Chapter 5
Chase: Call me.
Pepper: I can’t call right now because I lost all my fingers to frostbite last winter and I was born with inverted thumbs. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Chase: You think this is a joke?
Pepper: Note to self: obnoxious nepo babies do not recognize good humor. Inverted thumbs? Hilarious and also not a thing. Deserves more laughter.
Chase: Ha ha. Now, will you call me?
Pepper: No.
CHASE
The automated voicemail plays again in my ear and I grit my teeth. It’s been two days since Pepper Quinn stormed into my life and demanded I bend to her terms, and I haven’t been able to get a hold of her since.
More than anything, I feel like a fool. She all but clicked her fingers and I went running.
She talked me into getting her out of a bind and then she has the gall to ghost me.
It’s infuriating and reminiscent of the months on end that we spent playing cat and mouse before I knew who she was.
And now that I do know, I’m utterly perplexed by her.
The little information my private investigator has been able to unearth is the polar opposite to the image I manufactured in my head.
From all outward appearances, she’s a respectable, law-abiding citizen working a digital marketing job for a non-profit charity which aids vulnerable women and children.
No previous arrests and a spotless credit report—not even a parking fine.
I call again and sigh, tapping a finger on the arm of my leather ergonomic chair. I’m beginning to suspect that I made a mistake in taking her deal. Giving up when the voicemail kicks in, I hang up and fling my phone onto my shiny walnut desktop.
A soft rap draws my attention to the open office door, laptop screensaver on and responsibilities for the afternoon wholly forgotten. The face I see there stuns me. Long raven hair, icy blue eyes that are the spitting image of our mother’s, and a wry grin that accompanied many a childhood mischief.
“What the hell?” I’m up and around the desk in a heartbeat, my face splitting almost painfully from a grin.
“Surprise!” My sister twirls, hair fanning out and a hand poised elegantly in the air. I scoop her up, lifting her into a bear hug that pulls her small stature off the floor. “Eugh, gerrof me you weirdo.”
“You’re back.” I laugh, dropping her down and stepping away. I keep my hands planted on her shoulders.
“Well, I heard you were the only hopeless bachelor left in the group and that felt like an emergency situation worth coming home for.” Emily breezes in, breaking herself away from me, but I don’t miss the flash of emotion across her face.
Lashes lowering for a split second, the slight downturn twitch of her mouth.
Sadness. Sliding my hands into my pockets, I turn to watch her while she trails through my office, tracing her hands over my desk, fingering a paper or two back into formation on its top.
Anyone else would miss the way she taps gently six times on the corner before she moves on.
But I don’t, because I’ve watched her my whole life.
It’s always six. Six pens neatly lined up on her desk as a kid. Six hurried steps on a slab of pavement before she could step onto the next. Six laps around the old willowy oak tree in our garden. As an adult, she’s done the work to suppress the compulsion, but it’s still there.
“What’s really going on, kid?”
She smiles. She knew I would see right through her. Sighing, she parks her butt on the edge of my desk and stares out at the city. I wander over to her and do the same, folding my arms across my chest.
A plane tracks across the clear sky, so brilliant and blue it’s almost like a giant goldfish bowl of aquamarine corralling us.
The skyscrapers are so high and sharp they threaten to pierce the edges and send the whole thing crashing down.
My gaze falls to the rat run below, smog-stained grey on grey, with tiny vibrant bursts of color from billboards and cars.
“I was with someone these last few months, but it…fell apart.” Emily waves a hand as if the details don’t really matter and then seems to think twice of it. “I found him screwing the makeup artist on one of our shoots.”
My brows rise, not only because it pisses me off to hear some asshole treated her like that, but that she managed to go a steady few months with someone. Emily is a free spirit who doesn’t like to be tied down with commitment, which means she must have really liked the guy.
“Want me to fly over there and kick his ass?” I bump her shoulder and she snorts, shaking her head.
“No, but I do want you to humor me by pretending I didn’t just get shit on from a great height.”
“What a lovely visual,” I muse, her responding tinkling laugh warming my soul. God, I’ve missed her.
“So, what’s the deal with you, brother? Why are you being left behind in the dirt while all your friends get married?” She turns stern eyes on me, causing my own to take a leisurely tour around their sockets.
I turn to take my seat, feeling like I need comfort for this inquisition. “So it’s really true what they say, then. All women turn into their mothers eventually.”
Our mom has been at me to settle down for years. With Mason married and popping out a tribe of babies quicker than you can say virile, and Emily on the other side of the world, the spotlight falls on me.
“You take that back.” A carefully manicured royal-blue fingernail pointing at my face accompanies her glare.
I hold my hands out, offering her an apologetic smile. She tips her nose haughtily and waits.
“I don’t have anything to report. Work is busy, but good. And I’m still doing the same shit I was three years ago, Em.”
And I am A-okay with that. Despite fleeting envy when I watch my friends with their wives, I’ve never felt any real inclination to settle down.
