“It’s fine,” I said. And it was, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d started this evening so annoyed at Mac, I would have punched him if I’d gotten the chance. But something had changed, shifted, as we’d hopped from bar to club to late night haunt.
He had been in his element all night. I felt like I was finally seeing the real Mac, the one that wasn’t stuffed into suits and made to eat with silverware. Here was a guy who belonged with a group of hoodlums hanging out in an alleyway, who somehow managed to make it to the other end of the social spectrum.
“I get you,” I said, examining his face.
Mac glanced, amused, at me as we walked together. “What?”
“I get you,” I repeated, looking up at the sky. It was mostly blocked by the buildings, leaning over the street in cramped fellowship, but it was there, shining and dark and speckled with stars. “You’re not like the others.”
“The Knights?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “The Daniel’s.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a scruffy smile and he stopped walking suddenly. I stopped too.
He looked up at the sky and then again at me. “I didn’t know,” he said finally.
“What?”
“About Margot. Thought she was just some woman. Even if you hadn’t of followed me here, I wouldn’t have slept with her.”
I didn’t know what to say. But with his confession, Mac seemed to be done talking. He took another step closer to me, testing, seeing if I’d turn away.
Though he’d been by my side all evening, he seemed closer than he’d ever been. I could smell him over the powerful scent of the city, a musky mix of some kind of pine-scented shampoo and the wild smell of sex and danger. His green eyes studied mine, entrancing me and pulling me in, leaving me wanting when they looked away to my lips.
He walked closer and, in his shadow, his tall, wide form towering over me, I took an automatic step back, bumping against the brick wall behind me. But I didn’t look away. There was a new dare in his eyes and I’d be damned if I backed down.
He took my eye contact as a sign to move closer until we were only inches apart. He leaned forward. His lips approached mine, brushing so lightly against them, so close and yet not close enough. I wanted him to pull me in, to capture my mouth in his, but I was paralyzed, waiting for his move. The eyes smiled, and just as the tension had reached its peak and I knew it couldn’t go on any longer before it snapped, just as he was about to press them to mine—
“Hey asshole!”
Mac snapped back away from me and turned quickly, his entire frame poised and tense, blocking me from sight.
My emotions did a complete one-eighty as I went from entranced to terrified in an instant. The intensity of his eyes had sobered me and suddenly I was aware that we weren’t in the tourist district anymore. We were on a random street in this strange city. And the people looking for us had caught up.
“I think you’ve got something of mine.”
It was the guys from the bar — Mac’s opponent plus his friends from the table. The extent of their drunkenness was apparent now; they stumbled as they walked toward us, sleeveless shirts revealing toned arms. I noticed one held a baseball bat and my heart seized in my chest.
They circled around us, watching Mac, eyes darting toward me. It was like watching a pack of hyenas circle a lion, snapping, growling, looking for the better angle on their larger opponent. This wasn’t good. Not at all.
“This?” Mac asked. He pulled out the wad of cash he’d won at the table. He sounded calm, despite everything. But his eyes were hard as steel, and his voice was rough and two tones deeper than normal, a growl deep in his throat. He crossed his arms, forearms bulging, biceps straining in his t-shirt. He was much bigger than these kids, older too. None of them were as built as Mac, but they had numbers on their side.
“Yeah that’s it, big man. Now why don’t you hand it over? If you don’t want any trouble.”
Mac’s jaw hardened. Somehow, despite everything, I was struck by the sudden thought of just how attractive he was. NOT THE TIME, I internally shouted at myself. But still, Mac standing there taut and simmering was one of the hottest sights I’d ever seen and as I came to accept that I might be dying here, I was pretty glad it would be one of the last things I’d see in this life.
He looked back at me, just for a moment, and I got the distinct impression that, if I wasn’t here, Mac would try to take them all on himself. But the thought came and went and he threw the wad of cash down on the street.
“Take it,” he spat.
The leader pocketed the money. Then he turned to his friends. There was a look on their faces that I didn’t like, goading grins that suggested they were far from done with us.
“Ya know,” the leader said, “after you cheat me at pool, I don’t feel much like playing.”
Mac was silent, waiting for the rest.
“No pool means we need some new entertainment,” the kid continued. He looked behind him, found the eye of his friend with the baseball bat. He came forward and passed the weapon to the kid.
“And what does that mean?” Mac asked, breaking the silence.
“It means you’re going to be our entertainment tonight, tourists.” The kid spit on the ground and advanced on Mac.
I couldn’t help myself; I cried out as the kid swung the steel bat at Mac’s head.
But then something unexpected happened. Mac leaned back, and instead of cracking his skull, the bat whistled by. Mac struck like a viper, grabbing the kid’s arms and yanking them up. He grabbed the bat out of the kid’s hands and punched him in the face with a solid fist, knocking him to the ground before standing over him brandishing the kid’s own weapon against him.
It all happened so quickly that the kid’s friends didn’t even have a chance to react. Now Mac stood holding the bat like a home run swinger as the kid picked himself up off the ground, clutching a bleeding nose.
“Fuck you,” he spat. He said something in Spanish to the group. The friends gathered around us, looking dangerous.
Mac shielded me with his body, trying to keep an eye on all of them and our backs to the wall. But they were a pack and closing in, murder in their eyes. Mac was big and a fighter, but there was no way he’d be able to fight them all off. He was going to try though and I hoped I would get some hits in too.
And as I stared into the gnashing teeth and glaring eyes of the pack, another startling clear thought came into focus: This was going to fucking ruin the wedding.
Noise cut the air, strange noise, louder than the sounds of the bar a couple streets over, louder than the traffic on the nearby highway.
All of us — Mac, the gang, me — stilled, listening and trying to attach the noise to the situation. Because it was clearly opera. Loud, blaring, Italian opera, and it seemed to be getting closer.
“What the fuck…” the kid said, turning as the sound of screeching tires rounded the corner of the street and we were all bathed in blinding headlights and deafened by the sound of a rising crescendo.
It was only for a moment though because the car didn’t stop. It barreled down the street at fifty miles an hour and drove into our attackers with the force of a bowling ball against pins. Three of them went flying, two managing to get out of the way.