“Nope,” she agrees. She holds up the bowl again. “So you want some? Yes? No?”
Want some…the question pulses through me, threatening to reawaken the beast.
“No…no thank you,” I somehow manage to say.
“Okay,” she says, setting down the bowl. “Maybe I’ll reheat it for lunch tomorrow. How about that?”
But there will be no tomorrow for me.
“I’ve eaten my fill,” I answer. “I would like you to leave now.”
A beat. Then she says, “Okay. See you tomorrow then.”
I don’t answer. Just wait for her to get up.
Which she does. But instead of picking up the tray, she goes over to my unmade bed.
“I don’t need turn down service,” I tell her when she starts fussing with the pillows, picking one up and plumping it before picking up the other one.
“Gotcha, no turn down,” she says.
But still, she doesn’t leave.
“What are you doing?” I demand as I watch her lift the mattress, then pull open my nightstand drawers.
“Looking for the gun you stole from Faizan’s safe in the garage.”
My entire body ices over. Then I remember to say, “I did not steal any gun.”
She goes over to the nightstand on the other side of the bed that I never use and starts pulling those drawers open, too.
“I said, ‘I did not steal any gun,” I repeat.
“Okay, well Faizan’s searched everywhere else, and he’s freaking out. So I’m thinking it’s got to be somewhere in here…”
“It’s not.” I glower as she searches my closet. “Perhaps you should ask your son?”
“First of all, thank you for acting like Albie’s life is so inconsequential he should not only be used as the scapegoat for your theft but that it’s also totally okay to put a thought like that in my mind. And second of all, both Albie’s parents and his granddad were military. He knows better than to play with guns.”
Her words roast me with shame. I remember the disgust I felt when Mahirah blamed Aisha for lying about her obvious crime of betrayal.
But wasn’t that even more reason to stay quiet? It was a mistake that I survived that building collapse in the first place. A mistake I plan to correct. But I can’t do that until she leaves.
So I silently watch her search the rest of my room and even roll back when she asks to go through my desk. Of course, she finds nothing.
She stands up from the desk with a huff of frustration. “Okay, we’ve already searched the rest of the house. Plus, Faizan says you never go past the lanais…”
I wait for her to come to the natural conclusion that her wheelchair bound recluse must not have stolen his attendant’s gun in the first place.
But instead, she leans down and places her hands on her knees. “So I guess that means it’s on you,” she says, looking me straight in the eye.
My heart stills. Then pounds.
“May I have it?” she asks, her voice soft.
“I don’t…” I grit my jaw. “I don’t have it.”
“Okay, well, unfortunately, I’m going to have to violate Jahwari custom and touch you in order to check,” she answers.
“There is no need to do anything of the sort,” I answer. “I already told you—”
Her hands are on me patting me down before I can finish that denial. “Just trying to get this over with as quickly as possible,” she says.
I hold still for the pat down, willing my cock not to rise again, and hope that will be enough for her.
But then without warning, she suddenly reaches around the back of the wheelchair. “Alright, one more place to check…”
“No!” I push her away, shoving at her chest. But to my surprise, instead of backing off, she comes at me again.
I grab her wrists, and we don’t fight, but we do wrestle. She is fiercer than I expect her to be and I am obviously stronger than she bargained for when she decided to engage with me physically. Despite my thin frame, and perhaps because of my recent food intake.
In any case, we both wrestle for control until she unexpectedly slips and falls forward. My chair rolls and hits the wall beside the desk. Her entire upper body crashes into me, her breasts pushing into my lap…
This time there is no quelling the monster. I turn to concrete inside my pants.
And I know she feels my reaction to her by the way her eyes widen. For a moment, we stare at each other. My rigid length pulsing between us.
Her wrists are still wrapped inside my hands. I’m still in control.
Until suddenly I’m not.
I kiss her, my mouth crashing down on hers with such force I have to pin her wrists to my chest to keep her from falling backward. The taste of her…the feel of her…it sparks through my body. Even the parts of me I thought were dead. And for a few, short moments, I forget everything. The grief. The pain. The plan to make it all end.
But then she forcibly pulls away. “Let me go,” she whispers, her arms suddenly loosening inside of my grip.
She is the servant and I am the boss. But I do as she asks, like a thrall at her command.
She quietly raises to standing, and for several moments she doesn’t say anything. Just rubs at her wrists, breathing hard. Because she’s angry or because just as aroused as me? Was she planning on suing me now or had she felt that all-consuming spark too? I can’t tell.
But I sense her resetting. And it feels like a decision to change of tactic when she says, “You’re not dead,” her voice strong, even though she’s no longer fighting me.
No. No, I’m not. In fact, I can’t remember a time even before my accident when I became this hard, with just a touch.
“You’re not dead,” she says again, averting her eyes from the very obvious sign of my continued vitality. “And I know that’s difficult. But you have to go on living. Even when you don’t want to. And I don’t think, you want either of us to get hurt, so please…”
She holds out her hand. “Please, give me the gun.”
