She blinked and stood up. “Right. I’ll go find you something to wear.”
She reemerged from her room a few minutes later carrying a pair of stretchy leggings and a black concert sweatshirt for her favorite death metal band. I looked down at the logo, which was a blend of Cthulhu and a zombie, and back up with a raised eyebrow, which only made Jane laugh.
“Hey, you like black, right?” she joked. “Give me a break, it’s laundry day.” She didn’t need to add that finding clothes from her closet that would fit me wasn’t exactly easy, given that she was roughly five inches taller than me and two sizes smaller around the waist.
I gave her a quick hug. “Thanks, Janey. It’s perfect.”
I slipped into the bathroom to change, brush my teeth, and tie my hair up before reemerging in the all-black ensemble, over which I pulled my knee-high, black rain boots that I kept in the coat closet by the door and my favorite gray knit hat. I didn’t feel like putting in contacts—I had a feeling within a few hours I’d likely be bawling my eyes out—so I shoved my glasses on before tugging on gloves, a scarf, and then buttoning my black trench coat over everything else.
“You look like a bad ass,” Jane said with a sad smile. “He’s going to freak when he wakes up, you know. You sure you can’t just stay and kick him out yourself? Don’t you even want to ask him what this is all about?”
I shook my head. My mind was made up. It didn’t really matter what he would say about the whole affair—this was way beyond the scope of what I could handle. Our age and income disparities? I was just coming around on that. His obvious abandonment and childhood insecurities? Perhaps. Even his divorce I probably could have managed eventually. But the Mafia on top of all of it. As much as I felt his presence pulling me back to the bedroom, I had to—had to—think with my head on this one.
“I’m going to go to New York for the rest of the weekend since Monday’s a holiday,” I said, adjusting the strap across my chest and brushing down my coat. “Just tell him I forgot about a project and I went to the library for the day. Tell him…tell him I’ll call him later. And that I love him.”
My voice cracked on the last word. It was the only thing I’d said that wasn’t a lie, and Jane knew it. She reached out and lightly squeezed my hand.
“Sure, Sky, whatever you say,” she said softly. “But if he throws a fit...”
“He won’t,” I replied, wishing I were as sure as I sounded. “I think he only does that around me. Will you let me know when he’s gone?”
Jane nodded. “No problem.”
I fought not to glance down the hallway as I opened the front door as quietly as I could.
“All right,” I said, suddenly lowering my voice to a whisper. “Later.”
“Be safe,” Jane said, and shut the door carefully behind me.
I stood for as long as it took to take five deep breaths, sucking in the air slowing and exhaling it just as slowly. It was physically painful to be standing here, doing what I was about to do. But there was no alternative. As I let out the last breath, I straightened up, turned down the long, deserted corridor, and used every ounce of willpower I had to walk away from the man I loved.
~
Three hours later, I was about halfway down to New York on the train, having opted for a more expensive mode of travel in the event he pulled another stunt and showed up waiting for me again in Chinatown. I was curled up in a seat by the window, watching the cloudy New England seashore pass me by as I enjoyed the relative solitude of the early Saturday express. My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out to find a text from Jane.
Jane: Finally woke up. Told him you were at the library without cell service but I don’t think he believed me.
I paused, my thumb lingering over the qwerty as I considered what he might have been thinking.
Me: Why not?
Jane’s response was almost instantaneous.
Jane: He saw the divorce papers scattered around. Pretty sure he thinks u were mad abt something.
I paused, unsure of what to write back. My phone buzzed again before I could reply.
Me: He’s not stupid.
It was too easy to imagine his face, coming out of the bedroom looking for me eagerly after what must have seemed like a night of hard won reconciliation, and finding nothing but my uncharacteristically sober roommate and the divorce agreement scattered around the coffee table. Of course he knew what had happened. Deep down, I knew he would—it’s why I had skipped town like a coward rather than face it. He would have seen everything on my glass face the minute he woke up.
