meets John Wick meets Mad Max meets Mr. Rogers kind of— Holyfuck.”
Her train of thought abruptly derailed, Maggie drifted forward to pet the gleaming chrome masterpiece whose front-facing porthole McGarvey had heaved her dust- and flying-rodent-dropping-soiled clothing into.
“I’m pretty sure this thing has more tech than Fawkes.”
McGarvey punched some buttons that made the machine chirp to life with a merry ping, his fingers deft in their selection of what she suspected was theneeds the Lordcycle.
“Fawkes was my Fiat,” Maggie said, deciding his hesitation over the start button counted as curiosity. “As in the burning Harry Potter bird. Not that fucker that tried to do the same damn thing to the Houses of Parliament.”
The ache widened, deepened as the image of the cherry-red, snub-nosed sparkplug of a car sitting on the curb outside their Boston row house on the morning of her twenty-fifth birthday invaded her mind.
Oversized purple bow and all.
It had been such ahercar that she’d burst into tears, even ignored the joke about worker’s comp claims Charlie had made when she leapt into his arms.
Because, for just that split second, she’d believed that Charlieknew.
Knewher.
Gother.
Lovedher.
Of course, if she’dknownthat he and Fast Eddie had boosted it from an eighteen-wheeler hauling repossessed vehicles from Jersey to Ohio, she probably wouldn’t have given him a thank-you blowie on the New Jersey Turnpike on the way to Atlantic City that weekend.
The washer’s cycle was so quiet, Maggie wasn’t even aware it had started filling until Trent moved to slide the closet doors closed.
“Where was I?” she asked, tapping a nail against her lips. “Oh, right. The letter from Grandzaddy Townsend to Mayor Stewart’sincestor.”
If McGarvey picked up on the joke, he made no acknowledgment. Maggie padded after him as he made his way into the kitchen, where he bent to consult the cleaning supplies arranged on tiered shelves beneath the sink like an angelic choir.
