4. Cali
CALI
I don't sleep much. Or at all, really.
For the most part, I just lie on top of the covers in my clothes, listening to the house make its little settling noises, jumping at each and every one like it's yet another masked murderer here to drag me into a fresh new nightmare on Elm Street.
Every time a pipe knocks or the fridge hums downstairs, I sit straight up and grab for the butcher's knife I've temporarily or maybe permanently relocated to my bedside table.
But nothing else happens. The night just goes by. Who knew boredom could be so terrifying?
At some point, I do drift off, because the next thing I know, there's morning light in the window and a small, warm, familiar weight squirming up onto the bed beside me with all the grace of a fish out of water.
"Mommy. Psst. Psst, Mommy. Mommy, are you awake?"
I open one eye. Isabella is kneeling on the mattress next to my pillow in her nightgown, holding Doctor Fuzz's shoebox against her chest. Her hair is a rat's nest that spits in the face of gravity and her face is creased all over from her pillowcase.
She is, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I want to grab her and hold her so tight she squeaks.
I don't. She'd want to know why, and I'm not so sure I'm ready to answer those hard questions just yet.
"Hey, bug," I say instead. "You're up early."
"Mommy." She leans in close, whispering, like she's about to tell me a secret. "Did I have a dream last night? A bad one?"
My whole body goes cold.
Here it is. The moment I've been dreading since I heard her little voice come through her bedroom door in the middle of the worst night of my life.
She heard something.
She saw something, maybe.
And now, she's asking me to tell her it wasn't real.
And I want to. Lying would be the easiest thing I've ever done. Yes, baby, it was just a dream. A big, silly dream. Go back to sleep.
Maybe I would've done it, if the past few weeks hadn't changed me so much. Preserving the status quo, just to duck the difficult parts of life? Uh, yes please. It's called "coping," and I'm better at it than everyone else alive, pretty much.
But I look at her little face and I decide, then and there, that if I'm sick of lies, my little girl is probably sick of them, too.
And even if she isn't, what kind of mother would I be if I just passed my trauma down to her?
It's not easy on a person, being told over and over again that the ground under their feet isn't where it is.
I won't do that to her. Not even to protect her.
Especially not to protect her.
"No, baby," I say as seriously and still comfortingly as I can. "It wasn't a dream. Mr. Ronan was here last night. There was a loud noise, and it scared you, and that was real. But you're safe. You were always safe. Mommy and Mr. Ronan made sure of it."
Isabella considers this with the extreme seriousness of a six-year-old. She nods slowly.
Then:
"Oh. Yeah. I know."
"You—" I blink. "You… you know?"
"I know Mr. Ronan was here." She says it like I'm a little slow. "He's here right now."
My stomach does a cartwheel. "What do you mean, he's here right now?"
"He's sitting on the front steps." She points toward the window with total confidence and nonchalance, as if this is an everyday occurrence and the only weird part is that I'm finding it weird.
I sit up so fast my head swims.
He wouldn't. He absolutely would not dare. I told him to get out of my house and he did, he walked right out my broken door, and I told him—
Well. I didn't quite tell him to leave the whole planet. He made that abundantly clear. I'll leave your house tonight and I won't come back inside without you asking me to.
But I didn't think that meant he'd plant himself on my stoop like a garden gnome!
"Stay here," I order Isabella. I swing my legs off the bed and go to the window.
I pull the shade back an inch.
Sure enough, there he is.
Ronan Akov, in the same slept-in shirt from last night, sitting on the top step of my stoop with his forearms on his knees, looking out at the empty street with his steely gaze sweeping back and forth, over and over, traversing every fire hydrant and shrub.
My busted front door is leaning against the railing beside him.
He looks like absolute hell—hair a mess, shadow on his jaw.
Even from up here, I can tell he hasn't closed his eyes once.
He stayed.
All night.
On my steps.
I feel a squiggle of emotion in my chest, and I ruthlessly order it to go back into the deep, dark hole in my heart from whence it came. Fuck compassion or feeling touched—I don't want that shit! I want to feel angry! Don't I have that right?
This man lied to me, stole my company, put a bloodstain on my stairs, and now, he's decided—decided! Again! Without asking me!—that he gets to sit outside my house standing guard whether I like it or not.