I blinked away a tear as I thought about what we had shared in the shower, he begging for me to love him. And God, I did.
My phone vibrated in my hand with another text from Jane.
Jane: He’s standing outside the building. I think he’s waiting for u to come back. Do u want me to talk to him? He’s freezing down there. It’s actually hailing outside.
Waiting, always waiting. If I hadn’t known how much Brandon loved me, I would know it now—he was always so scared to miss me, that he would literally wait through a hailstorm in order to catch me at the right time. I closed my eyes and saw him at the Chinatown bus stop, outside the theater, striding into the club in New York, and leaning against my building only last night. His eyes were always slightly nervous, but eager all same. He really would never stop chasing me, like he said. Only this time, I wasn’t going to let myself be chased.
I tapped a quick message back to Jane:
Me: U can tell him I’m not coming back.
I pressed the off button on my phone to ward off the barrage of phone calls and texts that were sure to come and slid it into the bottom of my bag. Then I tucked my legs back under me and pressed my face up against the cold glass of the train window. I imagined Brandon’s face as Jane told him the truth of what had happened. And silently, I began to cry as I finally felt the pain of what I was giving up.
~
Chapter 41
The sound of my grandmother’s sharp, gravelly voice woke me from a night of thrashing around my bed, twisted up in dreams of mournful blue eyes and rainstorms. I exhaled a deep breath through the mass of tangled red hair that fluttered over my face. God, if I hadn’t known I was in Brooklyn before, few words out of Bubbe took me straight back to Flatbush. Maybe if I wished hard enough, she could take me back months, before this mess began.
“Bubbela! Get your tuchus down here for breakfast!”
I squinted my eyelids open into the stale light that peeked around the blinds of my small attic window. Maybe not.
“Go away, Bubbe!” I croaked at the door as I sat up. The mattress creaked loudly under me, as if it had had as hard a time with sleep as I had. I had a full day of studying ahead of me, considering I still had to catch up on the work I’d missed last week. With everything that had been going on in my personal life, my focus was starting to slip, something I just couldn’t afford so close to the end. I was going to require more sleep to keep the thoughts of Brandon Sterling at bay.
Unfortunately, the small light on my phone that signaled messages was right next to my face. I had managed, with helpful distractions in the forms of liquor, music, and my dad, to ignore all notifications after I’d finally turned the phone back on. Sometime late last night, I had fallen into the refuge of my mattress without a single, exhausted thought towards the insistent green light.
Now, however, was a different story. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I grabbed my phone and activated the screen, which revealed five new voicemails, twenty-eight new text messages, and a whopping forty-three missed calls. All were from a certain frantic CEO.
I deleted all of the voicemails, knowing that if I heard the sound of his deep voice, my resolve would melt faster than ice cream in August. I swiped over to the messages, which began innocently enough.
Brandon: Missed u when u left.
Then with more mischief:
Brandon: Was hoping to take u out for breakfast
. I’d just eat u.
When it was clear I wasn’t replying, they became more inquisitive and frustrated:
Brandon: When do u think u’ll be finished at the library?
Brandon: It would b nice if u could actually check ur messages.
After he had clearly been told that my trip to the library was a farce, they started to turn understandably confused and frantic.
Brandon: what did i do?
Brandon: im freaking out here. pls call asap.
Brandon: What the hell skylar? WHERE R U???
I scrolled down through the questions, the hurt, the obvious frustration, the confusion. Jane clearly hadn’t told him a thing about where I’d gone, but Brandon was too smart not to figure at least something out. It was clear from the messages that he’d deduced I was angry about something and determined to leave. Through various phases of anger, denial, and even begging, I scrolled to the last one, which seemed to stop my heart for a few moments.
Brandon: I meant it, red. Never.
He and I both know what he meant. He’d never stop chasing me. I’d done the right thing in deleting the voicemails—if I had to hear him say it aloud, I wouldn’t be able to ignore the part of me that didn’t want him to stop. No, this was for the best. If Brandon had come looking for me, he hadn’t thought to come to New York. Yet.
