by Pamela Clare
I pointed at the intruder. “The cat. It’s yours?”
Colin didn’t even look up before he murmured into the side of my neck. “Figured it was yours.”
“So, wait. Did you let it in?”
He nodded.
I pulled away from Colin, and he groaned in protest. “Sorry,” I said. “But this cat is leaving.”
I wrapped the sheet around me and picked up the cat, who’d now gone deadweight. His heft proclaimed that this was no starving kitty. “Absolutely, positively no cats allowed,” I said as I carried him down the stairs. Then I set him down outside the door and shut it with a satisfying click.
My confessions weighed on me, but the important thing was that Colin was still here. He still wanted me, and that was enough. I’d make it enough. I’d make us a family if it fucking killed me.
Chapter Nine
I peeked under the blanket draped over the stroller. A cherub with chubby cheeks and tawny curls slept peacefully, in direct contrast to the little devil who’d shattered my eardrums in the house earlier. Bailey had begun insisting, quite loudly, that she was finished with naps. Droopy eyelids at the dinner table and cranky bath times proved otherwise, though. The battles were epic until I found a secret weapon: the cracked, slanted sidewalks of Colin’s neighborhood. A few minutes in her stroller, and Bailey was out like…well, like a baby.
I didn’t mind the walks. I enjoyed them. Would have done them before, had I not been likely to pass a streetwalker and two drug dealers on a trip around the block. It was like a bad “three guys walked into a bar” joke, but with needles.
Here, there were houses instead of boarded-up storefronts and trees instead of broken streetlamps. I even passed the occasional jogger, a pastime that I’d never understand, or another mom pushing her kid. They’d wave, and I’d wave back. So neighborly.
But I missed my neighbor of almost two years. Shelly hadn’t come around since the revelation about Philip, when she’d said his last name unbidden, and I feared I knew exactly what that meant. Her client, the rich one, the one who liked to hurt her, the one she lived with, was Philip. I already disliked Philip for how he treated Colin—shitty—and how he treated me—like I was invisible. But if I were right, I’d despise him for what he did to Shelly.
I didn’t really understand it. She was beautiful, and she’d had long-term clients. With me and Bailey out of the woods financially, at least for now, she didn’t need a whole lot of money. So why would she live with him? Did he have something on her? Because he sure as hell held something over me. Oh, just my entire future. All because Colin trusted him, and so I had to by default. No biggie.
A cool breeze whistled through the trees. I leaned over to make sure the blanket was still in place, tenting Bailey in her own warmth. The blanket was fine, but from this angle, reflected sunlight glinted at me from the street. I glanced over.
A parked car, black, vaguely familiar. Was it possible that was the same car Shelly and I had watched from her apartment windows, watching us back?
It had to be a coincidence. I hadn’t been close enough to that car, or even this one, to get the exact model. The shape looked similar, but it was common. And so was the color and dark, tinted windows.
What were the odds?
I walked faster than before.
It was silly, I knew, but my heart raced. My body was always betraying me.
Could it be Jacob? He shouldn’t even know where we were. And if he did, would he really watch instead of just approaching us? Then again, it hadn’t worked so well for him before. Maybe he was waiting for something. Or gathering evidence to use against me.
I sped up.
As I reached Colin’s street, I heard the low rumble of an engine. I glanced back as I rounded the corner and saw the car moving away. Good.
I wished I could laugh it off, but my breath was still coming too fast. I paused only at the bigger bumps, not wanting to jar Bailey out of sleep but still needing to get home now. Home, yes. I’d be safe there.
Turning the stroller onto Colin’s driveway, I saw the same black sedan pull onto the street from the other side. It had circled the block in the opposite direction I’d gone. And arrived here. A handful of houses down from Colin’s house. Within viewing distance. Fuck.
No longer concerned for Bailey’s nap, I raced the stroller inside through the back door and slammed it shut. And locked it.
