by Callie Hart
“Oh. Glad to hear it.” I shake my head, regaining a little poise as I straighten my shirt. “Why are you lurking in the hallway back here? Are you waiting on someone?”
The guy, this James Dean-esque stranger whose dark eyes are glinting wickedly in my direction, makes a gun out of his fingers and fires it at me. He blows the imaginary smoke from the end of his index finger. “My grandfather. My mother said he needed to see me.” The guy watches my mouth as I fight back the urge to smirk. “What? Why’s that funny?”
I look him up and down. “Well. I think you probably went to a great deal of effort to look so…disheveled—”
“Disheveled?” He smiles a reckless smile. A dangerous, predatory smile. A smile that undoubtedly gets him into an awful lot of trouble.
“Yes.”
“Why? Because my jeans are ripped? Because my shirt’s faded?” he says in slow, measured words. Damn, his voice is so deep. I can hear the amusement in it, though he’s trying to hide it. He’s enjoying this far too much.
I stand my ground. “Yes. Because your jeans are ripped and your shirt is faded.”
“Fair enough. What of it?”
“You’re obviously trying to exude some kind of bad boy persona, dressing the way you do, and then you’re out hovering in the hallways of museums, doing as your mother tells you.”
He looks at me in a way that makes my insides twist. “Don’t all good sons do as their mothers tell them?”
A sharp twinge daggers me in the chest. I shouldn’t have brought up mothers and their sons. What was I thinking? I do my best to hide my discomfort by glancing down at the floor. “Not in my experience, no.”
“Then you’ve been spending time with some really shitty guys,” he informs me.
Oh, how little he knows. In the past five years, I haven’t been spending time with any guys at all. It’s not as though I’ve been avoiding contact with men. I’ve just been avoiding contact with everyone, period. That’s not something you tell a stranger, though. “I’m assuming Oscar’s your grandfather?” I ask, sidestepping his comment. Oscar is the only faculty member old enough to have a grandchild this old, despite that being not very old at all.
“Bravo, Sherlock.”
“Well, his office is three doors down. Right now you’re standing outside…” I peer over his shoulder. “You’re standing outside a disabled bathroom.”
“I’m fully aware,” James Dean tells me. “I’m preparing myself.”
“Preparing for what? Oscar’s the sweetest man alive.”
“Maybe to you. But to wayward grandsons who don’t visit very often and who cause…” he clears his throat, “trouble on a regular basis, he can be quite the opposite, I promise you.”
“Maybe you should cause less trouble.” I don’t know why I’m engaging with this kid like this. It’s none of my business how he behaves, or misbehaves for that matter. And it’s certainly not like me to blurt out obvious suggestions like the one I just gave him. The guy just smiles, though, apparently not noticing how strange or bossy I’m being.
“Where would the fun in that be?” he asks.
“Rooke?” A voice rings out down the hallway, echoing dimly. “Ahh, yes, Rooke, I thought I heard someone laughing like a madman out here. You’re an hour early.” Oscar shuffles down the hallway towards us. His pants are pulled up so high that his waistband must be chafing his nipples, and his hair is even poofier than before; it looks like a small cloud of cotton candy perched on top of his head. He catches sight of me and nods.
“I see now why you’ve been held up. I should have known you were behind this somehow.” He casts a scathing yet affectionate glare in his grandson’s direction.
“She tried to kill me, actually,” he says mildly. Rooke. His name is Rooke, and for some reason I find the name instantly fitting. A rook is a chess piece, but it’s also a kind of crow. Dark, mysterious, clever, wily and brazen. I can already attribute all of these traits to the tall man standing next to me and I only met him a second ago. “I thought I was going to have to defend myself. Now you’re here I’m sure I’m safe, though,” he says, biting back a smirk.
“Good lord, Sasha,” Oscar exclaims. “I thought you were a capable woman? What’s all this ‘trying to kill him’ business? If you need some help getting the job done, I’d be more than happy to assist.”
