by Cara Bastone
When he’d been into her, looking at her had been difficult. Every glance in her direction had been like trying to make out an airplane that was about to fly across the corona of the sun. She’d been too alluring to him. She’d burned herself into his consciousness. But now that that was in the past, he found that he was actually able to watch her walk across the lobby toward him.
Stay back!
There was something equally fluid and threatening in the way she moved toward him. She was still that bejeweled tiger, but suddenly his chair and whip had lost air, deflating comically. He could almost picture himself as a meme, the words womp womp plastered underneath him.
When she was just three feet from him, she stopped and crossed her arms under her breasts. “How’s she doing? Adjusting to the city?”
“Hell if I know.” It had been a week since Thanksgiving, and Christmas was already looming over Tyler, jamming itself down his throat on every billboard and jingle on the radio. He’d never realized how personal Christmas gifts were before. He’d also never felt more pressure to show someone how he felt with a gift. He desperately wanted to find Kylie a gift that said she was welcome and that everything would be okay and that maybe he didn’t know her that well yet, but he was trying his best.
Kylie, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care to know him in the least. She locked herself in her bedroom every single moment she wasn’t using the bathroom. Tyler had made up a story about cockroaches in New York City to scare her into eating her meals in the kitchen, which she did. But she didn’t speak. And their train rides together were marked by the same unfailing silence. It made things...slow. The pace of his life could have easily been outstripped by an inchworm.
His only respite came when she was at school and he could lose himself in his work. He’d convinced his editor that he could still write his sports column watching the games from home and he knew enough of the players personally to be able to get quotes from them over the phone or over text or email. At some point, he was going to have to start attending the games again, hounding the guys at the press conferences after and getting home at half past two. Tyler internally groaned when he thought about how much a babysitter would cost him for a night like that. But his column desperately needed it. Lately, he’d veered from his usual witty analysis of each player and their notable plays to waxing poetic about the nature of sports in general. He was doing it to reach his word counts, and his editor was not going to continue swallowing it for long.
Not that he was going to volunteer a single iota of that information to Fin right now. Not when he could practically track the tick, tick, tick of her bejeweled tail.
“Fin, what are you doing here?” he repeated himself.
She pursed her lips. “I’d like to talk with you. Let me come upstairs, Tyler.”
He couldn’t help but laugh at her audacity. “You’re not even going to ask? You’re just going to demand?”
“Would you prefer that I asked?” Her head tipped to one side with her question, taking the sheet of her hair along for the ride.
Dangerous.
“Either way I’m not getting the impression that I actually have a choice in the matter.”
Immediately, her hands dropped and slipped into her pockets. She took a step backward, a small one, her eyes softening and falling away.
In the absence of that zinging gaze of hers Tyler immediately took a deep breath, feeling as if a band of pressurized heat had just been released from around the cavity of his chest.
“Sorry,” she muttered, looking surprisingly chagrined. “I’ve been told that I can be really persuasive. Sometimes I let it get away from me.”
It was the first time that Tyler had ever wondered if she was telling the truth about her otherworldly talents. Up until now, he’d completely chalked it up as an act. She was so beautiful that anyone would find her confounding and mystifying. Psychic or not.
But right now, his heart pounding with the absence of whatever she’d just released him from, Tyler wondered if, in fact, there was something a little off about Serafine St. Romain.
When he remained silent, she eventually lifted her eyes again, but there was none of that persuasive, burning light that there’d been moments before. “I’m just hoping for a few moments of your time, Tyler. Then you can kick me out. If you’d rather, we can just talk down here.”
She gestured behind her toward the chairs.
The funny thing was, the second she stopped pushing to get upstairs, Tyler stopped feeling the need to protect his space from her. Suddenly, it seemed ridiculous to him that he was guarding his apartment from this woman. He could sit at his kitchen table, hear her out and politely send her on her way.
“Oh, fine. You can come upstairs.”
He could practically feel Benjy’s disappointment. He’d no doubt been hoping that they’d air their business out in the lobby, where he could lap up every word.
As he and Fin stepped onto his elevator, his last thought as the doors slid closed was that this was almost certainly a mistake. He just hoped it was one he could recover from.
* * *
EIGHT.
Uncharacteristically nervous, Fin leaned forward and pressed the elevator button for the eighth floor.
“How do you know which floor I live on?” Tyler asked suspiciously.
“You just said it to me,” Fin replied without thinking.
“No. I didn’t.”
Oh. As Matty would say, crap. Something about Tyler was throwing her completely off of her game. It’d been a long time since she’d responded to something that someone was thinking. She couldn’t read thoughts, exactly. But it wasn’t unknown for her to pick something like a floor number out of thin air. She’d taught herself a long time ago not to respond. It freaked people out.
Just like it freaked them out when she used her energy to get her way, the way she almost had with Tyler down in the lobby. When she really wanted something, she could look into someone’s eyes and talk her way into it. If she wasn’t careful, she found herself winning arguments, tricking her way into the last slice of pizza, into shows she had no tickets for. Anything she wanted.
