It was beautiful and terrifying.
He was a bad man. And he couldn’t hide it. Couldn’t blend in.
And this is why Charlotte and I couldn’t happen again.
Because I was this man’s brother.
It literally sent a chill through me, thinking of her being in this room with him. It made me nervous that she was next door, the wall too flimsy when it came to my badass brother.
“I heard about the fight,” he said. He ran a hand through his hair. His hair was longer than mine and curly, the way mine would be if I grew it out. When he was a kid rocking that long curly hair, waiters and waitresses always thought he was a little girl, but he didn’t care.
He fucking loved that hair.
“You heard I won, then?”
“Yeah,” he said, getting angry. I’d kill him now, if he tried. He’d gotten soft doing whatever the fuck he’d been doing for the last two years, and I had never in my life been so strong. “I heard you won. And next week you’re going up against Martinez?”
I shrugged. Word got around.
“Out of all the things you could do with your life. You pick this?”
“This is making me a lot of money.”
“Yeah,” he scoffed, looking around my place. “I can tell.”
“I’m good,” I said. “I’m really fucking good.”
He looked me over and I knew what he saw. My body was a machine. A weapon. All boyhood beaten out of it.
I was a man.
And I was a beast.
“Of course you are,” he said with a sigh that sounded like our mother’s when she caught us fighting. “But going up against these guys, you’re gonna get killed. Or hurt for real. Remember Lars?”
“Of course I remember Lars.” He’d been a neighbor on Burl. A grown-up man living in his parents’ basement, playing video games with us because of something that happened to him in the war.
“Yeah, well, you’re probably one concussion away from Lars. Tell me, what was the point of getting you free of all Dad’s shit if you’re only going to get yourself killed in some junkyard fight in a basement?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Oh, it’s exactly like that.”
“Well, it’s none of your fucking business.”
“You could have been anything—”
I went to door, ignoring the chain he’d cut through. My busted lock. I’d fix it all later. Just like I’d put myself back together, too.
“Don’t rewrite the past, Jack,” I said. “You were the one with the future, and you made your choices. I was born to be exactly this and we both know it. You should go. I’m sure you’ve got important shit to do.”
“You kicking me out?” he asked.
I shrugged.
Jack sniffed, that tattooed hand rubbing over his face like I flat wore him out.
“I got another question,” he said.
“I’m about done answering them.”
“Anyone new move in here lately? A girl?”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?”
“Shady Oaks is a long way to go for pussy.”
“It’s not…it’s not like that. I’m looking for a girl. A woman.” I didn’t so much as blink at him. There was no possible way he was looking for my Charlotte. It was like the big bad wolf looking for Little Bo Peep—they didn’t belong in the same world. “The woman I want split. I don’t know where, I’m pretty sure why, and I just…I need to find her.”
“And you think she’s here?”
“No, but I think her sister is here.”
For some reason that made my heart stop. I was not a guy who believed in coincidences.
“Why?”
“I know they were staying in a hotel out by the airport up until a few weeks ago. I know the sister sold her condo and gave the cash to Abby. I know Abby paid cash for a shitbox pick-up and left town. But the sister… she stayed. And since she didn’t have a lot of cash left, she needed a place with cheap rent.”
“And you think it’s here?”
“Lotta people hide out here.” He gave me a pointed look.
“I don’t pay a whole lot of attention,” I said. “People move in and out of this place all the time.”
“Yeah. Well, if you see anyone new or hear about some kind of artist—”
“Artist?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
Jack turned on me like a bloodhound. “You heard something?”
“No, I’m just…what kind of artist would move here?”
“One trying to hide.” He stepped toward me and I could see under his jacket the outline of his gun.
Fuck, Jack. No. Don’t tell me you’re in so far you’re never going to get out.
I looked away, wishing I could unsee it. He stopped an arm’s length away from me. I could feel him looking at my face, taking in the old scars. The new wounds. “You don’t have to do this,” he breathed. “I can give you enough money—”
“What about Dad’s debt?” I asked. I asked this question even though I knew the answer. I really knew the answer, low down in my stomach where I hurt every damn day. Where the pain lived that I couldn’t fight or fuck away. “How are you going to give me money when we’re supposed to be taking care of the money he owes to Lazarus? Last week I made back a chunk of it, you can take it to him. It’s not all of it, but it’s some.” It was barely a drop in the bucket, Dad owed a fucking life-destroying amount of money and my purse was big, but it wasn’t that big.
“Stop, Jesse,” Jack said, his hand on my shoulder. I tried not to feel it but it was impossible not to. “Dad’s debt’s been paid.”
“How—” I swallowed the rest of the question, because I knew.
The answer was in the tattoos on his arms and the gun under his jacket.
Jack paid back the debt in trade.
My heart just fucking broke. It broke in a thousand pieces.
Me and my brother—the people we’d been. Gone.
This was my brother, right here. Right in front of me. But he was an ice cold stranger.