A quick glance; Bailey was still asleep. Normally I would push her into the dining room so she could finish her nap while I got dinner started, but the bay windows in the dining room didn’t have curtains. Neither did the cupboard window in the kitchen. None of the windows in this house did—goddamn bachelor pad—making me feel like a bug in a jar.
Who could they be?
Then I realized—cops.
Fucking cops. Of course. They knew about me and Bailey. They knew about Colin and Philip. And they wanted to know more. Stakeout seemed too strong a word, when the most dramatic thing that might happen on our walk was a poopy in Bailey’s diaper. Surveillance, though. That made sense. Learning our routines. Trying to get something on us. On Colin.
Protectiveness was a welcome feeling, anger even more so, but it didn’t distract from my discomfiture in this house. An hour ago it had been home. Now it was a goddamn evidence storage facility. What secrets did he hide here? Besides me and Bailey, that was.
I had to get out of here. I packed a still-sleeping Bailey into her car seat and drove to the grocery store. I’d put this trip off for a couple of days now, making meals that taxed my creativity with whatever I’d found in the pantry because I had eighteen dollars in my bank account. The credit card Colin had given me only two days after I moved in, all officially printed with my name, had rested unused in my purse. This day had loomed, of course, ever since I’d traded in my apartment and my job for this security. The day when I’d surrendered Bailey and myself completely to Colin’s care. Now it was here, when that very security was suspect.
Bailey woke up on the way and fussed. I sang to her from the limited selection of nursery rhymes I knew. She, thank goodness, turned a deaf ear to the tinny waver of my voice today and settled down.
At the store I distracted myself with price comparisons and Bailey with produce. Bell peppers in particular made excellent toy doubles with their stoplight colors, hardy shape, and ability to go into a stir-fry at the end.
We’d made it through the pantry aisles and were just approaching the dairy section when I heard my name in a hiss. Startled, I glanced behind a display of chocolate syrup to see Rick.
Christ, he’d scared me, huddled behind there like some sort of mugger of perishables. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
He glanced behind him, toward the meat counter, and then back at me. “Come here.”
“What? Why?”
“Just…come back here. I need to talk to you.” Then he turned and went down a fluorescent-lighted hallway.
Goddammit. Rick always brought the weird. But he was my friend, of a sort, and I couldn’t just continue shopping as if I hadn’t heard him. I backed up my cart and then pushed it after him. I caught sight of his boot just as some maroon loading doors swung shut. We shouldn’t be back here. And I had Bailey with me. I paused.
Rick poked his head out. “Come on.”
“All right, all right,” I grumbled. This had better be good.
I pushed the cart through the doors into a large, shadowed room. Stacks of crates sprouted haphazardly from the cold, concrete floor.
The atmosphere of the room demanded I whisper. “What is it?”
“She’s so big,” Rick said, looking at Bailey.
Well, yeah. It’d been about a year since he’d last seen her, and then only for a brief hello one time when Shelly’d gotten an “emergency” call from a client and had dropped Bailey off at the bakery on her way. Which served to point out that the word “friends” was a bit of an exaggeration for the boss-employee relationship we’d had.
&n
bsp; I cleared my throat and spoke normally. “We needed privacy for that?”
“Ah, no. It’s about your new guy.”
“Colin?” Damn. I had to stop volunteering information, especially with the cops nosing around.
“Yeah, Colin Murphy.”
I narrowed my eyes. I wasn’t even sure I’d said Colin’s first name when I told Rick about him, but I definitely wouldn’t have said his last. It hadn’t been a secret at the time, but it wasn’t Rick’s business.
“What about him?” I asked.
“I don’t know how much you know about him, but he runs some dirty shit. Anyway, he…” Rick trailed off.
“Spit it out,” I said.
“Well, I had some debts. You know, gambling, shit like that. Just around town, but he bought them up. Then he said I had to pay up.”