12
MIKA
I wait for his answer, deeply aware of what’s going on underneath his sweatpants, even though I know I shouldn’t be. Geez Louise, I know being a tortured recluse is, like, this guy’s thing. But has he seriously not gotten the meme on grey sweatpants season?
And does he always kiss like that? a little voice wonders at the back of my very inappropriate thoughts. Like he snatching the soul right out of your body…and making you like it. My entire body’s still tingling. It’s been so long since anybody kissed me. And it’s never been like that.
Stop, Mika! Concentrate! My inner drill sergeant commands before I can get lost in the memory.
I clear my throat and stretch out my already extended hand, letting him know I don’t plan to go anywhere until I get that gun.
After a long, tense moment, he twists around in his seat. He’s so thin, I can see the imprint of his bones under his t-shirt as he pulls a matte black semi-automatic pistol out of the wheelchair’s back seat pocket.
I brace. This will be the hard part since army nurses don’t receive basic training, and definitely nothing that would involve wrestling a gun from someone’s hand if Rashid decides to shoot himself right in front of me.
Please don’t end your life like this, I silently beg, while trying to keep my face as fierce as possible. If you do this, I’ll never get over it.
I let out an audible sigh of relief when he turns the suiciding end of the gun to the ground and hands it to me butt first. It’s definitely not American. Russian, maybe? Whatever, it’s similar enough to a military-issue weapon for me to handle it. I immediately get to work, removing the magazine.
“Why?”
His question brings my head up from the task of emptying the gun’s chamber. I shake my head at him, not understanding his one-worded question.
“Why do I have to go on?” he clarifies, his voice raw and course. The expression on his face is sheer agony.
&nb
sp; “Oh, Rashid…” Formality falls away. I can’t pretend to care about titles when he’s in this much pain. “You just do.”
I place the dismantled gun on his desk and lean down to address him, this time with a sympathetic look.
“I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s been like for you. But I knew Aisha for one night, and I’m pretty sure I got a good sense of her heart. She loved you. She loved you so much. She wouldn’t want this for you. And I know it’s hard to stay here after losing that sweet little girl, but that’s what you have to do for her. Keep on living. Learn how to walk again. Dance now that she can’t. That’s the only way to make her life worth it. To make your life worth it.”
At first, Rashid doesn’t respond. But then his entire expression crumples. He raises a hand to cover his face as he silently sobs.
“Rashid…”
I feel his pain like it’s my own. Cutting and deep.
Once again ignoring Jahwari social mores, I reach out to touch his arm. But he knocks my hand away as soon as my fingers make contact.
“Get out.” The words come out broken and cracked behind his shaking hand.
“Rashid…” I try again.
“I said get out!”
Okay…Not knowing what else to do, I pick up the pieces of the gun and leave.
* * *
The next day, after I use the remote I’ve hidden in Albie’s backpack to open all the retractable window walls, I find the door to Rashid’s room locked.
My heart jolts fiercely. Fearing the worst, I grab the remote from its hiding place in Albie’s backpack and race around the side of the house…
And thank goodness! I let out a sigh of relief when I see that the retractable window wall is still open and Rashid is sitting alive and well in his wheelchair. However, my relief morphs into confused curiosity when I also see that he’s bouncing the basketball I bought for Albie against a wall. And not in any way you’d expect.
With his tongue tucked into the corner of his mouth, he throws the ball high, catches it, then throws it again. He seems to be aiming for the area right above the empty curtain line of the blackout shades I removed and pitched in the trash.
“What are you doing?” I ask, after walking through the open wall and setting his breakfast tray on the desk.
“Seeing if I can hit the electronic window array in a way that makes it come down.
He bounces the ball off the wall again and comes super close to a small slick box with a black panel on its outside, that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Or you could break it and make it so that the window wall never works again,” I point out.
A hostile beat. Then: “I will not let you win.”
“I’m not the enemy. I’m actually trying to help you literally get back on your feet.”
Rashid doesn’t answer. Just keeps throwing the ball at the curtain switch.
So he gave me back the gun, but he’s still fighting. Me.
“I guess this gives him something to do?” I say later in the day when I call Zahir to check in.
“The fact that he is doing anything is a miracle,” Zahir assures me. “You are doing excellent work.”
Excellent work. Feeling guilty I open my mouth to tell Zahir about what happened the night before, only to get interrupted when he says, “Faizan reported a gun incident to me.”
“Yes, I was just figuring out how to tell you.”
“I had been considered placing him in a mental rehabilitation facility in California. Do you think it is time to pull that lever?”
“I’m not a grief counselor,” I remind him. “And you know him better than I do. Do you think he’ll try again?”
“The man I knew would never have tried in the first place,” Zahir answered. “But he is no longer that man.”
“No, I think he’s struggling to crawl out of the hole of grief and depression. And I’m not sure having yet another thing taken out of his control will help with that. He gave me the gun when I asked for it. And we talked for a little bit, which means one day he might be willing to talk with someone else—like a professional. Time. I think that’s what he needs most of all right now. Light and time.”
