Revealed to Him

by Jen Frederick

  “I’ve read you.” I don’t get starstruck. I’ve worked with too many celebrities to be awed by them, but I am standing about twenty feet away from the person the New York Times has called “a revolutionary new eye into the future.” “I thought M. Kannan was a man” is my first thought.

  I know who you are.

  The threat takes on a different dimension.

  She snorts, interrupting her counting. “Male readers don’t read female authors. It’s more lucrative to be gender neutral, especially when you’re writing science fiction.”

  The words rush out, as if she’s saying them all in one breath, but at least she’s talking and thinking and not passing out. The panic attack is tapering off.

  Mentally I run through my bookcases and realize I have embarrassingly few female authors on my shelf. “Like I said before, men are dumb.”

  “Yes, yes they are.” When she half laughs, I exhale and realize I’d been holding my breath, waiting to run into the bedroom. Phobias are a bitch to fight off. Too many of my brothers-in-arms suffer from them and mental illnesses are viewed differently than physical illnesses. If a friend is sick with the flu, or God forbid, something worse like cancer, everyone is sympathetic. But depression? Fear of being in your own head? Folks just want you to get over it and if you can’t, you’re a weak-ass sadsack.

  I don’t know why I don’t have PTSD. It’s not because I’m better or stronger than my squad mates—more likely that I’m just a cold bastard. That’s what my youngest sister claims.

  “I’m going to need you to sign my books.” She has a big-screen television, one of those curved ones, and three different game consoles underneath. Whatever happened in her past, it hadn’t killed her love for the medium. I finish my inspection of the interior and walk to the kitchen.

  “Just bring them over. You know how to get in.” Her sultry voice is about an octave lower than earlier, and scratchy, as if she’s spent a long time screaming. A quick vision of sheets, bedposts, and an arched back flash through my mind.

  All right, Jake. Get a hold of yourself. It’s only been a few weeks since I last got laid so I’m not sure why I’m having such a visceral reaction to this woman whose face I haven’t seen.

  “I’m almost done here.”

  The last room is her bedroom and while I need to see inside of it, I know she’s not ready. Not today. Resolutely I turn away. “I’m leaving now.”

  At the kitchen counter, I pull out a small jar of powder and a brush. “A pre-Hollywood invention. Fingerprint dusting powder so you know where I was in your apartment,” I write on a notepad I find on the counter.

  I hope my token apology for interfering with her life, causing a slight panic attack, is offset by this. As I climb the stairs to the top floor, so it looks like I was with Graham the whole time, and then travel down the elevator to the lobby, something about the whole sweep of the apartment nags at me. Was it that I didn’t get to see her bedroom and complete my assessment of her security needs? Was it that I didn’t get to take Natalie’s measure by looking her in the eye?

  It isn’t until my feet hit the sidewalk that I realize that I want Natalie to like me, not to be afraid of me. I look down at my arm, the one that is missing a hand, and then the leg, the one that is missing the calf and foot. Turning around, I stare up at the window in the far right corner. There’s a movement there, a twitch of the curtain. I hold up my good hand and shove the bad one in my pocket.

  No, let’s be honest. I want Natalie to be attracted to me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  JAKE

  Her call comes just seconds after the window curtain twitches.

  “You left me a present.”

  “It’s a thank-you for letting me in. I figured it would give you some peace of mind to know where I was and what I touched.”

  “I didn’t let you in. You picked the lock!”

  Her indignation makes me smile. I give her another wave and walk toward Hudson. We’re both on the West Side so I decide to walk back to my office rather than catch a cab. I need to clear my head and the exercise would do my leg good. “You let me in. Or at least you gave me permission by going to the bedroom.”

  “So now you know all my secrets.” She sounds nervous, as if I’m going to start blabbing to reporters about what I saw in her apartment.

