If anyone is calling her therapist, it won’t be me.
I invade her office and grab a piece of paper out of the printer.
“You still owe me dinner. Call me.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
JAKE
“Are you going out?” Sabrina asks. “Because you’re kind of in a shitty mood for going out.”
I haven’t heard from Natalie, which is why I’m in this shitty mood, but I try to summon a smile for my sister. She’s back to talking to me . . . barely.
When she follows me into my bedroom, I put her to good use. “Yes. I’m meeting Ian and Victoria at Club 69. Pick out something suitably clubbish.”
I wait for her to beg to come with me. Club 69 is one of Kaga’s newest ventures. It seems like he is opening a new club every other month.
She avoids the subject and instead points to my closet. “What look are you going for? Trendy? Urban? Bridge and Tunnel?”
“What’s Bridge and Tunnel?” I ask, rubbing my chin. I’ve got quite the scruff going, but I’m too lazy to shave. In a couple more weeks, I’ll be headed into full hipster beard mode. I told Natalie that I preferred to shave and now I wonder what she likes. Clean shaven? A little scruff? A full beard?
Her skin felt petal-soft as I carried her into her bedroom. I tried not to stare at her legs or how the big shirt she wore clung to the curves of her ample chest and hugged her waist. Perving on a woman who had passed out from fear is probably one of the lower points in my life.
“Bridge and Tunnel is in from New Jersey to pick up chicks who don’t know better. Axe body spray or Drakkar, open collar, lots of chest hair showing.” Her head is stuck inside my closet, making the words sound like they are coming down some tunnel—although maybe not all the way from Jersey.
“I’ll pass on that. Isn’t there anything that looks like ‘I’m here because my friends think I’m a stick-in-the-mud’?”
“Only everything in your wardrobe.” She makes a face as she holds up a pair of camo pants from my army days. “Seriously, why do you still have these?”
“They’re clean. Sturdy.”
“Ugh.” She throws them back into the closet. Sabrina doesn’t like to remember the time I was in the army. Says it gives her nightmares. She pulls out a black suit and a plain gray shirt. “These things. No tie. Do you want to change your hand?”
I look down at the metal-and-plastic prosthetic on the left side, and flex. The design isn’t much to look at, but it is more functional than the other ones I have, like the more realistic flesh-looking one. That one is really nothing more than a mannequin piece. I choose function over form any day. “What? You don’t think the Terminator look is in? When your robot overlords are arrive, you’re going to be glad your brother is half man, half metal.”
She makes a face. “I just don’t want a bunch of stupid bitches at the club to say stupid shit to you.”
“Not everyone is like the old lady at Barneys.”
Sabrina is still hurting from the incident a month ago when we went shopping and an old socialite at Barneys nearly fainted when I reached down to tie my shoelace. My metal prosthetic, which looks more like a silver/black titanium glove, brushed the back of her tiny dog. She thought I was going to crush it. Most people ignore my hand or stare covertly, but she was elderly and had no problem shrieking and then apologizing all over, exclaiming how pitiful it was that a man like me had to have a prosthetic.
The pity gets to me more than the fear, but I don’t know if Sabrina understood that. I step into the bathroom to begin the semi-elaborate task of changing clothes. I usually keep my day-to-day limb in my boot. It’s easier to dress in the morning. My routine consists of pulling on my gel liner followed by the suction suspension sleeve. After that I stick my prosthetic in the bottom of whatever pants I’m wearing, pull the pants over my good leg, and then drop trou until my artificial limb is attached. That process takes less than a minute.
Getting undressed and into another set of clothes is a different story. I have to remove the prosthetic because the pants are a bitch to get over the artificial foot, and then while I have that off, I might as well change the liner and sleeve so I can last a few more hours without significant pain, which is why if I go out, I prefer to wear jeans. But Club 69 is not a place for jeans, and Ian and Kaga are good enough friends for me to make the extra effort.
“You never said why you broke it off with Deena?” she asks, rummaging in my sock drawer as I exit the bathroom having changed pants, reattached my limb, and shrugged on the button-down shirt.