“I believe you might be right,” Zahir says on the other side of the line. “You will watch him and report back to me if you suspect he is making a second attempt?”
“Of course,” I answer. “Faizan too, I’m sure.”
“Yes, it gives me peace of mind that both of you are there. I’ll place the rehabilitation facility on the back burner until I hear otherwise from you or Faizan.”
I feel weirdly relieved for Rashid. No, I’m not a grief counselor, but my heart is telling me he has it inside of him to crawl out from his pit of despair. I believe him, even if he doesn’t believe his life is worth living.
But how does he pay me back for my faith in him?
A few mornings later when I arrive with lunch I find him on the other side of the now closed window wall.
“Set it down,” he commands on the other side of the glass. “I’ll get it when I’m ready.”
Later, while Faizan, Albie and I are eating in the kitchen, Faizan confesses that Rashid had several packages delivered. “Expedited service from an electronics company. He must have made his own remote control for the window in his room.”
“Cool!” Albie says, way more impressed with Rashid’s feat of engineering than me. “Does this mean, I can have my basketball back?”
“I will inquire about it when I run his bath,” Faizan promises, with an indulgent smile. I don’t want to accuse Faizan of being bored AF, waiting around for Rashid to ask him for something all day. But he’s been clocking some serious Albie-sitting hours while I cook and clean during the day, and despite his possibly being a vampire, he and my son have already become fast friends.
But… “How are you going to get into his room now that he’s locked himself in?” I ask.
“Oh, he will certainly let me in if I knock and announce myself,” Faizan answers with a wry smile. “He does not consider me the enemy.”
“I’m not the enemy!” I answer Faizan. I also call it through the glass when I return to his room after breakfast and find the tray empty where I left it.
I can see Rashid clearly at his desk, his computer open to a site with the words CUSTOM BLACKOUT CURTAINS emblazoned across the top. I make a mental note to check all the packages that arrive at our door before Faizan can so that those hideous blackout curtains don’t end up back on the window wall.
“You may leave the tray there from now on and Faizan will let you know when I am ready to have my room cleaned.”
If his intention is to make me feel really, really dismissed. It’s working. But at least he ate breakfast without a fuss, I console myself, picking up the empty tray. I guess I should take that as a sign of progress? I’m the enemy, but the food I make is too delicious to be denied.
Deciding to go with that interpretation of events, I end up driving the Mercedes Benz G-Class SUV Faizan loans me for grocery trips to the Pacific Supermart. Not the one near Diamond Head, but the one over in Waipahu, where my mom shops. They carry everything I’ll need to make some of Mom’s signature dishes. And total score! I also find nata de coco and kaong. Guess who’s going to be making homemade halo-halo tonight!
I’m in a pretty good mood by the time I make it to the checkout line. And it only gets better when my phone vibrates with a text from Jazz. “Hey, have the day off. Headed over to teach Albie’s vampire how to surf!”
“Albie will be so happy, but I’m not there right now…” I start to write back…only to lower the phone without hitting send when I see the cashier.
It’s Leon. Just like I remembered him. Cheery and affable and making easy small talk with the customer in front of me.
That’s how we’d met, too. In the checkout line about six months after Alberto died. Albie was having a meltdown about not getting a box of Pocky sticks as we went through the lane. I hadn’t realized that my
mom, who had taken care of him in the messy months of ongoing local and federal investigations after Alberto’s death, had always gotten him a box of Pocky Sticks for being a good boy when they went through the checkout line.
Months later, Albie didn’t understand why his father was suddenly gone or why he couldn’t have a box of Pocky sticks just for walking alongside me quietly as I shopped. At the same time, I couldn’t give in to his demands, now that he was yelling down the store. Because as just about every mom with even an iota of black American in her knows, you don’t negotiate with terrorists.
I’d been just about ready to forget the groceries and see if I was actually strong enough to carry my six-year-old out of there when Leon had intervened like an angel from above. Instead of judging Albie for acting out in public over such a little thing, he’d simply opened a box for himself and asked Albie if he wanted one.
“I like Pocky Sticks too,” he’d said after my son tearfully took the chocolate tipped stick from him. “Which one is your favorite?”
Afterward, I’d been impressed by his ability to bring Albie back from the cliff’s edge of a nuclear meltdown to debating the merits of strawberry versus chocolate Pocky in just a matter of seconds. And I’d been even more impressed when despite me being a single mother whose son he’d seen at his worst, he asked for my number the next time he saw me alone (I’d fully learned my lesson about trying to take Albie with me to the store).
Leon was Filipino like Mom, so he got all my cultural references. He was also only a couple of inches taller than me, which meant I could look him in the eye when we were walking together and the first time we tentatively kissed. He was here on a student visa, and he hoped to get enough schooling to be a manager at Pacific Supermart someday, where he’d just been named Employee of the Year. I liked that he listed his three main talents as customer service, armchair basketball coaching, and dad jokes. And I loved that he was willing to take it slow after I told him I was widowed.
For a couple of months, it had been great. But then one day, he suddenly stopped calling.
RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii Page 9