And suddenly words were coming out of my mouth and I wasn’t speaking them. Emma was. She said, “You weren’t acting, were you?”
What? WHAT?! What did I just say? Shit, shit, shit!
Ryan looked at me. My mouth was hanging open as I sat there in total disbelief at what I’d just said. He started to slow down and pull over to the side of the road and I knew, I knew, that the second the wheels brushed the curb, he’d kiss me.
He had to glance, just once, in the mirror, and that broke the spell. I felt my mouth twist into a grin. “I’m kidding!” I said, and laughed long and hard, throwing back my head. “Oh, man. Your face! I know you were acting, you idiot!”
I’m good at laughing. I can do it even when I’m in tears on the inside.
I watched him swallow. I watched the anger and pain play across his face and I’ve never felt like such a bitch. But out of the corner of my eye I could see the shotgun, and I remembered what would happen if Ryan discovered the real me. Better this than that. Better to hurt him a little now than to rip him apart later.
He nodded to himself, as if what I’d said made up his mind about something. And then he flipped a switch and the radio crackled into life. “Let’s see if we can find some action,” he said. The radio started blurting out staccato orders.
I nodded enthusiastically and smiled as if I was oblivious to what he was going through. But I could see it in the way he set his shoulders, in the tension in his face. He likes me. He likes me a lot. But it couldn’t be more than that...could it? Oh God, please don’t say he’s really fallen for me. Not Ryan. Please don’t say I’ve broken his heart.
But as I looked at him, I knew it was true. This guy—this good guy, who’d never done anything to hurt anyone, had bought the illusion I’d been selling. He’d swallowed Jasmine hook, line and sinker and he’d fallen for her...he’d fallen for a woman who didn’t exist. And now she—I—was callously pushing him away.
The radio said something that was completely indecipherable to me, but Ryan hit a button and snapped out a response. “That’s only a few streets away,” he told me, his voice tight. He hit the gas and the car surged forward.
“What is it?” The acceleration was pressing me back in my seat.
“Bag snatcher. Someone on foot patrol saw it happen. Got a description. We’ll see if we can pick him up.”
He’d got all that from the few seconds of garbled radio chatter? I stared at him and tried to figure out what was going on in his head. Was he just pretending to concentrate on the crime, and he was still thinking about what had just happened between us? Or had he really just snapped into cop mode, everything else forgotten in an instant?
We turned into another street, then another. Ryan slowed the car and we cruised almost silently beside the crowds of shoppers. Then: “There.” He pointed. “See him? Red hooded top, black jeans, paper bag from a store? He’s got the handbag inside it.”
I looked and spotted the guy. “How do you know it’s him? There must be hundreds of people in red tops.”
“Instinct.” He stopped the car right behind the man. “Also, we do this and see if he bolts.” And he blipped the siren, just a single strangled wail.
The man bolted. Ryan already had his door half open and was off after him, plunging into the crowd.
I sat there stunned for a few seconds. What the hell was I meant to do now? Run after him? Stay there? Was I meant to watch the car?
I jumped out and sprinted down the street, searching for them. Fortunately, Ryan’s size made him easy to spot and the path he carved through the crowd made it easy to follow.
Clarissa had been trying to convince me to come jogging with her. I suddenly regretted every time I’d given her a lame excuse. By the time I’d gone half a block my lungs were burning, but Ryan was still pounding along ahead of me. He could really move, despite his height and bulk, and I wondered if he’d played sports in high school. He’d nearly caught the thief, one hand extended to grab his shoulder, and it didn’t look as if he was even running flat out.
I pushed myself harder, panting, thanking God I’d at least worn sneakers and not heels. I saw Ryan bring the guy down, spinning him around and pinning him all in one move. When I got there, he was already slapping the cuffs on him and reading him his rights. He looked up at me as I staggered to a halt. “You okay?”
I bent over, my hands on my knees, heaving in air. I gave him a thumbs-up.
“Who’s she?” asked the thief. “Your girlfriend?”
Ryan ignored him and heaved him up to his feet, then pushed him along in front of us.
“Is it...always...like this?” I panted, falling in alongside him.
Ryan thought about it and then nodded. “Yeah. Quiet, and then crazy.”
I watched him all the way back to the car. Even now that he’d caught the guy, he was still checking the crowd and glancing at passing cars. Alert. On patrol. I realized I’d got it wrong, before, when I wondered if he’d really gone into “cop mode” or was just faking it. He was always in cop mode. He’d just been dialing it down when he was with me. I tried to imagine what that would be like: to always be on the job, in a way, even when you’re out in a bar with your friends, or out on a date.
Maybe it wasn’t so different to constantly playing a role.
Chapter 17
Ryan
“Watch your head,” I told the guy as I bundled him into the back seat. Then I got into the front beside Jasmine. “We’ll have to take him downtown to book him,” I told her, keeping my voice neutral. “That okay?”
“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Hey, I need to see that stuff too, right?”
I pulled out into traffic, trying to draw calm from the familiar: the feel of the wheel under my fingers, the chatter of the radio—half-heard, but always there in your consciousness. Civilians think it must get irritating, but it doesn’t. When the radio’s on, you’re connected. You’re a part of something, and someone always has your back.
