“It’s not a con,” Wes said bluntly, ignoring his own instinct to dance around the issue. “It’s Rosemary. And there will be no conning, not from either of us, or I swear to God, I’ll cut you off for good.”
Chapter 24
After letting the silver fox he’d nearly bowled over into the bar, Jess was more cautious in pushing open the door and peering out.
Where the heck had Frankie and Miranda gone?
Miranda had made huge strides in the supportive-sister department since Jess first came out to her. She hadn’t reacted well to the announcement that her baby brother was in love with a guy she considered too experienced, too wild, too … everything.
Which, to be fair, Frankie really was. All of that. It blew Jess’s mind when Frankie returned his deepening crush. How could someone like Frankie want to be with an inexperienced kid like Jess? And yet, Frankie did. And at first, Miranda was not pleased. To say the least.
She’d gone to excruciating lengths to break them up, in fact—until the night when a disgruntled former employee had returned to Market, coked up and trigger-happy, waving a gun in everyone’s face and eventually firing off a shot that could’ve killed Jess.
Would have, if Frankie hadn’t stepped in front of the bullet, shielding Jess and taking it in the shoulder in one of the hands-down worst, scariest moments of Jess’s life.
The cops showed up, and the EMTs, and Frankie turned out to be okay after a trip to the ER, but those few short, interminable seconds where he was on the ground, his blood oozing thick and dark and terrifying under his limp body—Jess still had nightmares about it.
More often now that he was alone in his bed at night and had no one to chase the bad dreams away with soft, sleepy kisses.
After Frankie took a bullet for Jess, Miranda lightened up about him. Mainly, though, she’d seemed to finally be willing to try to see her little brother as an adult, capable of making his own decisions.
Shivering in the crisp night air, Jess cupped his hands over his mouth and wished he’d been smart enough to grab his peacoat in his mad rush to keep his bossy, opinionated older sister from talking to his brash, impossible ex-boyfriend.
Although, Jess realized as the sound of quiet voices filtered through the ambient city music of car horns, trucks, people hailing cabs—maybe they weren’t fighting. Huh. That would be weird.
He followed the snatches of low conversation around the corner of the old church for which the bar was named, and found his quarry sitting on a cracked cement wall bordering a patch of sparse, dry grass.
“I’m just worried, that’s all,” Miranda was saying. “It’s been a while since you broke up, and it seems like it’s still as painful as it ever was.”
Frankie grimaced around his cigarette, his eyes deep black pools. “It will get better. It fucking has to, right?”
Geez. Jess’s heart squeezed with humiliation. He hadn’t thought he was that obvious about how much he was still hurting, every day that he wasn’t with Frankie.
He couldn’t believe they were sitting there so casually, talking about his innermost feelings.
Hey, maybe it’s a good thing, he thought. Even in his head, he almost winced at the sharp bite of sarcasm, but he couldn’t help himself.
Maybe between the two of them, the two people who think they always know what’s best for me, they can arrange my whole pitiful life for me, and all I’ll have to do is show up and live it.
A hard kernel of resentment lodged in his chest, Jess ducked back behind the set of Dumpsters before they could see him. He wanted to know what else they were saying behind his back.
Well, he did and he didn’t. If it turned into a poor-pathetic-Jess-we-must-protect-him conversation, he might have to yark in one of those handy Dumpsters.
And Jess wasn’t a hundred percent on what he’d do if Miranda started berating Frankie for breaking her baby brother’s heart, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
So he was a little surprised when he peeked around his big blue metal shield to see his sister sliding her arm around Frankie’s hunched shoulders. He looked thin and lanky, the long-sleeved thermal shirt under his olive-green I-AM-NOT-JOHNNY-RAMONE tee clearly not enough to keep him from shivering in the whippy breeze ruffling his black hair like the ruff on an angry dog.
Frankie was surprised at Miranda’s sneak-attack embrace, too, if the way his eyebrows shot toward his hairline was any indication.
Miranda, however, was not one to back down. She visibly hugged him tighter and said, “I mean it, Frankie. You haven’t been yourself in weeks.”