Rooke pretends to growl under his breath. “Traitor. You’re meant to be on my side.”
Oscar stops in front of us, puffing a little. He takes a pair of extraordinarily fragile looking wire-framed glasses from the breast pocket of his shirt and hooks the narrow arms over his ears. Squinting, he assesses his grandson, his mouth hanging open slightly as he takes stock of him. “You got taller,” he says.
“You got shorter,” Rooke retorts.
“Yes, well, I suppose gravity has been kind of getting me down of late.” Oscar slowly reaches out and places his hands on Rooke’s shoulders. He seems emotional all of a sudden; his voice is thick when he speaks. “I’m very glad to see you. And I’m very glad, despite my jape with Sasha here, that you weren’t callously and coldly murdered moments ago.”
I begin to feel as though I’m encroaching on a deeply personal family moment. “You know what? Rooke’s early and I’m late. I think maybe I ought to come back—”
Oscar shakes his head violently. “Nonsense. Our meeting won’t take long. Rooke, why don’t you wait upstairs for me in the gift shop? I should only be fifteen minutes or so. Sasha, come now. I appreciate you lending your expertise to me for a while.” He tucks his hand into the crook of my arm and leads me back toward his office. I can sense the guy behind me smiling. I can feel his amusement somehow, burning into my back, skating across my skin, making my ears burn, and for a very brief moment I’m spun around by it. Why should a kid at least ten years my junior make me feel so…odd?
“It was nice meeting you, Sasha,” he calls after me, that maddeningly deep voice booming down the corridor. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
I cast a hurried glance over my shoulder, considering what kind of response would be appropriate. For some unknown reason, it feels like I should tell him to go fuck himself. While the words that made up his farewell were civil enough, it felt like he was mocking me, and now I’m gripped by the need to tell him where the hell to go. Instead of heading up to the gift shop, Rooke leans heavily against the wall, tucking his hands into his pockets, smiling at me, and I feel the scowl etching itself into my features.
Oscar squeezes my arm. “Don’t worry. You don’t need to hurl such sharp daggers at him. The boy makes a habit of carting around enough rope to hang himself with and then some. He won’t be coming to the museum again. I’ll make sure of it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. He just caught me off guard. He has…quite the personality.”
Oscar chuckles. “Personality. Attitude. Call it what you will. I love the boy dearly, but he is his own worst enemy. I’m sure it’s his age. One day he’ll mature, I’m sure of it. Until then, I’m afraid the world is just going to have to tolerate the madness and machismo of Rooke Idlewild Blackheath as best it can.”
FOUR
DARK SHIT
ROOKE
He drew her closer, wrapping his arms around her. She felt insubstantial inside his embrace, like she might dematerialize at any moment, and that scared him. She’d been his for such a short time. Not months. Not weeks. He’d possessed her for a mere matter of days, and yet the prospect of continuing on with his life without her made a cold, dead weight grip at him from the inside. There was no life without Isobel. There was no rhyme or reason, no up and no down. He would do whatever he had to in order to make sure she was safe from the men who would hunt her down and cause her harm. More than that; he would do whatever he had to in order to make her his forever.
“What the fuck are you reading, bro?”
I nearly drop the book I’m holding, the sound of Jake’s amused voice sending a jolt through me. The f
ucker’s always sneaking up on me, always trying to make me jump. I hate it at the best of times, but now? Being caught with a romance novel in my hands? Yeah, that ain’t good. I consider launching the book at his head, but then I decide against that particular course of action. There’s a half naked dude on the cover of the book, for fuck’s sake. Why give Jacob even more ammunition to mock me? I bend the pages back, cracking the book’s spine so I can conceal the image of the dude with the ripped abs caressing the side of an anonymous woman’s face.
“None of your damned business.” I pick up a dirty sock from the floor (his) and toss that at him instead. He sidesteps the missile, laughing like a hyena.
“Forgive me,” he says. “I just didn’t know you could read.”
“I read. I read plenty.”