I glanced across at her. God, she’d turned up in the sexiest outfit imaginable. A Fenbrook sweatshirt whose soft black fabric formed a ski slope over her perfect breasts and jeans that hugged every inch of her glorious curves.
So she thought I’d been acting in the screen test. And she’d been acting, too.
I cursed my own stupidity. Of course she’d just been acting. Of course she didn’t feel anything for me. Get real! Those few times I thought I’d glimpsed something must have been wishful thinking.
One thing didn’t make sense. If she’d thought all along that I was just acting, why had she run off to the corridor? Why had she been banging her head against the soda machine?
I reddened. Shit. Because thanks to me, she had to perform with an idiot. Maybe one she didn’t even like. And when she discovered that I couldn’t act, it would be even worse. She would have been starring with a professional, talented actor, even if he was a sleaze. I’d messed up everything for her!
“So,” said the bag snatcher. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“Shut up,” I said without turning around.
***
At the station, I left Jasmine sitting in a corner where she could watch the chaos without being completely consumed by it. The room was packed with uniforms: hauling perps around, filling out paperwork, tapping away at computers...she was probably in the safest room in the entire city, but she looked terrified. I figured it was being so close to actual, real-life criminals—with her privileged background, it was probably the first time she’d seen one up close.
I filled out the booking form for the bag snatcher. Charlie C came over to grab it off me so he could process the guy. “Please tell me,” he said, “that she’s in the TV show.”
I followed his gaze to Jasmine. Cops usually use surnames, but we have three Charlies in our precinct with surnames starting with A, B and C and, once people started using it, the names stuck. Charlie C’s the little one, scarcely taller than Jasmine herself.
“Yep,” I said.
“Oh, man. So you have to, like, teach her how to be a cop?”
“Yep.”
Charlie shook his head. “You lucky SOB. Does she take it off, in the show?”
I turned to him. “What?!”
He blinked and stepped back. “What? I was just askin’.” He looked at Jasmine again. “Man, she’s hot. Look at those—”
I slapped the booking form to his chest. “Done,” I told him, and stalked off, anger flaring inside me. What had I expected? I’d overheard plenty of conversations about hot actresses on TV. Hell, I’d probably contributed to a few of them. So why did it bother me so much with Jasmine?
You know why, said Hux.
But she wasn’t with me. Wasn’t ever going to be with me—she’d made that pretty clear. But that didn’t seem to matter—I still had this urge to protect her, to shield her from all the bad shit in the world. Every time I looked at her, I just wanted to scoop her up in my arms and carry her off somewhere where no one could ever talk about her that way. She deserved better than that. She was a goddamn princess.
Listen to yourself, said Hux.
He was right. She was a princess, and princesses don’t date cops. I wasn’t some white knight who could rescue her—if she even needed rescuing. I was the goddamn stable boy with a crush.
Chapter 18
Jasmine
The police station was the scariest place imaginable.
All around me, men and women in uniform hustled people just like me from the open air and freedom of the streets into interrogation rooms and holding cells. That shoplifter, cursing and demanding to see a lawyer? That could have been me, aged 15. That hooker, staggering across the floors in her heels? That could have been me just months ago, when I’d joined an escort agency to pay my rent. If my client had turned out to be a cop. If Karen hadn’t brought me to my senses.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I forced myself to relax and, after a while, I slowly began to see the cops as people. It was a little like...did you ever sneak into the teacher’s lounge at your school? Or maybe see one of your teachers at the mall or a restaurant? That sudden realization that they too had lives and partners and kids. That there was a person behind all the shouting and the red ink. It was a little like that.
Most of them, I saw, were with their partners. They never seemed to leave each other’s side for long, whether they were filling out paperwork or yelling at a suspect or bitching about the coffee. I wondered what that must be like, to be that close to someone day in, day out. Few people work that closely—in an office you’re surrounded by people, not isolated with just one of them. It must be almost like being in a relationship. That’s what Ryan had had with Hux. That’s what he’d lost.
I still got the impression there was something he wasn’t telling me. I’m pretty good at watching people and there was definitely something different about how the other cops reacted when they saw Ryan walking by. They were friendly, sure, but slightly on edge. Maybe they’d heard about the TV show and were jealous.
I tore my eyes away from him. If he looked around and saw me staring, I’d have some explaining to do. I was meant to be there to study cops, not him. I searched around for something else to focus on.
And stopped on the missing person’s board. A wall of faces, some young, and some old. Most of them likely sleeping rough.
My heart stopped. One of them was Nick.
I stumbled over there and studied the photo. After a few long minutes of second-guessing myself, I was certain: the guy had the same desperate eyes and similar threadbare clothes...but it wasn’t Nick.
I waited for the rush of relief but it never came. All I felt was sick, twisting fear. Suddenly, I was back on the subway platform two years before, glimpsing him across the tracks. He was out there somewhere, just like all the guys on the board. I knew it. Only he wasn’t a missing person because there was no one left to miss him.