I glanced at Bailey, who’d managed to pull the stem off a red pepper, the use of swear words around her registering distantly in my mind. “Okay…did you want me to talk to him about it? Because I don’t really know if—”
“No, not like that,” he said. “He didn’t want the money.”
He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t get it. “But you just said…”
“He wanted the bakery shut down,” Rick said. “He wanted you out of a job.”
More crazy. Shouldn’t be surprised. “Why would Colin want me to be out of a job?”
He shook his head. “I’m not explaining this well. He wanted you out of a job so that you’d be dependent on him. For money. And since I was in a shitty situation, he could just make it go away. He knew I couldn’t pay up, but he didn’t care.”
“Wait. Colin came and said all this to you.”
“No, no. It was just one of their players. One of his brother’s guys.”
Yeah, Philip. It seemed as if everything circled back to him, and not in a good way. “But if it wasn’t Colin, then it could have just been…”
“He said I had to leave town,” Rick said. “And I wasn’t allowed to tell you why or give you anything or talk to you after that.”
I raised my eyebrows. Of course the thing I’d latched on to would be the useless piece of information, that he wasn’t exactly following the rules if he was talking to me now, was he?
Rick flushed. “I left, but I couldn’t stay away without you knowing what you’re getting yourself into with him.”
“Well, it’s a little late for warnings now. Jesus, Rick.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and I was gratified that at least he did look sorry.
But fuck, I was still annoyed at him. To tell me this at all. To tell me this now, when it was clearly too late for caution. I was entirely moved in and financially dependent on Colin, I was a known associate of his and Philip’s according to the cops, and Philip and Colin were now, independent of me, it seemed, handling my situation with Jacob. The cart of groceries that Bailey sat in, the groceries I couldn’t pay for without Colin’s money, underlined the entirety of my dependence.
Bailey picked that moment to throw the stemless pepper at Rick. I wanted to do that too. He caught it and tossed it back, where it hit her in the chest with a soft thud and fell to her lap.
Her eyes widened, and her lips quivered.
Rick gave me a panicked look.
I stared back at him stonily.
“I’m so sorry,” he said with his hands up. “I thought she could catch.”
All I could think was that men really sucked. Bailey wailed her agreement.
*
I slammed a jar of tomato sauce down, then rethought the object of my aggression when the shelf rattled ominously. From the living room Bailey banged her block down on the floor in solidarity.
The snick of the back door let me know Shelly had responded to my summons. I’d left a brief voice mail for her on the drive back from the grocery store. “We need to talk,” was all I’d said.
She paused to kiss Bailey on the forehead and then entered the kitchen with a rush of crisp winter air.
I pounced on her. “Who’s the guy, Shelly?”
“Okay.” She didn’t play dumb. “It’s Philip. Don’t be angry.”
“Don’t be angry? This guy is like…I don’t know! Something bad.”
“He’s not so bad.”
How dare she side with him? “I saw what he did to you.”
“He didn’t do anything I didn’t agree to,” she countered.
Damn. A low blow.
“I’m sorry.” She stepped toward me. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“No, you’re right,” I managed to get out.
“No, I wasn’t.” She reached out her hands for mine. “I’m really sorry. At first I didn’t know, and then by the time you told me, there was the thing with the cops, and I knew you’d be upset about it, so…”
I sighed. “Avoidance.”
“Learned from the best,” she said with a small smile.
That pulled a smile from me. I kept my voice down. “Bitch.”
“You love me anyway.”
My eyes prickled. “Is this the part where we hug?”
“Let’s not,” she said.
And I was fine again. I picked up a can of soup from the bag. “I can’t believe you’re seeing that asshole.”
She just gave me a wry look—I see who pays me—and crossed to the coffee machine.
Fair enough, but there were limits. Or there should be. “Have you seen his study?”
She started the brew, then turned around and leaned against the counter. “The bullfighter,” she said. We both laughed.