“Mom wouldn’t want you fighting like this,” he said.
I laughed. “Yeah, you think she’d want you doing whatever the fuck it is you’re doing with that gun under your jacket?”
His face got hard, mean. It was like seeing someone you loved put on a mask. Him, but not him.
“Mom’s dead,” he said for absolutely no good reason.
“I’m so glad she can’t see who we are now,” I said.
Jack blinked and looked away. But he was nodding too.
We would break her heart.
“Listen, you hear of a girl moving in, you let me know,” Jack said. “It’s important. Real…important.”
I closed the door behind my brother and rested my head against the wall. I lifted my skull and pounded it back down for good measure.
Never. I would never tell Jack about Charlotte, especially if she was the girl he was looking for.
But other people knew Jack was on the lookout for an artist moving in here, and sure there was plenty of turnover in these apartments, but not a whole lot of single girls moving in all the time.
And an artist.
Jesus.
My brother was a stone-cold killer, and I had to make sure he wasn’t looking for my neighbor.
Chapter Ten
Charlotte
My shower was as hot as I could take it. My skin alive with the pleasure-pain of the heat and the surprising water pressure. But good things didn’t last forever at Shady Oaks, least of all the hot water, and as it drifted into cold I cranked off the water and stepped out of the old claw foot tub. My wet hair falling down my back, tame for the time being with water weight, I reached forward and swiped my hand across the mirror, clearing a stripe of condensation away.
And there was my face. The same as it ever was. Pale. Freckled. Bright blue eyes. Transparent eyelashes.
My sturdy body. The broad shoulders my mom always thought
meant I was going to be a swimmer, such a disappointment for her.
The same as it ever was.
But there at the junction of my neck and my shoulder was the purple mark Jesse had left on me. I touched it with trembling fingers, but it just felt like my skin. It just felt like me.
It really happened. The proof was right there.
And instead of being embarrassed, I was amazed at how fucking proud I was of myself. Not because I’d done something dirty and kinky and was now ready for a life of group sex. But because there’d been something I wanted. Something wild and different and difficult.
And I did it.
Who is the drag now, huh? Not me.
And Jesse…God, how strange the gratitude was. How awkwardly it pulsed inside of me. A light I had no idea how to turn on or off.
It was Sunday, and for the first time in so long, work held no interest. I made my coffee and sat down out of sheer habit. Turning on my system out of muscle memory.
My designs appeared on the screen and I just…didn’t want to.
I opened up my Facebook page and looked through the pictures I had with my sister. Lingering on the one from our last birthday. We were wearing boas and tiaras—she looked like she was born wearing them. I looked self-conscious. But she had her arm around my neck and her lips pressed hard to my cheek and we looked equally happy.
No one had been starved or denied. No one left behind.
It was us. And it was enough.
I clicked on the picture and made it my desktop picture. Replacing the sunset that had come with the system.
And then I decided I needed breakfast. Diner breakfast. Home fries and bacon. Endless cups of mediocre coffee. I grabbed my keys from the hook… pausing for a moment, my body frozen by the memory of Jesse’s fingers inside of me.
That happened. That really happened.
When I opened my door, Jesse was standing there, his fist raised like he’d been about to knock.
Startled, I stepped back and he dropped his hand.
And for a second, naked and honest, we just sort of grinned at each other. Or I grinned at him and he sort of gave me the impression of grinning, and it was enough to make me blush. Enough to make me erupt in a full body blush, my body alive with memory.
And then he coughed into his hand, breaking eye contact, and his face, when he looked back at me was set into stern lines.
I wondered briefly why he did that. If I had a habit of pushing away the things I wanted, he had a habit of pretending not to feel anything, when he so clearly did.
“I’m going to go to Jim’s,” I said, naming the rundown diner a few blocks away. “Want to come?”
“No,” he said and I blinked, the giddy/happy thing happening in my chest dissolving away.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Why are you here?”
“I just…” He glanced sideways down the side of the building, as if checking to see if anyone was watching and I was reminded, so clearly, so terribly of the time Chris Anthenet, the high school quarterback, asked me out on a date. He’d done the same thing, made sure no one was around to see him asking out Abby’s fatter, shyer sister. “I can make you breakfast,” he said.
“You don’t want to be seen in public with me?” I asked and then was completely astounded that I did. Where had that come from? I was wearing my favorite sundress, the fabric printed with smiley-face suns, with my cowboy boots. My hair in a thick damp braid down the back of the denim jacket I’d thrown on.
I wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.
“No!” he said with the kind of wide-eye surprise I couldn’t imagine him faking. “I just don’t…like people.”
“Well, I can relate to that.”
“I want to see you, and you’re hungry. So, I can feed you.”
I can feed you. How primal that sounded.
“What exactly will you make? Gatorade with a side of ice-pack?”
That made him really smile and I saw the white gleam of his teeth, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He really was handsome. So handsome my stomach fluttered and I put my hand against it.