You don’t know he’s on the streets, I thought. Maybe he’s doing just fine. But I didn’t believe it. He’d relied on my dad, back in Chicago, who’d alternated between slipping him money and beating him up. He’d treated Nick like a starving dog, doling out just enough food to keep him hungry, hitting him enough that he knew never to rebel. My brother had dealt for him, even going to jail for him. And by the time I’d left Chicago, he’d been using the heroin he was selling—another way for my dad to maintain control.
After two years of holding it back, the guilt finally broke free, like a dam bursting inside me.
He must have finally rebelled and fled Chicago a year or so after I had. My stomach lurched. What if he’d followed me? What if my leaving had given him the confidence to run as well, and he’d guessed or somehow found out that I’d picked New York as my new home? What if he’d come here hoping he could find me, hoping he’d find the one person who still loved him, and I’d turned my back on him?
Since I saw him, I’d spent every day trying to forget that sudden, heart-stopping glimpse. I’d thought at the time that I’d been protecting myself: that getting on the train was the only safe course of action. What if I’d been wrong? What if he really needed me? He’d been in New York for at least two years. I couldn’t imagine him holding down a job—not unless he’d gotten clean. So he must be either on the streets, or working some hustle to pay for his habit. Either way, he needed help.
But contacting him—if I could even find him—would bring it all back. Everything I’d run away from, everything I’d built walls in my mind to hold back...it would come spilling out, as soon as I saw him. Everything I’d achieved in New York would be put at risk. And what if I was wrong? What if he hadn’t fled from my dad? What if he was still close to him, and what if getting in contact with Nick helped my dad find me?
But even that wasn’t a reason to turn my back on my brother, and I hated myself for even thinking it.
“I’m a selfish bitch,” I said aloud.
“I hope not,” said Ryan. I’d been staring off into space, and he’d come to stand right next to me. “Don’t know if I want to be in love with you, if you’re a selfish bitch.”
I stared at him.
“In the show,” he told me. “You were talking about your character, right? Isabel?” But his eyes weren’t asking that at all. They were asking are you okay?
“Yeah,” I managed. “Isabel. Listen, sorry, but I have to run.”
“Classes?”
I shook my head. “No. Just something I have to do.”
***
Nat had told me that, after he saw her dance for the first time, Darrell tracked her down in the space of one night. One woman in a city of eight million.
Of course, Darrell had millions of dollars and enough computer knowledge to rewire the internet in his sleep. I had neither of those things. What I did have was determination. I had a lot to make up for.
I didn’t know how to hack Facebook or whatever the hell it was Darrell had done to find Nat, but I did have another sort of knowledge. I knew the hidden world that decent people don’t even know exists. The one where the currency is strictly cash and the main things for sale are drugs, sex, and favors. Of course, I’d left that world behind when I’d left Chicago, but the funny thing about crime is that it’s pretty much the same everywhere. It’s the same drugs being sold from a different street corner. It’s the same designer clothes being ripped off in a different sweatshop. It’s the same girls from the same backgrounds standing on different street corners. Once you have a feel for it, you can navigate that world in any city you want.
I got off the subway one stop before my normal stop and walked the rest of the way, tuning in to all the things I’d been shutting out for years. The guy in the alley whose eyes never stopped moving, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The streets, just a few turns from the respectable thoroughfares, where the blinds were permanently drawn or the windows boarded up. The bars that you didn’t see advertised on any flyers or mentioned on any websites.
At the su
bway station where I’d seen him, I took a deep breath...and started to search.
I spiraled slowly outward, taking my time. I stuck to the back streets and the alleyways, the places where rent was low and the doors were solid sheets of metal covered with graffiti. I was looking for a particular sort of bar: a bar with TVs showing football and basketball games. Places that would be sports bars, in a more upmarket neighborhood. We’d both hung around those places with our dad for years. They were where gamblers found bookies to take their ill-advised bets, and foolish gamblers were prime targets for my dad’s money lending. If felt like half my teenage years had been spent in those bars, avoiding the hands of men who wanted to cop a feel, collecting the greasy rolls of bills for my dad. I’d hated them, but my brother had developed a kind of grudging affection for them, over the years, spending hours watching sports of dirty TV screens while shooting the shit with the customers. He might still gravitate to them here.
And that meant I had to go back in and face the past.
I hauled open the door of the first bar. Heads turned—most likely, I was the first woman to enter in years. The smell of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer brought it all back.
I froze up and swayed a little. For a second, I wondered if I was going to faint. It wasn’t just the memories of the bars my dad had taken me to. He ran his own bar. A bar with a dirty, smoke-filled back room.
“You lost?” asked the owner.
I blinked in the darkness. They keep these places dark so they don’t have to clean the floor.
I could feel eyes crawling over my body, every man in the place trying to work out why I was there. There were limited reasons why a twenty-something woman would be in a place like that. I was glad that I’d worn my sweatshirt and jeans. If I was in my normal Jasmine get-up, I’d have been asked “How much?”
“Looking for someone,” I told him. And I showed him the only picture of Nick I had—three years out of date.
He hadn’t seen him. Or if he had, he wasn’t saying. I moved on.
Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) Page 11
