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The sun’s going down behind the hills out to the west, but some of its caught in her hair, turning it all burnished gold. She’s got it down today, always does when they’re riding in the drop top. They’re parked now, on a rise with the whole city stretched out in the valley beneath them. She’s comfortable, her arms crossed behind the headrest and her head tipped back against the creamy leather; she’s got her shoulders bare and her long legs thrown over the door, her booted ankles crossed. There’s a song playing on the radio, but it’s turned down so low he can barely make out the up-and-down lilt of rolling Spanish; mostly what’s most prominent is her, humming along every now and then. Her eyes are closed and her lips are curved up in a smile that’s just this side of contented.
He knows all this because he’s watching her, the way he always watches, because it’s been a few years since he first noticed but she’s still the prettiest thing he’s ever seen. She’s pretty here, sitting quiet in the passenger seat of his car, and she’s pretty with a knife in her hand, with blood under her nails and a gun jammed in the waistband of her jeans. She’s pretty with a smile or a split lip, and even if he thinks she’s prettiest when she laughs, he thinks that hellfire glare of hers might be the quickest way to get him hard. But that’s just Charlie, she’s always been that way; a little soft, a little jagged; she’s what people expect her to be until they realize she’s really, really not.
And Connor’s a fan, has been from day one, from the moment she walked into a dim and gritty Mexican tavern and sat down at his poker table with a smile like desert sunshine that scorched him to the bone, sizzled down his spine. He thought he was a bad boy back then; he thought a girl like her had no business trying to pick that kind of fight with him. He was a major player; the Boss might turn it all over to him one day. He thought he knew what kind of man he was. Until Charlie Matheson leaned in close to press her lips to the curve of his cheek and the muzzle of her .45 to his side. She said, "Hello, cousin," and she said it the way some people might say, “My room, ten minutes,” and Connor’s dick twitched behind his zipper.
That was Mexico. Two weeks later, in Chicago, she shoved him back against an alley wall, ten feet from two dead men, and he ignored the knife in her blood-speckled hands to catch at her hips with desperate fingers and kiss her like salvation was on her lips. He knew the Rosary by heart, but he didn’t think he’d ever known what it felt like to mean it until she slipped her bloodied hand down the front of his pants and wrapped her fingers around his cock for the first time; right then he said, “God please,” like it was torn from him, and she’d smiled against his mouth, said, "Since you asked nicely."
He’s a little older than her, but that doesn’t really stop them, any more than the family ties stop them. They’re family, sure, in both the loosest and strictest sense of the word; there’s no blood shared in their veins but plenty shared on their hands. It’s the family business; it’s tradition. Years ago, his mother sent him to Mexico, to live with relatives, to keep him away from his father and uncle. Not because she knew, but maybe because she guessed that one day, maybe, it would be this way.
She shouldn’t have bothered. Mexico was no better than being at his father’s side, not for that kind of thing. He learned to lie anyway, to steal and to take what he wanted; he learned how to be a criminal and how to be a killer. He learned how to love and how to spend that love on all the wrong things; he learned how to fuck like it was his last day on earth and how to cut people down like an old pro.
When Charlie Matheson pressed a gun to his side and a light, dry kiss to his cheek, she welcomed him back to the family he’d always been missing, the one he’d never known he needed. She’d had a smile then too, just like this one she has now.
Contented. Like the cat who got the canary.
He shifts in his seat, not much but enough that she opens her eyes, eyes like the waters off the Gulf, the same clear blue-green and just as deadly; she’s sharp, looking at him from under her lashes. “What?”
"Nothing," he says the first time, because it’s customary. When she smiles a bit wider, he tips his head, returns the smile right back. "Just thinking."
"Is this the part where you say you love me?"
"Depends. Are you going to say it back?"
"I don’t know," she says, cocks an eyebrow. "Give it a shot and find out."
"I love you," he says, because he’s never been a coward.
"I know," she says back, because she’s not a coward but she’s not a fool either.
He smiles anyway. He knows what she means, even when she won’t say it, won’t even hint at saying it. He knows what she means because he knows what she’s thinking, knows what she’s feeling even when it’s nothing at all. Because they’re partners, because they’re family. She can’t hide from him, no more than he can from her. Maybe it’s their thing.
Maybe it comes down to being a Matheson and a Monroe. Who knows.
He turns the music up, listens to the rhythm; he mouths the word bandoleros at her and watches her smile turn into a grin, that desert-summer grin that dries out his bones and makes him ache for her, makes his body tighten up. He lays a hand on her thigh, slides it up once and then down again; it’s possessive and he doesn’t pretend it’s not. She covers his hand with one of her own, laces their fingers together; she doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to.
The sun sinks behind the horizon, leeches the gold out of everything and takes the hue with it when it goes. Except Charlie. Charlie’s sunshine in the darkening dusk, fire catching in the deep midnight; she’s baked riverstones, scalding and wet from the lapping current; she’s warm and soft and firm under his hands.
The night presses in, wraps around them; the song goes on, but he’s not listening to it anymore. He keeps Charlie close by his side, tips his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes against the dark.
He’s not afraid of the shadows.
They’re still the baddest thing in them.