Wait. They weren’t talking about how pathetic Jess was?
They were talking about … Frankie?
A mind-bending fact that was confirmed when the man in question threw his head back and exhaled a plume of smoke to the sky. “I’m always myself, Miranda. Never more than now.”
“When you’re being a coward, on every level?” Miranda said, her voice hard.
Jess blinked. He knew his sister didn’t pull her punches, but damn. He was struck by the ridiculous impulse to defend Frankie, even though he essentially kinda sorta agreed with Miranda’s brutal assessment.
As he’d told Frankie before walking out, Jess knew Frankie was afraid.
Frankie didn’t appear to want to cop to it any more now than he had that awful day. He made that wriggle with his shoulders that Jess knew meant he wanted to throw Miranda’s arm off and pace, but was too polite to tell his best friend’s girl to go fuck herself.
“Think I took the coward’s way, do you?”
“I know you did. You even tried to make Jess think it was because you were bored with him.”
Jess winced. He never should’ve told Miranda about that—but she’d caught him at a low moment, brooding on what Frankie had said to him, and he’d let it slip out.
Frankie, apparently stung by the realization that Jess had confided such intimate details to his sister, finally did shake free of Miranda and stand up. “He didn’t believe it, anyway. I couldn’t make that drivel sound true. Not when it was the furthest thing from.”
In spite of himself, Jess warmed at the confirmation that Frankie hadn’t dumped him on his ass because he got tired of having a college kid tagging along after him. He’d denied the possibility at the time, but months of second-guessing had allowed doubts to creep in like insidious shadows casting everything he thought he knew into darkness.
Miranda huffed out a breath. “Men. I love how you all think you’re so mysterious and enigmatic, when really, anyone who ever saw you with Jess knew instantly how you felt about him. How you felt about each other, really—and yes, I know it took me a while to warm up to you, but Frankie.” Her eyes softened as she stared up at the tall, thin Brit smoking like a chimney and doing his damnedest not to make eye contact. “I know you loved him.”
The past tense—loved—went through Jess like an arrow. Crap, when was this going to stop hurting?
While Jess was still catching his breath at the sharp stab of pain, Frankie mumbled something in response. Something that made Miranda’s face crumple in what looked like sadness mixed with bewilderment.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” she cried. “I just don’t understand you. First with Jess, and now even with that new restaurant space Grant keeps bringing up—it’s like you’re so afraid of making a mistake, you’re paralyzed into doing nothing.”
Jess had to stifle the urge to shriek a question about what, exactly, Frankie had just said. It was insanely difficult.
Drawing hard to suck the last bit of tobacco and carcinogens from his cigarette, Frankie scowled. “Pardon me for being an arsehole, but you know fuck-all about it.”
“I know how your friendship with Adam and Grant is supposed to work,” Miranda said stoutly. “I’ve been around long enough to see you three in action, and I know for a fact, Adam is supposed to be the cautious one. Grant pushes for change, he brings up new ideas—and Adam resists, for a while. His cue to act usually comes from you, Frankie.”
“Bloody hell,” Frankie complained. “I wouldn’t have let you follow me out here if I knew you’d come over all Freudian and headshrinky. Leave a bloke a few illusions about being complicated and hard to figure, won’t you? There’s a luv.”
But Miranda was relentless. “You’re supposed to be the filter—you rein Grant in on his wilder schemes, and you reinforce the good ideas so Adam knows which way to fall.”
“You act like we lead Adam around by his nose,” Frankie said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it to dust with his boot heel.
“Not at all,” Miranda denied. “But you know how he is. When he’s in the kitchen, he’s in charge—no self-doubt, no questioning, no hesitation. But when it comes to the business side of things? He needs a little nudge every now and then. That’s where his two best friends come in. Except this time, you aren’t coming in. For whatever reason, Grant is holding open the door, and you’re hovering in the doorway, blocking Adam and keeping everybody at a standstill.”
“And you can’t think of any other reason why poor Adam might be having a crisis of confidence, hmm?” Frankie sneered, already fumbling through his pockets for his crumpled pack of Dunhills.