  “They’re still your secrets. I’m hired to protect you, not to bring you more harm by revealing your secrets. That’s why we have a nondisclosure agreement.” As the sun warms my skin, I wonder what it’s like to be locked inside the four walls of an apartment. Does she open her balcony windows? How often does she feel the sun on her face or the wind in her hair? “Is the author thing a big deal?”

  “Meaning will it hurt my sales if it is revealed that I’m not male? Who knows? I already don’t do book signings,” she sighs. “I didn’t want to use a male pseudonym because of where it got me before. I had to fight for the ambiguous first initial, but I knew if I used my real name it would be tainted by everything that had gone on in the past. I wanted the books to succeed or fail on their own. Not because people felt sorry for me or because they hated me for something other than my writing.”

  “That makes sense. How many people know you’re M. Kannan?” That could narrow my suspect list considerably.

  “Oliver. His parents. My therapist. My editor.” She ticks them off one by one. “There might be a few other people in the publishing house, but we also have a nondisclosure agreement and they’d pay hefty damages if they broke it.”

  “But the resulting publicity could be good for them,” I suggest.

  A foul stench hits me as I reach Hudson. Being indoors isn’t all that bad. Natalie’s apartment smelled like cinnamon and lemons.

  “I don’t want to sound like an asshole, but we’re doing pretty well on the publicity part.”

  A metro bus speeds by wrapped in an advertisement for the upcoming movie. “Good point. Do you think the note is from someone in your past or your current life?”

  “Past,” she replies firmly. “It has to be. My life . . . it’s so small now and everyone in it is a friend. I can’t imagine someone I know and love doing this to me.”

  Just because you don’t want something to be true doesn’t mean it isn’t. But I suspect she knows this. “If it’s someone from three or four years ago, then he has a real hard-on for you to be coming back after all this time. Can you make a list of the most determined guys who threatened you?”

  “It wasn’t just guys. A few of the worst were women.”

  That surprised me. “They threatened physical harm?”

  “No, but they sent me other stuff. Women know how to hurt other women so well.” She pauses. “Will it be very difficult if I don’t want to delve into the past? I mean . . . yes, God, I did not like getting the note, and yes, it set me off, but digging through all that shit is only going to make me more stressed out.”

  “Why don’t you have someone forward it to me?” My leg is starting to ache. I probably shouldn’t have planned to walk this far with this prosthetic. I’d traded out the blade for my normal device with the vacuum-sealed socket and the carbon foot. It’s not made for strenuous activity, such as walking forty blocks. And while I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that I’m walking around with a fake limb on my leg and arm, I don’t enjoy the looks of pity when I have to turn on my vacuum pump to adjust the fit of my socket. It’s noisy as fuck and it makes it harder to convince people that they really don’t have to feel sorry for me when I’m grimacing in pain because the damn device isn’t fitting well as my stump swells or shrinks.

  I face the street to hail a cab.

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Like what?”

  She takes a deep breath. “How about a picture of what you’re wearing?”

  I look down at my jeans, Windbreaker, and T-shirt. “It’s not flannel. I promise.”

  “No picture?” She’s disappointed. Maybe she wants to see my prosthet
ics. Did Oliver tell her? She never said a word before. When I meet women, it’s the first thing they check out. I don’t hide it, because if they’re turned off by the fact that my left hand and foot are made of steel, plastic, and synthetics, I’d rather know that up front than later when I’m taking my clothes off. But for some reason I don’t want to acknowledge, I don’t want the focus on those things just yet.

  “I’m six feet three. Weigh about two sixty.”

  She’s silent. Am I too tall for her? Too short? A cab stops as I’m scratching the side of my shorn head. Why do I care?

  “So not a runner’s body?”

  “I’m not sure what a runner’s body is.” That’s not the comment I expected. “Because I do run.”

  “How long?”

  “Depends, but usually about six miles a day.”

  “Six miles?” she yelps. “That’s like half a marathon.”

  I cover the phone and give my address to the cabbie who stops. Returning to Natalie, I correct her. “It’s a quarter of a marathon.”

  “It’s a marathon compared to what I run.”