“Why is it me doing the breaking? Maybe it was Deena who had a change of heart.”
Sabrina turns toward me with a give-me-a-break look on her face. “Has anyone broken up with you?”
“Sure.”
“Who? Name one girl.”
“Anna Madden.” I sit on the edge of the bed and motion for her to throw me the socks.
“Who’s she?” A belt lands beside me and I dodge a pair of black leather shoes, which land neatly, sole-down on the bedspread. I pull on the socks, one over my right foot and the other over my prosthetic foot. I don’t need a sock on my fake foot, of course, but it looks better.
“Nice throw. Anna Madden was my soulmate. She crushed me when she told me she wanted to see other people,” I say cheerfully.
Sabrina’s eyes narrow.
“Was this in like sixth grade or something?”
“Second. She was the cutest thing in elementary school. She wore pigtails and her brown hair curled around her face when she sweated. I liked to chase her around the playground until the hair started forming little ringlets.”
“That’s weird. And perverse. What’s Anna doing today?”
I shrug and stand. Sabrina comes over and buttons my shirt. Small buttons are a struggle for me. I swallow my resentment at needing help to dress. Reaching for the belt, I loop it through the pants. She makes a motion to ask if I need help with my buckle. I shake my head. The buckle I can do with my right hand. There’s never a moment that goes by that I’m not grateful I lost my left instead of my dominant right. “Hopefully breaking more hearts. Then I’m not the only sap she rejected.”
“The fact that no woman has broken up with you since second grade pretty much proves my point.”
I’m not sure where Sabrina is going with this, so I tell her what I told Deena. “We wanted different things in our lives at that point.”
She’d understood. She was—is—ambitious and wants to make a name for herself. While I want Tanner Securities to be successful, I didn’t need it to be big. I didn’t need to own half of Manhattan to feel good about myself. Deena wondered why I wasn’t expanding, hiring new people. Why I kept turning away business. She blamed it on my trust fund.
I’m not sure how she knew about that, because I’m pretty tight-lipped about my money, about everything in fact. That was another thing she didn’t like. In retrospect, the only thing Deena and I had going for us was our compatibility in bed. She liked to be fucked hard and often and I was happy to oblige.
After a while, though, having only sex in common became boring.
“Mom wants you to get married.”
Sabrina follows me out of the bedroom and down the two flights of stairs to the main level.
“She wants a lot of things, but she’s been a mother for over thirty-five years. She knows life is full of disappointment.”
“Maybe if you had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t worry about my love life so much.”
And there it is. Sabrina has decided to switch tactics from yelling at me to trying to divert attention away from her feelings toward Kaga. It’s working, although she doesn’t know it. My mind has been preoccupied with Natalie since I left her.
I glance at my watch. I could sneak down into my office to check my messages. I have yet to hear from her. Was she mad that I was in her bedroom? Would she have wanted me to stay? Call me wasn’t an invitation. It was a command. Maybe she didn’t understand that. I hadn’t abandoned her, bu
If I’d stayed, I would have wanted to climb into the bed with her, that pink-and-white monstrosity of a thing. She had more pillows than the bedding department at Macy’s. Hell, it could have been the bedding department at Macy’s.
I’d left with an uncomfortable ache in my pants and another pang slightly higher and to the left. The feeling hadn’t gone away either. I’d had to take myself in hand in the shower both last night and this morning; something I hadn’t done for a long time, because I either had someone else around to take care of that or I went without.
But last night when I got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Natalie. She felt right in my arms. She fit—in a way that Deena and all my past women had never done. I wouldn’t have gotten any sleep that night if I hadn’t taken care of my hard-on, so in the shower I’d fantasized about pulling down the sheets, licking my way from her calves to her core.
By the time I had my tongue deep into her pussy, I was coming. After a quick cold-water rubdown, I’d been able to fall asleep, only to wake up with her on my mind. So I took the same course of action again. I was left just as hungry and nearly as hard as when I’d started.
