by Jane Lark
Jake was at the end of the block and about to turn, heading for home. I wished he’d wait. Our neighborhood was one of the worst in New York; kids ‘round here always claimed they didn’t have a choice about being in a gang. Gangs were what people did. But not me. I’d stayed in school, kept my head down, paid my way through College, working in a Mackie D’s, and now I was doing my best to keep my brothers out of all that shit.
My heart thumped steadily like it did every day when we walked back and Jake disappeared out of sight. Dillon kept talking, and I commented, laughed, and said all the things I was supposed to in reply, but my mind was on Jake. There were tons of drive-by shootings in our neighborhood. Stabbings. Fights. For no better reason than people just wanted to show they were frickin’ tough. That wasn’t tough, that was cowardice. Tough was fighting against a life, and a hood that tried to hold you back.
My Mom was tough. She’d escaped one of those guys. A guy who used to bring all sorts of crap back to our door, he’d beat her up, and he’d slept around. In a hood like this, she was bringing up four boys alone and working her ass off to do it. Dad had thought himself tough. He’d grown up in a gang. He’d ended up leading it. Mom was the tough one. Maybe sometimes it made her seem like she didn’t care but she cared her heart out about us. Dad had just beaten all the softness out of her. Our Mom cared with venom. She fought fiercely to do the best for us. Respect.
I loved my Mom.
We got as far as the street corner Jake had turned. When we turned it, there were a few kids in a car near him. My heart played an erratic base-beat against my ribs.
I settled a hand on Dillon’s shoulder, and drew him close against my hip as we walked on. He kept talking, oblivious to the tension which rattled about inside me. My eyes were on Jake. He kept moving, but the car slowed down near him. Shit. Come on… I was too far away to do anything. If the barrel of a gun appeared out the car window, Jake was a corpse, there was no way I could cover the two-hundred yards between us and do a single thing to stop him getting wiped out.
The car crawled along beside Jake, and a kid in the back seat wound down the window. I was walking faster without even thinking about it.
Dillon started half-running to keep up. “What is it?”, he said as he looked up at me, sensing my tension and realizing I hadn’t heard a word he’d said for five minutes.
I glanced down at him. “Nothing.” I kept my hand on his shoulder, so he couldn’t run off and get anywhere near the car.
Something was said to Jake, but as far as I could tell, he didn’t answer, just ignored them and kept walking. Good boy.
The car pulled away speeding up, and then the wheels screeched as the back window got wound up, and it accelerated away up the street.
This was our walk to and from school. It was like stepping through a field of landmines. We regularly past burned out cars. Some kids had crashed joy riding the night before, then torched. As well as kids standing on street corners with their hands inside their coat or their jeans, like they had a knife to flick at you any moment… They just wanted us to be scared. I wasn’t scared for me. I was beyond the reach of gangs. I had my education. I had my job. And I had a decent life.
It was my brother’s I worried over.
Jake hadn’t given off a single sign he was rattled by whoever had been in that car, but his movement was a little stiffer and his stride a little longer. It had rattled him. I’d tell Robin and get Robin to ask him what was said. If I asked Jake, he wouldn’t answer. But then if I told Robin, Jake would know the question had come from me anyway… Maybe I just had to leave it and trust him. He’d probably been just as scared as I was that the barrel of a gun was gonna come out of that rolled down window.
Chapter Three
When Justin walked into the office my gaze got stuck on him. I had been looking at the door waiting for him to walk through it. I smiled, my cheeks heating as he caught my gaze and smiled too.
When he smiled he was actually pretty good-looking. I liked his smile, and he had a relaxed way of moving. Justin was the antidote to me. He was soooo laid back he was horizontal, and he had New York swagger. Justin was the polar opposite of what my last boyfriend Daniel had been. Daniel had been rich, old family and up-himself.