  As if the distance is what’s offensive. Of all the things about me I figured she wouldn’t like, the fact I work out isn’t one of them. Most women like my body, if they can get over the stumps. They coo over my muscles and wonder how I can even have any on my left side. I’ve had more than one run her tongue over the ridges of my abdomen. The last woman I slept with—a financial reporter, whom I stopped seeing because she was a little too snoopy for my taste—told me that my physique and big cock made up for a lot of deficits. Come to think of it, I probably dumped her for more than a few reasons.

  “You have a treadmill so how much do you run?” I ask.

  “Three miles with no resistance either. I run flat with no incline.”

  “Three miles is a lot.”

  “I could never keep up with you.”

  “Did you plan on racing me?”

  “No, but it’d be nice to run outside.”

  I’ve never run with a woman, never wanted to. But I could picture Natalie running beside me along the Hudson River, telling me I’m going too fast or too slow in her sultry voice. My jeans start to get a little tight and I shake my head. Getting turned on by just a voice is a first for me.

  “If you go early enough, the route along the Hudson is pretty empty.” I rub my chin. Am I asking her to run with me? Maybe the cell phone radiation is scrambling my brains. This is probably the longest conversation I’ve had with a woman not in my family.

  The cabbie stops at my townhouse and I hand him two twenties and climb out. “Keep the change,” I mouth.

  “Yeah, man, thanks,” he says and his voice is an intrusion on whatever weird intimacy that Natalie and I had developed over the phone.

  She senses it too, because she clears her throat awkwardly. “Gosh, look at the time. I can’t believe I kept you on the phone this long. I’m so sorry. You must think I’m totally friendless and weird. Anyway, um, send me a bill for this and whatever else.”

  “Natalie,” I say gently. “I enjoyed talking to you.”

  “Um, right. Just, ah, send me the bill.”

  Then she hangs up.

  With a sigh, I tuck the phone into my pocket. We have a connection, a different sort of one, but I think we’re both caught off guard. I did enjoy talking to her, and generally speaking, I’m not a phone person. I text, I email, but spending thirty minutes on the phone isn’t something I’ve done in a long time. The lights to Tanner Security, which is housed on the ground floor and garden level of the townhouse that I bought with the inheritance I received when I was twenty-one, are off. I glance upward to see if my sister is home.

  All the rooms are dark with the exception of the front bedroom on the fourth floor. She’s home, then, but doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.

  My sister and I were close once. When I was shipped home after my unfortunate run-in with an IED in Afghanistan, she was still in high school. I hadn’t wanted to live at home and I hadn’t wanted to have a live-in nurse, so Sabrina volunteered to come and stay with me. It worked out great. By the time she began attending Columbia, I’d become self-sufficient again, learning how to redo simple things I’d once taken for granted—such as buttoning my shirts. I solved that by wearing pullovers. She’d since moved out, but still spent a lot of time with me.

  Yet somewhere along the line, possibly the moment she met Tadashubu Kaga, she stopped appreciating having me as a big brother and started accusing me of interfering with her life.

  While I admire Kaga and view him as a friend, I don’t want him anywhere near my innocent baby sister. He’s a powerful and wealthy man with very specific taste in women.

  I finger the phone in my pocket, wondering what Natalie would say about this. She and Graham seem pretty close. I have the phone out and in my hand before I realize what I’m doing. I just met this woman. Hell, I hadn’t even met her. I talked to her on the phone for nearly thirty minutes and I’ve been inside her apartment, but we aren’t even friends and I’m thinking of calling an agoraphobe for fucking advice?

  I need to go inside and take a long cold shower.

  When the phone rings, my heart thumps like a fucking twelve-year-old’s until I see my mom’s face on the screen.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Are you still working? I can hear the noise on the street. You should be inside having dinner. It’s nearly eight o’clock at night.” She sighs, an exhale of frustration.

  My mother has been nagging me about working too much and this moment of insanity is proof she’s right.