She hated it.
Because she deeply believed in free will. She’d spent the first half of her life at the whim of her erratic, manipulative mother and she didn’t wish that loss of control on even her worst enemy. She had no desire to manipulate people.
But there was just something about Tyler that brought it out of her. His smug, handsome face, that untouchable look in his eye, like he’d just hopped out of a convertible without opening the door, simply hoisted himself over the side like the rich villain in an ’80s movie.
It inflamed something within Fin. Activated her desire to assert her power over him.
She realized now that his manner, his appearance, had subconsciously made her think of him as less feeling, less human than other people. She’d confused his untouchable demeanor with being unhurtable.
But the man standing next to her in this elevator was plenty hurt. She could feel the murky cloud of his lostness practically filling the space. His life had been flipped onto its side. And he didn’t deserve to be manipulated.
“Um. Good guess?” she said, answering his question.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Either you really are a psychic or you were snooping through my mail.” His eyes narrowed even further. “Probably both.”
She laughed at that one. “Snooping through your mail? People come up with the wildest theories to explain me.”
“Some people make a good living with the use of nothing but smoke and mirrors.”
She smirked at him. “Tyler, if I were cheating people out of their money using smoke and mirrors, trust me, I’d be charging a hell of a lot more for my services.”
His face went long, his lips pulling down and his head bobbing to one side, as if he ac
tually considered that to be a reasonable explanation.
“Here we are.”
She thought it was actually kind of nice the way he put out one arm to hold back the elevator doors, as if there were some head-chopping danger he was valiantly keeping at bay. It was an absent and polite gesture, one she was certain he’d performed a thousand times.
He led her down the hallway, though she could have picked his front door out of a lineup of a hundred. There was an expensive plaid welcome mat laid neatly out in front of it.
It was as ugly as her hippie pants were but in a completely different way.
Blue blood.
She couldn’t help but look at his neatly pressed slacks, his fresh-from-the-Hamptons hair, wondering if she and he could possibly be any more different than they were. Before he even opened the door, she knew just how hard it was going to be to convince him to let her into Kylie’s life.
He swung open his door, stepping aside to let her in and Fin braced herself for the inevitable onslaught of male energy that was sure to assault her. She hated going to men’s homes for this very reason.
Though she was able to ignore and/or block most male energy that emanated from a man’s person, his vibes were usually so strong in his own home that there was no shielding herself from them.
She imagined the scent of expensive cologne, “Eye of the Tiger” played by a string quartet, carafes of disgustingly overworshipped scotch, Cuban cigars. She imagined plaid lampshades and fur rugs picked out by some hot little interior decorator he’d been banging.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside and looked around.
“Oh,” she couldn’t help but say out loud.
“What?” he asked, obviously already on the defensive.
Fin slipped off her clogs and stretched her socked feet into the thick blue carpet of his living room. His walls were a pretty white, obviously chosen with intention, not the usual landlord beige. She spotted many pieces of Sebastian-made furniture, including a coffee table, an end table and a bookshelf along the far wall, which held more books than she’d expected of Tyler.
The couch was a gray herringbone pattern and looked comfortable and unique. She suspected that Tyler had chosen it from Mary’s shop in Cobble Hill. There was, of course, a horribly gigantic flat screen taking up one wall, like the unblinking eye of Sauron. But Serafine didn’t hold that against him. As she looked at it, she could almost hear the whistles of referees, the roar of crowds, the familiarly cadenced drone of the color commentators on football Sundays.
There were a pair of large windows on one side and morning light slanted lazily across the floor, a few dust motes looking right at home in the bright blur.
“I didn’t know you owned.” It was rare in New York not to rent.
“How’d you know I owned this place?”
“It seems obvious. Most people who rent aren’t able to make this many modifications to their places. You know, they have the broken light fixtures or cracks in the drywall because they can’t get the landlord to come fix them.” She thought of her leaky, unusable bathtub. She liked to soak long enough for the water to turn cold, her hair floating around her like seaweed. But she hadn’t gotten around to calling her super yet. Something kept stopping her, getting in the way, and each night, toothbrush in her mouth, Fin found herself glaring at her useless tub, another opportunity to get it fixed setting with the sun.
“Right.” He seemed uncomfortable. “Well.”
He led her into the kitchen. If she’d been surprised by the living room, she was downright floored by the kitchen.
“You cook?” she asked him, picking up on the vibes of a well-used kitchen immediately.
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Is there even a point to asking how you can tell that just from looking at my stove?”
She shrugged ruefully. “It’s just...obvious. I don’t know. You have all the spices lined up and a whole set of knives. And look, three different cutting boards. People who don’t cook don’t need three different cutting boards.”
He eyed her for a second. “See? Smoke and mirrors. You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes in Miss Cleo’s clothing.”