I realized I hadn’t looked away. I’d been staring at Justin, watching him walk along the office, probably with a dumb besotted look on my face. The more I looked at him, the more I liked the look of him, and of course in my subconscious, memories of a certain New Year’s Eve night in a pool still hovered. My opinions about Justin were shifting at a rapid pace.
When he got nearer, I turned to look at my computer screen, which was still a spinning wheel, with a message saying ‘Welcome.’
His fingers touched my neck. They only skimmed over my skin, just a light slide of his fingertips along the inside of the collar of my blouse. I shivered, and the sensation ripped right through my middle to my belly, making me ache between the legs.
Heat burned my cheeks. I picked up my phone, feeling the need to say something to him. Anything…
‘Did you have a good night?’ I sent the text and heard his phone buzzing in his back pocket as he hung his coat.
He didn’t reply straight off, but he took his phone out just before he sat down, then smiled over at me, nodded a little and winked.
Shit. Even that stupid little gesture flipped my belly.
‘I did. Did you spot any more dumb dressed up dogs in the park? I fancy something to laugh at.’
‘:-) Sorry, no.’
‘:-) No matter then, but if you think of anything to make me laugh…’
‘I’ll text you :-)’
‘Yeah.’
Why did it feel so good talking to him? I had this warm sensation in my belly.
Probably because I was sad–in the pathetic sense of the word–and I was heading toward becoming one of those old women with a cluttered house and a hundred cats. I was friendless and lonely. Yeah, I had Becky and Crystal at work, but we didn’t get together much outside work. We were not BFFs, we were just girls who got on okay in the office. I didn’t even know if they really liked me…
Whatever, I’d been on my own for a year, I could cope with being on my own.
‘What are you thinking about?’
I looked up and saw Justin standing, diagonally to me, on the other side of our block of desks. He lifted his phone a little. Probably telling me to answer.
I smiled, then looked down to text.
‘My boring day in the office.’
‘:-) Cool as long as there is nothing wrong.’
‘There’s nothing wrong.’
The guy had a sweet streak. How come I had never seen that before? I’d watched him befriend the new starter, Jason, back in the summer, and while Becky, Crystal and I were on good terms, he and Jason had been really thick… Like always talking…
He went over to the kitchen, probably to get a coffee. I watched him again. I loved the way he walked. Was that a crazy thing? To like the way a guy walked…
Watching how he walked had the quivering feeling tickling in my belly too.
‘Do you want a coffee?’
He texted me. I couldn’t see him. He was in the kitchen.
‘Yeah, thank you.’
‘It’ll be with you in a moment. Ma’am.’
‘Fool.’
‘:-) Just thought it might make you laugh.’
My lips lifted in a closed lip smile and a chuckle of amusement tickled in my throat. I really liked him now. How come that had happened?
~
I set Portia’s coffee down on her desk. It was the fourth day I’d made her coffee. She looked up at me, giving me one of those tight-lipped smiles of hers that implied she still knew I was way beneath her on the social ladder but she was thinking about letting me climb up the rungs a little. I went back to the kitchen for Becky’s and Crystal’s coffee. Yeah, I had started making them all drinks, so it didn’t stand out that I made Portia one. They though
t it was my New Year’s resolution; to suck up and make them coffee. ‘Course they hadn’t actually picked up on the fact that I always gave Portia hers first. ‘Cause she was the hottest girl and the one I was chasing. Mildly. It was no big deal if our texting and coffee-making went nowhere at all–but equally, if it went somewhere… Well, I’d quite like to have another New Year’s Eve pool moment with her.
And she did keep texting me. Only about stupid stuff but she wasn’t cutting me.
“Hey, did you see this?” I caught sight of Becky dropping a magazine on Portia’s desk, folded back, to show Portia something on a particular page.
When I came back with Becky and Crystal’s coffees, all of them were clustered around Portia’s desk, jawing in catty voices about some celebrity gossip in the magazine, cutting some poor famous woman down to shreds for having put on a few pounds, laughing at the before and after picks.