  “I’m going in right now and eating a cow,” I reassure her.

  “Save some for your sister,” she replies. “She’s looking tense and hungry these days.”

  The last thing I want to think about is what might be causing Sabrina’s unhappiness. I shuffle that thought toward the back of my head and lean back against the stone railing of my stoop and enjoy the brisk night air as Mom catches me up on the news of her friends. She murmurs something about my ex looking me up but that’s another thing I don’t care to pay any attention to. After I promise to feed Sabrina, Mom lets me go.

  I put the phone away and jog up the stairs. The front door has a lock and key, but it’s for show. Access to my townhouse is gained through a biometric hand scanner and voice recognition. I press my hand against the pane of glass in the door that serves as the scanner and give an audible command. The three locks disengage and a chirp of the alarm acknowledges my entrance.

  I wonder if Natalie would feel more secure with a system like this—

  Stop, I order myself.

  This is not me. I don’t obsess over women. What I need to do is sit down, evaluate what I know, suggest a security system, and start viewing her as a client, not a potential bedmate.

  In the kitchen, I find that Sabrina hasn’t totally written me off. There’s a plate of pasta covered in plastic wrap with a note that says “reheat, two minutes.”

  “Bless you, my child,” I murmur as I stick the plate into the microwave. I can boil water, operate a microwave, and cook a steak. That’s about the extent of my cooking skills.

  “You’re welcome.”

  I hide my surprise and turn nonchalantly to lean against the counter. Sabrina stands at the entry of the kitchen, her arms crossed and her mouth pressed into a hard line. Despite her angry stance, I see confusion in her eyes. She loves and hates me at this moment.

  “Mom called to make sure you were eating.”

  “I ate earlier. Tiny came up an hour ago and said you were out on a call.”

  “New client,” I answer. Tiny’s an investigator for Tanner Security, but she’s also married to Ian, whose best friend is Kaga, so I know where this is headed—nowhere good. The only mystery is how long it will take for us to get to the subject of him.

  “Is it Kaga? Is he in trouble in any way?” she blurts out.

  Not long, apparently. I pinch my nose because just
the thought of her wanting to know about him gives me a headache. “Bri, honey,” I begin, but before I can finish my thought, she interrupts me.

  “What? I can’t even ask about him?”

  “What purpose does it serve for you even to imagine yourself in a relationship with him?”

  “We’re friends.” She’s stubborn.

  “If you were friends, then you wouldn’t need to ask how he’s doing.” Immediately I regret my words as she turns ashen and the skin around her lips whitens as her lips thin. “Aw, fuck me, honey. I’m sorry. I love you and I just want to make sure that you’re happy in life.” Pushing away from the counter, I move toward her, but she backs away.

  “Really? You could have fooled me. Every action you take is designed to keep me away from people I love!”

  She loves Kaga? She doesn’t even know him. I reach a hand toward her. “Sorry you feel that way.”

  “If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t do this. You’re only sorry that I’m mad at you.” She whirls on one foot and runs out of the kitchen and up the stairs. My leg aches too much to run after her and frankly, she’s right.

  I’m sorry she’s mad, but I’m not wrong about her and Kaga. Their differences are too vast.

  The microwave dings and my stomach growls in response.

  For a moment, I let my forehead rest on the heel of my hand. Maybe I’m thinking about Natalie because she’s the one woman in my life that I haven’t disappointed . . . yet.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NATALIE

  “In my next book, I’m killing off the protagonist on the first page.”

  “Because you’re tired of success and you want to shit all over your readers?” Daphne doesn’t even look up from the magazine she’s paging through as she predicts the demise of my career.

  “How can I write about anything even remotely brave and heroic when I can’t even put my hand on the doorknob without puking and fainting?”

  “It’s fiction. You can’t do martial arts either, but your famous protagonist, Soren Blake, is a master at it. You haven’t flown in outer space and fucked three alien dudes, or if you have, you are completely holding out on me.”