But maybe it didn’t have to be like this. I wasn’t sure how much, but Colin had money. And I knew Shelly had some saved. “Maybe Colin could…”
“No,” she said. “You know how I feel about it.” I did. Honest pay for honest work. Besides, I wasn’t totally sure Colin would be okay with stealing away Philip’s live-in prostitute.
“So if you live with him, is he like your sugar daddy?”
She crunched up her nose. “I hate that term.”
“This from the girl who prefers the word ‘whore’ to ‘escort.’”
She laughed. “It’s for the same reason. Girls want to act all uppity, but it’s all the same.”
“Colin is like my sugar daddy, you think?”
She shook her head at me—not “no,” but more like it didn’t matter. “You did the right thing. We all make deals to get what we need. Everyone has a price.”
Colin had once said the same thing to me. Everyone did, and I suppose it was a small comfort that mine was high. Oh, not as high as Shelly’s, especially not in terms of hard cash, but choosing me with all my issues, taking in a little girl, spending time with us, that all counted for a lot.
And even when I tried to box it into a neat little agreement, it didn’t fit. He could get straight sex from Shelly or someone like her, or just one of those other girls at the club. No, somehow he actually liked me. And I liked him right back, despite his gender. Fucking complications, feelings.
Shelly handed me one of the mugs she’d been preparing.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Anything,” she said.
“They’ve been in contact with Jacob. I need you to find out where he is.”
*
An hour. That’s how long I’d been in bed staring at the ceiling while Colin was downstairs, “finishing up a few things.”
My thoughts were not friendly company tonight.
Rick’s accusations stung. More information than I’d wanted, and yet less than I really needed to act on. I wasn’t in a position to have any leverage with Colin.
And while I was glad that I’d cleared the air with Shelly, our conversation had dredged up more memories. What I’d told Colin was true; I’d sat there, almost comatose, when Jacob had driven me home.
The weight of what had happened, of what Jacob had done, had sat between us like another passenger in the car. I hadn’t dared look at him, afraid I’d see the face o
f my friend masking a violent stranger. Or maybe I was more afraid that Jacob—sane, safe Jacob—had returned and I’d have to deal with his horror at his own actions.
Before we had even slowed to a stop, I bolted out of the car and ran into my house. I wasn’t sure how long I lay there on my bed. Movies showed rape victims rushing to take a shower, to wash it all away, but I just lay there. As if the water would make it real. Or maybe if I scrubbed hard enough, there’d be nothing left. I already knew the important things could never be rinsed off. The shame, the fear. The pain. So it was better not to feel.
I might have stayed there forever, slowly withering away, only found two weeks later when my dad returned from his route. But Shelly had come.
She’d taken one look at my torn clothes and discolored wrists, and she’d known. God, the horror of that, of someone else knowing about that dark moment, was like another thrust of the rape.
“Who did this?” she’d asked.
I couldn’t tell her. I’d seen the way she looked at Jacob when she thought I wasn’t looking. The way she invited him to everything, the way she asked after him if I’d seen him without her. I hadn’t even been able to tell her that he liked me, that he had asked me out, again and again. How could I tell her this?
As it turned out, I didn’t have to.
My silence gave it away. “No,” she’d gasped.
But she’d brought something new to the table: anger.
Anger was good. I felt it burble in me now, hot springs of wrath. Manipulative. Controlling. Asshole. This had started about Jacob, but now it was about Colin.
Why did Colin have to force things? Well, I answered my own question there. Because I’d told him no, repeatedly. To men, no just meant make me.
I had wanted Colin, but by taking away my choice, he’d degraded me as much as Jacob had. Colin hadn’t even had to do it, because I’d needed more money than I could make at the bakery. Because of Jacob. Jacob, who pushed me for custody and then disappeared. Jacob, who Colin had spoken with, but not me.
Was it possible Colin had used Jacob the same way he’d used Rick—to try and force my hand into coming to him? No, that seemed beyond even him. Still, though, the lines had utterly blurred. We’d moved from shades of gray into hot mess.