I don’t know. I mean, I liked Portia, physically. She was seriously attractive. But her bit-of-a-British accent and her tipped-up-chin-and-nose, saying I’m-better-than-you-back-off, gave her a hard edge that was cutting. Maybe there was something there or maybe there wasn’t. She was brittle really. She had a personality that was like stone. Was she really interested in me? Would I be interested in that?
She glanced up before I could turn away and caught me staring at her. There was a really tiny twitch at the edge of her lips. Then she looked back down.
Shit, that little twitch in her lips made me feel a little twitch in my cock, running through my nerves. Lust gripped hard in my middle, as if a sudden punch winded me. Yeah. I could overlook her similarity to stone. Maybe it would be fun to go up against such a hard edge in a bed anyway.
I caught Justin’s eyes widening, and his lips tipped sideways just before he turned away. The smile that had involuntarily come at the side of my lips spread. There was something going on. I was sure he was making a play for me. Every day he made me coffee, but he made it for Becky and Crystal too. Yet he always brought my cup back first, put it down, and then went back for theirs. He was up to something. Becky said something and Crystal laughed. I laughed a little too, though I hadn’t heard what she’d said, my eyes and my attention were on Justin; watching him as he walked around to his desk.
I loved the way he moved. I mean, he had this relaxed way of walking but as he walked, you could see the strength of his character coming through. It was the way he carried himself. Justin was confident–comfortable in his own skin. He wasn’t afraid of being judged. He didn’t seem to care what anyone thought of him. If someone didn’t like him; I think he would just shrug it off. He wasn’t interested in impressing anyone. He was just who he was. No complications.
The main editor walked over to talk to him. It gave me more time to watch as he stayed standing.
While he talked with Keith, Justin’s hand came up and gripped the back of his neck. Something trembled low in my belly as I remembered those long fingers touching me.
I still liked the shape of his head, the curve of his jaw. I don’t know. Justin was just perfectly proportioned; it was like he’d been airbrushed in real life.
Keith said something and Justin nodded, his hand falling. Then Justin turned as Keith walked away. Justin’s gaze didn’t lift, he didn’t catch me watching. He was looking at his computer screen as he sat down, his lips parting to let out a short sigh as he sat.
That meant he was working on something complicated. I’d started really noticing the sound of his little sighs that drifted across the desk. It meant he was thinking, working something out in his head.
The thought of his broad lips parting, of how they’d just opened a little as he sat, had my blood heating, sensations teasing me between my legs. Had someone turned up the heater in the air-con?
“Hey. What do you think?” Becky hit my shoulder with the back of her hand.
I didn’t know what she was asking; I hadn’t been listening to them.
“Girls!”
Keith saved me anyway. He’d seen we were just talking. Becky and Crystal immediately turned away.
I sat back down; my mind spinning with unvoiced questions I wouldn’t admit to, my imagination fixating on Justin’s lips and his hands.
I don’t remember fixating on anything about Daniel, my ex. Daniel had always just been Daniel. We’d known each other for years before we got together. Our parents were friends. They’d pushed us together.
At the time, I thought I’d wanted that.
I looked up, but I couldn’t see Justin around my computer. The way he moved played through my head; his confidence, his simplicity. No secrets. No games. No disguises and false fronts.
God how refreshing was that.
Daniel had been too like my dad in personality. But then I hadn’t known what Dad was really like at the time I’d started with Daniel. I’d been blind still. Seriously, it was as if I had never opened my eyes until the night everything had gone wrong.
How had I not known Dad was cheating; and how had I not seen how self-centered and pathetic Daniel was. I wasn’t even sure he’d loved me at all. He’d loved himself, and he wanted to look good, and have the sort of influence my dad had. I was just part of that package. The girl who would look right on his arm. The girl whose inheritance would help fund the political career he was aiming for. The girl who knew how to act in that world… Except, I wasn’t going to play any part in it. I hadn’t even known everyone else was acting until my eyes had been ripped open.