She rolled her eyes and he pulled out a kitchen chair, plopped himself down into it like an exhausted bag of rocks.
“I don’t cook the way Via cooks,” he said, scraping his hands over his face and answering her question. “But I’ve been successfully feeding myself since my twenties. Not so much lately.”
“Via’s stuffing you full of lasagna and minestrone and homemade bread?”
Tyler drummed his fingers on the table. “Her food is so good I don’t have the heart to tell her that she can cut it out already.”
Fin laughed, still wandering around the kitchen, careful not to touch anything. Just looking. Learning.
“Can I offer you anything?”
She shook her head.
“Tyler—”
“Fin, you’ve gotta tell me why you’re here.”
“I talked with Kylie a bit at Thanksgiving,” Fin said carefully.
“No need to rub it in.”
Fin felt her eyebrows rise. “She’s not talking to you?”
He pursed his lips, like he wished he hadn’t given that bit of information up. “She can be a bit of a closed book.”
Here was her opening! Fin took a deep breath, gathering herself up. “Maybe she would open up to someone else? A woman?”
Tyler smirked infuriatingly. “Who? You?”
Her breath came out in an irritated puff. “Maybe me. I was thinking that maybe I could spend a little time getting to know her—”
“No,” Tyler responded flatly and immediately.
“No?” It took a lot to surprise Serafine St. Romain, but the inarguable resolve in his voice had done it.
His eyebrows were the ones lifting now. “You and I don’t exactly have a great track record.”
“Look, I know I was rude to you at the baseball game.” She’d planned to apologize, nice and sincerely, but she was all thrown off now, riled up by his stupid welcome mat and the organized spices.
“Rude? Fin, you tore my life a new asshole. You humiliated me in public.” He paused, and again she got the impression that he’d said more than he’d wanted to. “I’m not about to invite you into my little sister’s life.”
Humiliated.
The word hung between them. She couldn’t let that stand.
“I didn’t mean to humiliate you, Tyler.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE DIDN’T FOOL him for a second with those big, guileless eyes and innocent set to her mouth. Tyler could still feel the way she’d looked at him down in the lobby. He had almost been able to see the hypnotizing spirals circling in her pupils. He needed to keep his footing here.
He’d let about a thousand different vulnerabilities slip out already, so he knew that he wasn’t going to be able to strategize his way out of this conversation. He was man enough to admit that he was certainly outgunned when it came to an argument with Fin. He figured he had only one route. Blatant, unflagging honesty.
He gave in to the urge and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Her eyes tracked the movement.
“Regardless, Fin, you’re not nice to me. I’m uncomfortable around you. And most of all, I don’t trust you.”
“Tyler, if I could go back and be nicer to you at that baseball game, I would. I swear. I’ve wanted to apologize for months now. It’s not like talking to you that way made me feel good. But I can’t change what happened.”
In the first crack of her impassive expression, he thought for one moment that he saw something like guilt flash across her face. But that couldn’t be right. The woman was self-righteous and aloof and haughty. There was no way that she could possibly feel bad about the way she’d treated him. He was certain that he was merely one in a long line
of men she’d chopped up into dog meat and fed to her pack of hell-chihuahuas.
He narrowed his eyes skeptically at her. He’d been imagining her laughing to herself about the baseball game for weeks after it happened, regaling her girlfriends with the story while she sucked away on a Cruella De Vil cigarette.
As if to prove his point, she kicked out one delectable hip, raised that imperious eyebrow and spoke again. “Don’t punish me for not wanting to date you.”
Rage ignited in his gut like a flamethrower being kicked on in a dark room. “You think I’m punishing you because my ego is bruised?” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t even know why it surprises me anymore, how little you think of me.”
“Tyler, I don’t want to fight with you.”
He scoffed.
She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes to the ceiling, like she was praying for strength. “What happened, happened. And either we move on from it or we don’t.” She took a step toward the table. He automatically stiffened in his chair. “I’d like to get past it, Tyler. And if we can’t get past it, at least ignore it. Because what I’m asking for here, would be good for all of us. Trust me.”
Trust her? Not as far as he could fly her like a kite. “What exactly are you asking for, Fin?”
“I’d like to get to know Kylie. Spend some time with her. I could teach her about the city a little bit. I was a transplant to Brooklyn at almost the exact same age as she is. I know a lot about what she’s going through.”
“You want to...mentor her?”
Fin shrugged one shoulder. “In a way. I want to be her friend. Talk to her. I feel a connection to her, Tyler. And look, I know things aren’t good between me and you. But I’m just asking for a chance to create a relationship with Kylie.”
Tyler pursed his lips. “Kylie ignores me enough already. I’m not sure I want her buddying up with someone who wouldn’t care if I fell off a cliff.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Tyler! Will you please shelve your wounded male pride for a moment?” Her hands came up into the air in a rare show of temper. He seemed to have found the end of some rope of hers. “I’m trying to explain that I have a connection to her! This isn’t about you and me! It’s bigger than that!”