I deleted all of the messages, set the phone back on the nightstand, and pulled the covers over my aching head. I couldn’t open the lines for communication. Not until I was strong enough to say no to him no matter what.
“Skylar Ellen Crosby!”
I groaned again at the sound of clipped heels marching up the rickety wooden stairs to my room. The door burst open with a loud thwack against the wall. Before I knew it, the blankets were yanked off my head by pair of small, strong hands that belonged to an equally small, strong body.
“Hey!” I yelped, yanking the blanket back up to ward against the chill in the room, but sitting up all the same to face my grandmother. “I was sleeping!”
Bubbe reached up to pat her immaculately set gray bob, which was loaded with so much hairspray it hardly moved under her fingers. It was Sunday, which meant that she had her weekly mah-jongg game at the community center, but not until three. She was dressed in her favorite outfit, dark brown, poly-blend slacks and a matching sweater set, over which she had her familiar kitchen apron, which, if the pattern of orange and brown flowers was any indicator, was purchased around the same time my dad was born. I couldn’t help but smile a little at the sight of her. Bubbe wasn’t the most stylish lady on the block, but she was, as my Dad would say, definitely an old school dame. She also looked like a garden gnome.
“Skylar,” she said again, pointing a manicured finger at me. “First you come traipsing down to the club last night and drink too much whiskey with your father. That’s right, he told me. My Danny doesn’t keep anything from his ma, and you know that.”
I sighed, rubbing my temples. God, my dad was such a mama’s boy. After escaping my apartment yesterday morning, I had chosen to hole up at the NYU library rather than Brooklyn to be interrogated by Bubbe. I had begged another family emergency with my instructors and gotten a round of apologetic support from them.
Dad had given me the perfect outlet when I appeared at Nick’s without warning. He didn’t seem surprised to see me, just nodded silently when I took a seat at his small table near the band and raised his casted hand to Nick to get me a drink. He wouldn’t play for the foreseeable future, but he was as dedicated to his band as ever. We watched them play for several hours, two wounded Crosbys with our whiskey. The combination of liquor and jazz managed to keep my thoughts at bay; the sight of my dad cradling his maimed paw while he watched his best friends make music without him was enough to maintain my resolve about my decision.
I sat up regretfully and faced my grandmother, whose imperious brown gaze more than made up for her diminutive size.
“It’s eleven o’clock,” she said as she tapped on the face of her polished, gold-chain watch. “Your father’s been up since nine, and he was out just as late. Now, it’s time to get up and have breakfast like a civilized family before you go back to school. I don’t know what you’re doing here on a Monday, Skylar, but I know you need to get your keister back to Boston tonight.”
Bubbe cocked her head, waiting for my smart-ass response, but when our eyes met, the forceful expression slipped from her features. She immediately crossed the room and pulled me to her small body.
I didn’t cry—Crosby women rarely cried, and only when no one was there to see them. But I laid my head on her tiny shoulder and let her rock me like a child as I took comfort in her familiar scent of wool, flour, and Chanel No. 5.
“That rich goy who stayed at the Waldorf?” she asked, brushing my hair lightly down my back, occasionally picking out tangles from the bedraggled waves.
Wordlessly, I nodded against her shoulder. She patted my head once more and pushed me back upright so she could look me over properly. It didn’t matter that I was twenty-six; I would always be her little girl.
“Tell me everything,” she ordered, and folded her hands neatly in her lap while she waited for me to speak.
So I did. I started at the beginning, with the chance meeting in the middle of a snowstorm. I left out the steamy parts that no one in their right mind would tell their grandmother, but I knew that Bubbe was under no illusion regarding what I did with men. She made no bones about her desire to see me happily married, but generally maintained a somewhat humorous, don’t ask, don’t tell attitude regarding my premarital exploits.