“Give me a half hour,” he said. “And I’ll be back.”
“Not here!” I said, “I don’t have any chairs, remember?”
He glanced around my apartment over my shoulder and then he nodded. “Right. My place, a half hour. You bring coffee.”
A half hour later I was standing outside his door, holding a bodum of hot fresh coffee like a bouquet of flowers.
Weird. This is so weird.
I knocked, and his muffled voice answered, “Come on in.”
The inside of Jesse’s apartment smelled like a diner, the air thick with bacon and potato smells.
His table was set with his two plates and two forks.
This felt strangely like a date, between two people who knew nothing about each other and didn’t like people. It felt like a date that didn’t stand a chance.
“Hi,” he said, looking up from whatever he was stirring on the stove. He wore workout stuff again. It was not hard to imagine that was all he wore. Like he didn’t have other clothes.
“Hi,” I said.
The awkwardness was excruciating. It was actually painful. What in the world would we talk about? What could we talk about? Group sex? Unexpected voyeurism? I wanted to walk across the room and kiss him. I wanted to knock the spatula out of his hand and make him bend me over something like he said he would.
I didn’t know how to sit here and eat breakfast and drink coffee with that desire inside of me.
He was watching me, like he knew I wanted to run and he wasn’t going to persuade me either way. Maybe he wanted to run, too.
“I’ve never made breakfast for another person,” he said. And it was like his hand had snuck out of the shell he lived in and dropped a little breadcrumb onto the ground between us. And now I had to push my hand out of the shell I lived in and take the breadcrumb.
“Why don’t I believe that?” I asked, and then winced. Shitty way to pick up the breadcrumb. “I mean…you host orgies. It only makes sense someone would get hungry. Or something.”
“Not technically an orgy.” He glanced down into his sizzling pan. “You need five for an orgy. Technically.”
“Good to know.”
“If you’re going to leave, leave. But if you’re staying I’d like a cup of coffee.”
He addressed those words into his pan and I was glad, because I had to give myself a wicked eyeroll before stepping inside and shutting the door.
Honestly, after last night I was going to run scared? Grow up, Charlotte.
I poured coffee into the two mugs on the table. Each of them said Iowa State Wrestling on them. After I filled them, I took one over to Jesse.
“Did you go to Iowa State?” I asked, handing it to him so he could take the handle and not burn himself.
The look he shot over my shoulder was decidedly not smiley.
“Your mug,” I said. “And you had a pair of shorts on once—”
He was wearing the same shorts now, I realized. The red Iowa State printed on the shorts right above his knee cap.
“Jesus, you pay attention to the details, don’t you?”
“It’s kind of my job.”
He didn’t say anything and I took a sip of coffee just so I had something to do.
“I went for most of a year,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I got a scholarship so I went.”
“No.” So weird that he would frame my question that way, like the story was in how he went, not how he left. “Why did you leave?”
“Grades mostly. I pretty much fucked it up.”
“What was the scholarship for?”
“Wrestling.”
Oh, man. So many things clicked into place.
“All right. This shouldn’t be too bad,” he said and turned toward me with two plates piled high with food.
What he put down in front of me was such a surprise I could har
dly believe it. Bacon, yes. Some potatoes but eggs, too, fried and covered in salsa and avocado. There were tortillas on a separate plate.
“Wow!” I said. “This is beautiful.”
“Yeah?” He looked pleased as he sat down. “Beautiful might be a stretch. My mom used to make this for us on weekends. Hopefully it doesn’t suck.”
It totally didn’t suck. And for a few minutes we were quiet as we ate.
“So is wrestling how you got into the fighting? In the basement?”
He kept eating, not answering for so long and I realized, this was just how he was. He didn’t speak without thinking. He didn’t answer questions casually. I put down my fork, compelled to pay attention.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “I grew up around here. Wrestled in high school and when I came back from college, this old friend of my dad’s, Sal…he reached out. Offered me the opportunity.”
“Opportunity?” I sputtered and the second I did I knew it was a mistake.
He put down his fork. “I flunked out of college. Probably would have flunked out of high school if it wasn’t for my brother. All I ever wanted to do was wrestle. It was all I was good at. So when I moved back here I could fight for Sal, or I could roll in with some gang, or I could work at McDonald’s.”
I swallowed the egg that was a lump in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“No,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. I just…everyone thinks this thing I’m doing is a mistake. But it feels like the thing I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Fighting?”
He rubbed at his forehead with the back of his hand. “Yeah. Fighting.”
“You like it then?”
“I feel like my life makes sense when I’m fighting. Or training for a fight. Every other part of my life just feels like something I have to get through.”
“I understand that,” I said. “That’s how I feel about my work too. Like it’s the best part of me.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you…like, have a gym? Or something? A trainer? I mean, I don’t know anything about what’s happening in the basement but if I’ve learned anything from Rocky—”
Bad Neighbor Page 9