“Graphic novels do not count as reading, my friend.”
“Of course they do.”
Jacob shakes his head, collecting a shirt from the living room floor (also his) and sniffing at it dubiously. “My folks are coming by in a couple of days. How long do you think it’ll take to make the apartment fit for parental consumption?”
The house is normally immaculate. The only clutter in the living room right now is Jake’s, and I plan on burning whatever the fuck he doesn’t tidy up soon. “For anyone else’s parents, I’d say we were good. But for yours…I’m gonna say it’d take longer than either of us have left on this earth.”
“Gee. Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I do my best.”
Jacob shrugs his way out of the ball tee he’s wearing and slips on the black button-down shirt he just collected from the floor. As he does up the buttons, he squints at me like he’s trying to read my mind. “What’s wrong with your face?” he asks.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about that weird, guilty twitch you’ve got going on.”
“I don’t have a weird, guilty twitch.”
“Oh, but you do. Give me the book.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
He holds out his hand. “Don’t make me fight you for it.”
I let out a bark of laughter. “You think you can take it from me, come on over here and try.” No way he’ll be able to. All through high school Jake tried working out, dietary supplements, protein powders, basically anything he could get his hands on that might help him bulk out a little. Suffice it to say, nothing worked. He’s still as rail-thin as he’s always been. He was adamant he would weigh a hundred and ninety pounds by the time he was twenty-one, and yet here we are, both of us creeping up on our twenty-fourth birthdays, and he can’t weigh more than a buck forty soaking wet.
Jake rolls his eyes. “Fine. If you wanna be all secretive and weird, then so be it. But know this. If that piece of literature in your hands has anything to do with those psychos in waiters’ outfits handing out free personality tests in the city, then you and I are no longer friends.”
“I’m not joining a cult, dude. It’s just some book this woman dropped. It’s nothing.”
“Some woman? What woman?” He narrows his eyes again.
“I don’t know. Some chick that works at the museum. She was kinda hot.”
“Oooh. Librarian type. I like it. Is she interning or something?”
Jake seems to have entirely skipped over the part where I called Sasha a woman and not a girl. I choose not to bring it up again, though. “I don’t know. Maybe. We only spoke for a few seconds.”
“And you stole her book?”
“Like I said. She dropped it.”
He waggles his eyebrows in a comical way. His face is made of elastic. Has to be, the way he can contort and manipulate the way he does. If he wanted to, he could easily be the next Jim Carrey. Jake’s more interested in becoming the next Damien Rice, though. “I get it. You’re reading the thing from cover to cover so you can take it back to her and impress her with your knowledge of its contents, right?” he says.
“No. I’m not going to see her again. My grandfather doesn’t want me back there any time soon. And besides…she’s not exactly…suitable.”
Gathering his bar blade and apron from the dining table, Jacob makes a derisive sound. “What the fuck does suitable have to do with anything, man? She’s a chick, right? You think she’s hot. Do what comes naturally. Take her out for some drinks. Charm her with that ridiculous fucking face of yours. Bring her home and fuck her. The end.”
I could take the time to explain that Sasha’s not the bring-her-home-and-fuck-her type, but Jake wouldn’t understand. Not until I also explained that she must be in her early to mid-thirties, that she looks like she has her shit together, and that screwing around with a guy like me is undoubtedly very low on her list of things to do. Instead I give my friend the dirty, rakish grin he’s expecting from me and I shrug my shoulders. “Yeah, you’re right,” I tell him. “I do have a ridiculous fucking face, don’t I?”
“I’m gonna be late for work. I have a crazy early shift. If you wanna bring this mystery hottie by the hotel later, I’m sure I can slide you guys a couple of free martinis.”
Jake works at The Beekman in Lower Manhattan; it’s classy and stylish—the kind of place I probably would take a woman like Sasha, if I was planning on taking her on a date. Since Jake is there every night, making an obscene amount in tips and flirting outrageously with anyone who sits at the bar irrespective of their gender or sexual orientation, I won’t be doing that any time soon, though.