She has until tomorrow to call me back before I take matters into my own hands.
“What are your plans?” I ask Sabrina.
“Going to a bar with some friends.”
“Have fun tonight, squirt.” I lean down to give her a quick kiss on her forehead. “Be safe. Call me if you need a ride.”
“Tell Kaga I said hi,” she says softly into my shirt.
I stiffen at her words, but wanting to avoid another fight, I give her a half smile. “Will do.”
Priya, Kaga’s drop-dead gorgeous assistant, meets me at the side door. “You’re late,” she says in greeting. Priya lives and dies by her schedule, and his. I’ve suspected more than once that she suffers from at least a mild case of OCD. I once accidentally moved the stapler on her desk and she about melted down until it was repositioned.
But her attention to detail was why she was the perfect match for Kaga, a guy who ran two empires—one in the US and one in Japan. I often wondered if they had a thing. Priya is almost too beautiful not to make at least one play for, but I never got anything but a boss/secretary vibe. Probably Kaga would say that it was dishonorable to take advantage of an employee.
“Only by fifteen minutes. That’s early by New York standards.”
Priya frowns, but says nothing. She silently leads me up the stairs to the owner’s suite. In every bar Kaga owns, he has a private suite that overlooks most of the club. It’s equipped with televisions if you are bored with the floor show, a private bar, catered food, and several flat, soft surfaces for when you want to take your dancing from vertical to horizontal. I’ve done my own share of fucking in his private suites. There is just something about clubs that makes women want to take their clothes off. The one-way privacy mirror feeds their exhibitionist fantasies without exposing them in any way.
I wonder what fantasies Natalie has.
“You look fierce. Kaga’s not even here,” Ian says as Priya opens the door. “Japan. A family issue,” he adds before I can ask where and why.
Kaga’s comment about cleaning house followed by his quick departure gives me pause. I’m glad when a knock at the door interrupts us. A dark-eyed beauty walks in with a sultry smile and a tray holding two glasses of amber liquid. God love Priya’s efficiency.
She bends near Ian first, her body brushing his. He draws back and makes a show of reaching for the glass with his left hand so that the platinum of his wedding band flashes in the light. She’s smart enough to recognize the rebuff and turns her attention to me.
My left hand is noticeable too, but in a different way. Either Priya gave her a heads-up or she’s got good self-control, because she doesn’t react at all. She treats me with the same seductive attention. A cynical part of me knows that of course she’s going to treat me the same. A guy with a prosthetic—who is a personal guest of Kaga—likely has a big enough bank account to make up for all kinds of deficits, including the lack of a limb. Or two.
“Anything else I can provide?”
Ian raises his eyebrows to indicate that the invitation and response are mine alone. Another time, maybe I would’ve taken her up on it. Ian would have excused himself and this young lady would discover that the rest of my body still worked just fine.
Instead, I shake my head. “We’re good.”
Her regret seems genuine as she nods and leaves.
“Not feeling it tonight?” Ian asks. “Too easy?”
He likes the chase—a waitress offering herself along with Kaga’s aged whiskey wouldn’t have enticed him before his marriage. I don’t mind easy offerings. “Not interested.”
“Why not? She was gorgeous. All legs and boobs.”
“There are dolls for you if all you are interested in are legs and boobs.”
He nods and without another question turns back to the large windows overlooking the show.
In the cages and on the stages at Club 69, couples simulate sex acts—there’s something for everyone. Gays, lesbians, heteros. In the center a rotating stage rises and lowers on a hydraulic lift—something that gave Kaga a dozen headaches pre-opening.
From this room, we can see the various acts and the clubgoers writhing on the dance floor. Ordinarily one of the acts would’ve stirred me, but tonight all I can think of is Natalie.
“How can you even see her down there?” I ask, referring to Ian’s wife and my employee, Victoria. Ian calls her Tiny, which I freely admit I don’t get. She’s average sized.
“I just know. I could pick her out from a thousand look-alikes. She’s on the dance floor, northeast corner.”