That's exactly the kind of thing I told him I was done with. Men deciding what I get to have.
I march downstairs, fully intending to open the door and read him the riot act. I get all the way to the front hall, past the empty rectangle where the door used to be, and I open my mouth.
And then I look at him.
He hears me coming and turns his head, and his face does this thing—this small, careful thing, like he's bracing to be yelled at and has already decided he deserves it. His eyes are red-rimmed. There's a spot of dried blood on his collar. I don't want to think about whose it is.
But that little speck of red is enough to make me close my mouth.
I stand there for a second. Then I turn around and go into the kitchen.
I don't know why I do it. I'll never be able to explain it, not to him, not to my mother, not to a courtroom or to St. Peter at the pearly gates. But I pull two mugs down from the cabinet, brew a pot of coffee, and pour some into both of them. Then I carry them back to the front hall.
I step over the threshold where the door isn't, into the cool morning air, and thrust one of the mugs down at him.
"It's coffee," I say when he eyes it skeptically. "And no, it's not poisoned. If I wanted you dead, I'd have let the last guy finish the job."
That startles a short, tired laugh out of him. He takes the mug. His fingers brush mine, though we both pretend not to notice.
"Thank you," he mumbles in a sticky voice.
I don't sit next to him. I sit on the step above, so I'm higher up, because I am nothing if not consistent about maintaining my newfound power positions. I wrap both hands around my own mug and blow on it.
For a while, neither of us says anything. A garbage truck rumbles by at the far corner. One of Ronan's men, standing near the intersection in a dark coat, watches it go and then goes back to watching everything else.
"You stayed all night," I say finally.
"I did."
"That's insane, you know."
"So I've been told." He takes a sip of the coffee and settles back against the bricks. "This is good coffee."
"I know. I only make it for people who deserve it."
He glances up at me. "Am I in that category?"
"No," I say. "But I couldn't very well drink mine in front of you without offering you some. My mother raised me right, even if the rest of my life is a smoking crater filled with shit."
He huffs another laugh into his cup.
I look at him sideways. His eyes are barely open.
There are actual bags under them, enough to make a normal man look a decade older.
But somehow, I don't mind the little preview of middle age on Ronan.
It looks good on him. Humanizing, in a way that softens me toward him.
I can picture gray in his hair and beard, a certain gravitas in his facial expressions.
I might have an older man kink I was not previously aware of.
Really shit timing to learn that about myself, all things considered. The last thing this situation needs is silver fox sexualization.
"You look terrible, by the way," I tell him, more to convince myself than to insult him.
"That matches how I feel then."
"Good. You deserve it."
Haughtily and bitchily, I sip my coffee.
The sun is coming up over the brownstones across the street, that pale early light that makes everything look fresh and new.
It's such a normal morning. Birds and garbage trucks and coffee.
You'd never know that, twelve hours ago a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-pound man died on my landing after I stabbed him in the side and then my ex-lover came soaring in like Batman to finish the job.
"You know what the wildest part of all this is?" I muse.
He laughs again. "I couldn't begin to guess. The list is endless."
"It's that this is my life now. It's a Tuesday morning, and my neighbors are all preparing to go to work, to care for their kids, to drag the garbage to the curb or whatever.
I bet most of them slept great last night.
But I didn't, because a man broke into my house to kidnap me, another man shot him on my stairs, and now, I'm sitting here drinking coffee about it.
Two murderers and a couple cups of joe. La-di-freaking-da.
" I shake my head. "Three months ago, my biggest problem was that I didn't think I'd hit my goal weight before Santorini. "
"To be fair, you did hit forty pounds under your goal weight. From three thousand miles away."
I nearly spit out my coffee. "Was that a joke?" I demand. "Did you just make a joke about the scale? The scale that started this entire disaster?"
"I've been sitting on your steps for six hours," he says. "I've had a lot of time to develop new material."
"That is not funny."
"It's at least a little funny."
"It is not even one percent funny.”
But I'm biting the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling, and he sees it, damn him, and the corner of his mouth ticks up, and for one second, it's like none of it ever happened.
Like maybe we really are just two people on a stoop with coffee, and the worst thing in the world is a joke that's a little tasteless, although definitely worthy of at least an audible snort through the nostrils.