I’d had to wake up and grow up quick.. I’d cut my ties with my parents’ wealth and their world and just walked away.
Dad hadn’t cut me off. My trust fund money was still sitting in an account. Untouched. It felt like blood money. I didn’t want it. I was making my own mark on the world. Doing what I wanted, not what they wanted. As far as I was concerned, I had no obligation to them. They’d lied to me, pretended they were something they were not. Just like Daniel.
There was another whisper of a sigh from the other side of the block of desks. I saw Justin’s arm lift and his palm settled on top of his head as he stared at the screen, clearly trying to work out in his head how he was going to do something.
Not like Justin.
Justin was different from any guy in my world back home. The world that now seemed like I’d dreamt it in a nightmare. Then I’d arrived in New York alone; determined to do stuff my own way. I’d armored myself with the sort of confidence Justin had naturally. It had not come naturally to me. But I think I’d managed to convince everyone that I could do this–that I could make it by myself. Yet beneath the person who tried to con everyone else into believing I was a thick-skinned, unknockable, independent girl without a care in the world, there was still that girl who had arrived in New York, alone and terrified of how she’d cope.
Justin was just Justin…
I was starting to really like him.
I looked down at my phone, my fingers itching.
I picked it up.
‘Stop sighing, you’re distracting me.’
I saw his hand fall from his head. Then there was a little amused grunt.
‘:-) I’m concentrating.’
‘Well concentrate quietly :-)’
‘Ha. Ha.’
I had on the sort of smiley face I’d texted as I looked back at my own screen, and tried to get my brain to focus on work again; not on the guy across our block of desks.
~
I sat on the bed looking at Justin’s number on my cell for about the twentieth time. I was so bored–and lonely. I was fed up of my own company Crystal and Becky weren’t free and… and it was my birthday. Mom and Dad hadn’t rung but then they were in Europe.
They were in Europe every winter, and always too busy to remember the day they’d had me. But why did I care?
Because a part of me was still the child they had rejected for half my life, and then scarred irreparably when I’d discovered why.
My thumb hovered over the call icon again. Should I call him?
What would I say if I did? I’d sent him a text first, after we’d swapped numbers, a picture of a stupid looking dressed up dog in the park that I’d seen as I walked home, just to break the ice. We’d sent a few texts since, all just conversational. It was a huge leap from that to calling and saying do you want to come over. But I needed some company.
I slid the call screen off my cell and selected messages, then typed: ‘I’m bored.’
I sat waiting for five minutes, gripping my cell in my palm, staring at the thing. It rang out the first couple of notes of One Republic’s, Counting Stars, as it vibrated.
‘Are you :-)’
Shit, what did I say? ‘I want someone to talk to, and no one’s free.’
‘Are you hoping I’ll be that person?’
I breathed out, not even realizing I’d been holding my breath. Anyone would do today. I just wanted some company. ‘Maybe? I want someone to come over.’
‘Portia. Are you asking me over or what?’
My stupid stomach did a somersault. Did I care that much if he came? No. It wasn’t him. I just needed someone to spend my birthday with. ‘If you want to come’… I didn’t finish the sentence, I just sent it.
The reply came back immediately. ‘If you’re asking me’…
I didn’t reply; my courage failed.
A moment later there was another text. ‘Are you? Or aren’t you?’
I took a breath. My fingers were actually shaking as I answered. ‘I am. Will you? I’m lonely.’
‘Ha. Ha. That, I don’t believe.’
My hand was still shaking and I didn’t know what to say. At work they all thought I was a stuck-up bitch. I knew I sounded like that. I could hear myself… But… they didn’t know me.
My thumb lifted and hovered over the letters. I wanted to type, please come. But that sounded too needy. Sad and needy was the bit of me I hid from people. ‘Are you coming over or not? I’m not asking again. Do you want to watch films here?’
‘I’ll come. Yes to films. I remember where you live. I’ll be there in about an hour :-)’