“Oh no. You’re not making this about me,” Miranda said, her eyes widening.
“Why not?” Frankie insisted. “Who’s closer to Adam than his darling not-wife? If anyone could reinforce his clarity, luv, it’s you.” He pulled out a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and spoke around it in a vicious mumble, his eyes trained on Miranda’s defiant face. “Or maybe that would be easier to accomplish if you, oh, I dunno, actually agreed to marry the bloke instead of keeping him dangling after you like a fish on a hook.”
Jess watched his sister’s face take on that familiar, stubborn cast he recognized so viscerally from his childhood. “I’m not getting married until my little brother has the same rights.” As always, his heart warmed in his chest at the lengths Miranda was willing to go to prove that it was still the two of them, shoulder to shoulder against the world.
The fact that she would delay her own happiness as a statement about equal marriage rights never failed to move Jess—but he was never sure if the tears he felt threatening behind his eyelids were from pride in his sister’s support, or sadness for the fact that she felt she had to do things this way.
“No zealot like a convert, eh?” Frankie smirked, his lip curling in that infuriating way that filled Jess with equal parts annoyance and frustrated desire.
She stood, shoving her hands in her jacket pockets. “I may not have reacted to Jess’s coming out the way I wish I had. God knows, I regret it every day. But I love my brother. At the end of the day, all I’ve ever wanted is for him to be happy.” She regarded Frankie with the ghost of the honest dislike she’d taken to him from the first, turning her mouth into a thin line. “And for whatever reason, scared, idiotic, overgrown little boy that you are, you make him happy.”
“And you hate that,” he said, still pushing and needling, hard enough that Jess felt scraped raw. God. Just shut up, he wanted to say. Why do you have to bait everyone all the time?
But Miranda was more than equal to it. “It’s not about how I feel about you,” she said. “It took me long enough to figure that out, but I did finally internalize that lesson. None of the men in my life seem to be able to do without you—not Jess, and not Adam, either. So quit playing around at life, man up, and be there for them when they need you.”
Her soft, inflexible tone seemed to hit Frankie like a sack full of rocks. He stood there, panting audibly as if trying to breathe through the pain. He was silent long enough that Jess started to wonder if he was hoping Miranda would give up, stop staring at him and waiting for a response, and just go inside.
But at length, after a bit of pacing and a few skyward glances, as if he hoped he’d find the answer to all of life’s problems written in the light-polluted sky over Manhattan, Frankie spoke.
“You really think I ought to make him listen to Grant about expanding Market?”
Miranda’s face softened. As Jess knew from experience, she was way easier to deal with when she knew you agreed with her. Or when she thought you were about to.
“What I really think,” she said, placing a hand on one of the tense forearms Frankie had crossed over his lean chest, “is that it would be a shame to miss out on this opportunity because you’re too busy being afraid of what it would mean to really consider it.”
Jess could actually hear Frankie swallow. “Yeah, all right,” he said, his hoarse voice sending an involuntary, unwelcome, extremely pleasant thrill down Jess’s spine. He wondered if he was fooling himself to be hoping maybe Frankie was agreeing to think about more than the new restaurant space. “I can do that. Consider it, I mean.”
Miranda stepped back, a satisfied gleam in her eyes. “That’s all I’m saying. Think it through. Weigh in with a real opinion, one not based on your own issues right now—which, by the way, I think you should resolve. In case I never made it clear before, I like you, Frankie. I liked you for Jess, once I understood how much you cared about him.”
She made a face, the one that meant she was simultaneously amused and frustrated with herself. “And I know it doesn’t matter now; you didn’t break up when I thought you should, so why would you get back together just on my say-so? But for the record, I’ve never seen him as happy as he was with you. You were good for him. And I think he was good for you, too.”
Wow. Jess blinked, something that had been coiled tight in his chest for months letting go in a rush of unexpected emotion.
In the back of Jess’s mind, buried under the more obvious aches and raw places from the breakup, had been the niggling thought that Miranda was probably secretly glad that he and Frankie weren’t together anymore.