I squint and make out a pretty light brown head next to a curly-topped head and one security guard, standing as a buffer between the crowd and the two girls.
“That doesn’t look like one of mine,” I comment, pointing to the guard.
“Kaga’s security,” Ian admits. “Steve wouldn’t come. He’s too busy chasing that waitress.”
“Still? I don’t know what to be more impressed by. His persistence or her ongoing refusal.” It seemed like months since we’d discovered that Cecilia Howe, a wealthy socialite, was blackmailing a number of people in order to maintain their silence about her husband’s infidelities—among other things. One of Howe’s victims was a waitress trying to keep her younger brother from going back to prison.
“His persistence,” Ian says. “Because who’d want to wake up to his crabby ass every morning?”
Steve is Ian’s bodyguard, driver, and good friend, but surly is his default setting.
“Why are you up here with me? Shouldn’t you be down there marking your territory? I think I saw a male hand come within six feet of Victoria.”
He scowls at me. “I’m up here learning to be an evolved man, not the Neanderthal she keeps calling me.”
“How’s that working?” I note his hands are curled around the arms of the leather club chair.
“I’m here, aren’t I? Instead of down there, pissing a circle around her,” he responds drolly.
I could needle him more by talking about how hot she looks in her sparkly dress, which is so short I swear I can see her underwear, but she works for me and that feels vaguely wrong.
“I’m surprised you even let Victoria out of the house after dark.”
“It was either ease up on the chain or face divorce. We compromised with the guard after she was kidnapped off the street.” He nods toward the solidly built man keeping the crowd away from the dancing pair.
“Good call.”
“Thanks. Tiny doesn’t seem to appreciate how much of a sacrifice I made for her.”
I can’t tell if he’s serious or not.
“If we’re mentioning surprises,” he continues, “I’m surprised there’s nothing here that interests you. You weren’t interested at the game, and you aren’t tonight. I think your reporter girlfriend is down there.” He gestures toward the main bar. I don’t even bother to look.
“We parted ways a few weeks ago.”
“Too clingy?”
“Too nosey.”
“She is a journalist.”
“So I noticed.”
“Tiny’s got a friend,” Ian starts.
“No.” I raise my left hand. “I get that enough from my mother. I don’t need it from my friends.”
“Okay, but don’t say I never warned you. Tiny’s worried about your long hours and thinks that her friend Sarah would be perfect for you.”
Great. I could see I was going to have to avoid Victoria for the next few weeks.
Our conversation changes to the Mets and Yankees and which team is going to disappoint the city the most this year. I stay for one more drink and then use my aching left leg as an excuse to leave.
But I don’t go home. When I get in the car, I head south instead of north, and I find myself in Tribeca, sitting outside a seven-story apartment building watching the third floor for signs of life. I thump myself a few times with my prosthetic because it’s heavier than the skin and bones on my right hand, but it doesn’t have the right effect. No sense is knocked into me. I’m not suddenly free of my growing Natalie obsession. In fact, I don’t leave for a long time, not until after the cop car circles the block a second time.
The lights in Natalie’s apartment never turn on—at least not from my vantage point.
Tomorrow.
She has until tomorrow to call me, because I’m not going to sleep well until I know she’s all right.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NATALIE
I read the note for the umpteenth time. Call me.
Is he even serious? I feel like there’s some hidden message in the seven words on the page. Maybe it’s an anagram for “You’re the craziest loon I’ve ever met. Stay away.”
My mind is sluggish today. Oliver called Dr. Terrance, who ordered me a whole new cocktail of drugs and put off any attempts of mine to go outside for another couple of weeks. After Dr. Terrance chewed me out for opening the door to a stranger, someone he hadn’t met and approved of, Oliver showed up with the new prescriptions and wouldn’t leave until I’d taken my recommended dosage. Poor Oliver. He tries his best to cope with me, not calling Dr. Terrance until the last minute. Even Oliver grapples with Dr. Terrance’s need to vet everyone in my life and every action I take, as evidenced by Oliver hiring Jake without preapproval.
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