“Yeah, dude,” I tell him, lying through my teeth. “Maybe.”
Jake leaves. I return to the book in my hand, smoothing back the pages, flexing the spine, trying not to laugh at the blatantly sexual cover before me.
“Don’t you dare hurt me,” Isobel snapped fiercely. She had every right to warn me from bruising her heart. I’d hardly shown myself to be anything close to reliable since we’d met, and yet her words still stung a little. How could she not see what she meant to me? How could she not know that I would crawl over broken glass for her? Defend her always. Even die for her if I had to?
The crush of her breasts against my chest was enough to drive me mad with desire. My erection was rock solid and painful. I was in severe need of release, but my physical desires were nothing compared to the painful need I felt deep in my chest. Was this what it felt like to love someone? In all my years, I’d never experienced a sensation like it before. Warm, enveloping and comforting, yet terrifying at the same time. The feeling was a drug, an addiction, a craving that only seemed to intensify every time I drew breath around her.
This woman had the power to own me. She had the power to destroy me if she wanted to. Fighting it seemed futile.
******
My parents bought the two-bed walk-up in Brooklyn Heights where I live back in the mid-nineties, back when the 11201 zip code wasn’t quite so coveted. In fact, back then, the area was rough and more than a little run-down, and it wasn’t smart to walk the streets alone after dark. For years they rented it out to tenants until I turned twenty-one and “came into my inheritance” as they put it. I frequently get the impression that giving me real estate in what they considered a rough, violent area was a passive aggressive way of telling me what they thought of me: that I wasn’t worth much to them; that they thought I was cut from a certain type of cloth; that I wasn’t going to amount to anything.
It’s ironic that Brooklyn Heights is now fast becoming one of the most sought after areas to live in New York. Where dilapidated seven elevens with grated windows caked in dirt used to stand, now Kombucha shops staffed by pretty little hipster girls with thick-rimmed black-framed glasses are doing a booming trade. Where once stood empty thrift stores and soup kitchens, fixed gear bicycles are now sold, along with beard maintenance kits and quirky unisex clothing lines that look like they’re made for androgynous space aliens.
As I make my own way to work, heading north into Williamsburg, I think about the shitty fucking email I received from my mother this morning:
<
br /> Rooke,
Dad says you came by like you said you would. Thank you. It’s about time you went out of your way to see more of your family. When you come by at Christmas, I’ll write you a check for your efforts. In the meantime, don’t steal anything if you go over to his place.
Mom.
Don’t steal anything? Don’t fucking steal anything? From my own grandfather? And she’s planning on cutting me a check? Bitch can shove her Bank of America special where the sun don’t shine. When I read the brief message this morning, I nearly smashed my fucking hand through the screen of my laptop. The only thing that stopped me was the knowledge that laptops are not cheap and certainly don’t just unexpectedly fall from the fucking sky, so I bit the inside of my cheek instead, snarling at the stark black and white of the words in front of me.
In fairness, I suppose some people could say she’s well within her rights to give a warning like that. I have been known to steal things in the past. Cars, mostly. I spent two years in juvi for borrowing a vehicle that didn’t belong to me and ever since then I’ve been Rooke the thief. Rooke the bad influence. Rooke the black sheep. My father won’t even look me in the eye. Five years, and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be properly addressed by the man. Not that that’s any great shame. He’s always been an asshole. Being ignored by him is a blessing as far as I’m concerned.
I roll up to the shop at eight thirty with a piping hot coffee in my hand. I’m half an hour early, but I like opening and setting myself up for the day before anyone else arrives. I like the quiet. I like sitting in the back and arranging the tools I’ll need for the day, making sure I have everything I require. If there’s a particularly difficult mechanism I need to repair, I might get a head start on that and see if I can’t have the watch ticking by the time Duke, the shop’s owner, arrives, whistling loudly while complaining halfheartedly about the temperature in between refrains.