He’d hardly noticed how much the idea of that bothered him until it was suddenly gone, shattered to smithereens by Miranda’s honest, frank appraisal of their relationship.
Holy jeebus. Even Miranda thinks we’re meant to be together. So why the fuck is it so hard for Frankie to get it through his stubborn head?
Frankie shook that stubborn head, a helpless denial that made Jess’s throat hurt. His sister’s shoulders slumped, the closest she ever came to admitting defeat, and she glanced away, knotting her light scarf more tightly around her neck. “Fine. I can’t make you. You’ll think about what I said, though, right?”
Jess couldn’t hear Frankie’s response, but he didn’t need to. He’d been treated to multiple renditions of Frankie’s patented better-for-everyone-if-we’re-not-together speech.
As he hurried back to Chapel, praying he wouldn’t get caught eavesdropping after all this, Jess had a hard time keeping the encroaching feeling of hopelessness from taking over his whole body.
Sure, things looked bleak when even the indomitable Miranda Wake couldn’t make a dent in Frankie’s ironclad resolve. But that didn’t mean Frankie would never see reason.
Did it?
Even using the walking directions provided by the GPS in her phone, Rosemary still had to double back twice before she actually found Chapel.
Somehow, even with the name, she hadn’t expected to find a bar in the basement of an abandoned church. Or, wait—she squinted at the sign on the corner of the gray stone building. It wasn’t abandoned, it had been repurposed into a theater of the absurd, dedicated to exploring experimental music, short-form theater, and performance art.
As Spock would say: fascinating.
Movement to her right drew her attention from the sign, and she noticed a pair of people moving toward a heavy wooden door at the bottom of a small flight of steps. She recognized one of them as Frankie Boyd, the tall, angular sous chef from Market. The woman at his side didn’t immediately ring any bells, although there was something familiar about her red hair, petite build, and the even, regular features usually classified as beautiful by modern society.
“Excuse me,” Rosemary called. “Is that the entrance to Chapel?”
“Well,” drawled Frankie, swinging around to face her. “If it isn’t Wes’s pretty little genius. How goes it, Professor?”
Rosemary paused, taken aback. “Oh! Well, fine, I suppose. I’m supposed to meet Wes. Did you happen to see him inside?”
“He was at the bar, last I checked,” said the redhead. “Hi, I’m Miranda Wake. Jess is my brother.”
“Of course,” Rosemary said, her brain slotting the answer to the mystery of this strange woman’s familiarity into place, with some relief. “There’s a strong facial resemblance between you—clearly, your family contains several strong, dominant genetic strains.”
“Er. Thank you?” Miranda shook her head, laughing a little. “And Adam thinks I use big words! He’s going to love you. Come on inside and meet everyone.”
As she followed Miranda and Frankie into the bar, Rosemary mused on the way popular culture seemed to enjoy portraying New York City as this cold, unfriendly place where people interacted mainly through one-night stands and muggings. That hadn’t been Rosemary’s experience at all.
Everyone was friendly! Even these two, to whom she was a virtual stranger in spite of her relationship with Wes, were quick to offer guidance and chatter about the restaurant and its various constituents.
Miranda was the chef/owner’s girlfriend, Rosemary discovered as their motley trio trooped into a low-ceilinged room thick with the scents of tobacco, smoke, and warm bodies. The air throbbed with the sound of many voices, all shouting to be heard over the thrum of rough, angry rebellion rock from the speakers.
“Come on.” Miranda beckoned, heading for a knot of men standing at the far end of the bar. After a minute pause, scanning the interior of the bar like an air force pilot searching the clouds for dangers, Frankie jammed his hands in his pockets and sloped off after her.
Rosemary started to follow, but stopped after only a few steps, her entire attention arrested by the fascinating scene unfolded before her.
She gazed around with intense interest. She’d never been anywhere quite like this. It reminded her a bit of the frenzy she’d encountered at the science fiction conventions she’d attended—lots of people from all different walks of life, dressed in improbable costumes and gathered together to form a new community of like-minded individuals. Klingons side by side with Cylons, stormtroopers chatting up stake-wielding blondes.
Just One Taste Page 22