As I recounted the story of the past few months, she listened with her characteristic poker face, her only emotional betrayed by an arched eyebrow when I recounted my rebuff of the trip to Paris, and low sigh as I filled her in on Brandon’s current predicament and what he had done for our family. When I told her about the name I had discovered in Brandon’s divorce documents—the name that had caused me to leave him sleeping in my room while I made out like a bandit—she straightened slightly, but remained silent as I finished my story. My hands clasped over my knees, I waited for her verdict.
“Well,” she said after an uncharacteristic moment of quiet contemplation. “That’s the quite the macher you found for yourself, isn’t he?”
It was unclear what exactly she meant. Macher was Yiddish word that roughly meant someone with a lot of ambition, but it could also be used as an insult, like “fat cat.” I sighed, my head bowed over the sheets tented across my knees as I readied myself for the inevitable onslaught against idiot goyim and why I should be dating a nice Jewish boy instead.
“A mess, but a mensch,” she murmured to herself. A man of worth, a man to be respected.
I looked up in surprise to find her staring at me, one eyebrow pointed expectantly. She reached a small hand out to tap me on the knee.
“So what are you doing here, Skylar?” she asked sharply. “Despite his troubles, you’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
I breathed out a long sigh between my pursed lips and dropped my head back to my knees.
“I can’t, Bubbe,” I muttered into the bedding.
“What? I can’t hear you when you’re talking into your knees, bubbela,” she snapped.
“I can’t!” I protested as I yanked my head back up and thrust my hands into my hair. “You heard the story, Bubbe. You want me with a man like that? A man who is already someone else’s husband, who’s in some kind of nasty business with a guy like Victor Messina?”
Irritably, I pushed the covers aside and stood up, stalking across my small bedroom to yank a pair of old jeans out of the beat-up dresser drawer. With a loud huff, I stuffed my legs into them, ignoring Bubbe’s obvious disapproval with the worn holes in the knees.
“I don’t know why you insist on walking around like such a schlumper, Skylar,” she remarked, crossing one leg delicately over the other. She sat at the edge of my bed as if it were her throne. “I know you have nice cl
othes—I’ve seen the pictures on the Facebook.”
I rolled my eyes, tugging on an equally raggedy sweatshirt—my favorite old gray and purple NYU hoodie I had bought on my first day on campus. “Can’t I be comfortable in my own home?” I muttered. Bubbe loved to argue, and I was used to being picked on. Sometimes I thought growing up with her predestined my career as a lawyer.
I finished buttoning up my jeans and turned around to find Bubbe standing up. She brushed the nonexistent wrinkles out of her slacks and then propped her hands on her hips as she looked me over with obvious irritation.
“Please don’t start, Bubbe,” I said, but she held up a finger again to stop me so she could say her peace.
“The saying goes, behind every strong man is a strong woman.” She paused meaningfully, tapping her fingernail thoughtfully on worn walnut trim of my nightstand. “It sounds to me like this Brandon is strong enough for my granddaughter, but he needs someone to be strong for him too.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but she shook her finger back at me again.
“Ah, ah, ah, no. Let me finish. You told me this story, and I hear about a man who needs his woman—that’s you, Skylar, not this Miranda woman who clearly never loved him. I also hear about a man who has been working to do his best by you and yours. He is protecting this family, and he wants to give you the world. Maybe this business with Victor Messina is a bad idea, or maybe there’s more to it than you think. If it’s bad, it seems to me he would need you to guide him away from it, not run away when he needs you too. And for what? Because you’re scared of his money? Because you’re scared of his love for you? Maybe, bubbela, it’s because you’re scared of yourself and how you really feel for him.”
She paused again, presumably to let me ruminate on her question for a few moments. I knew better than to argue back. I’d just get another finger-wagging. So I stood there, didn’t even dare to move. I watched the dust flecks scatter in the streams of light that landed on the worn wood floor; I listened to the sound of her fingernail tapping on the nightstand.
Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1) Page 45