Why settle for one flavor of ice cream when I can have a whole parlor?
I’m not an ass, I’m respectful. I treat women with chivalry and manners, I just make it very clear that it’s sex only.
Most of them are fine with that, and the ones that aren’t soon reveal as much and we don’t sleep together anymore.
The latter are usually the ones that have been primed by fussing mothers their whole life to snag an eligible man from a wealthy family.
A Walker would be a colossal catch by any of their standards, but that’s not actually about me.
It’s about the name I sign on my checks.
“What a sad little life, Chase,” she drawls, knitting her brows together.
“Oh yes, all the no-strings sex is terrible. And doing what I want? Just dreadful.” The thick sarcasm falls off my tongue, making her lips purse.
Pity. “One relationship and you float back in here, suddenly the guru for love?” I meant it as a joke, but the second she winces I feel like an enormous ass.
“I’m sorry, that was my poor attempt at humor. ”
She hums, turning her attention back to the clear blue sky. “Is it true baby Guerra ran away to become a cowboy?”
Now that really does make me laugh. The deep belly kind that almost hurts, because I still can’t believe he did it.
Logan Guerra, youngest of the two Guerra brothers and one of my best buddies, fell in love with a ranch owner in Canada, sold his company, and gave up life in high society to shovel horse shit.
It’s as funny as it is sad he left the city.
But I’m happy for him. He’s happy and his wife Nour is great.
“Yeah, I’ve got a picture from Nour, wanna see?” I pull out my phone, cataloguing the flicker in her eye. Handing it to her, I show her a photo of the big handsome fucker in question balls deep in clearing out a stable.
A wry smile twists Emily’s lips. “He’s happy?”
She has a history with Logan, which they both swore blind was fleeting and only physical, but I sometimes wonder if that was one-sided. Call it sixth sense.
“Yeah kid, he’s happy,” I say gently, taking my phone back.
“Good.” She nods decisively, tuning back to the window. “And what about Mom, is she happy?”
I click my tongue, filling my lungs with air.
That’s the question, isn’t it? Emily was too young to have seen the worst of it back then.
Not like me. Young as I was too, I remember as clear as day Mason dragging our mother’s unconscious body from the bathtub, crimson-tinged water seeping across the ivory tile. Gruesome slashes painting her wrists.
Things were better for the years that followed—on the surface anyway.
When everything came out a few years ago and she divorced our dad, she slowly receded into a shell of the woman who once sparkled with life.
The regal jewel at the center of Manhattan’s social scene.
Call it guilt, or depression—I don’t know. And so I tell Emily as much.
“Mom is Mom, it’s hard to tell these days.”
Sometimes I want to resent my siblings for leaving me to bear the burden of the Walker crown, but it’s hard when we’ve all been through so much.
I wish they were there to help on the bad days when Mom can’t get out of bed, or that I could hand off some of the media appearances to them, but I don’t blame them for being wrapped up in their own happiness.
Mason’s wife Mia, also one of my closest friends, helps where she can.
But with twin toddlers and a four, going-on-fourteen-year-old daughter, she has her hands full.
Not only that, she has her own job as a COO for one of the city’s largest gaming software firms. Which all solidifies my belief that women are the far superior sex.
Seeing the shadow over Emily’s bright eyes as she considers my words, I do what I always do and use humor to lift people up. Something I’m told is a coping mechanism developed from growing up in a household where very little laughter lived.
“Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, can I ask what the fuck you are wearing?”
Her mouth drops, turning icy eyes on me and then her outfit. “It’s fashion!”
“It’s ghastly,” I counter truthfully, eyeing the bright orange fuzzy sweater that rests at her waist, and the hot pink pleather mini skirt. The whole dreadful ordeal is topped off by black patent stiletto boots that stop at the knees. “You look like a Dr. Seuss book threw up on you.”
Emily scoffs, flicking her hair over her shoulder as she stands. “I’ll ask you for fashion advice the moment I want to look like a stuffy finance bro.”
“Hey, this suit cost seventy thousand dollars—where are you going?” I call out after her as she flounces abruptly over to the doors.
“To see my niece and nephews!” she throws snottily over her shoulder.
I grin. I’ve missed winding her up something crazy. “You’ll need to switch that disgusting outfit out for a bomb suit!” I raise my voice as she disappears from view, still grinning to myself.
I’m not lying. I love my nephews, but those boys are category-ten tornados strapped into miniature bodies. Sighing contentedly, I stare at the paneled ceiling.
It’s only then that I recall my conundrum about Miss Quinn. I press one of the side drawers in my desk and it automatically releases with a slow glide. Plucking the cardboard file from the drawer, I flick open the first page and memorize the address.
***
My fist doesn’t even finish its second knock when the white apartment door swings open. Instead of the silver-pink hair that I’m expecting, I get an eyeful of whiskery grey and wrinkles.
“What?” the old man snaps in a prim British bite, frowning at me beneath eyebrows that haven’t seen a trim this half century.
“Er, hi…is Pepper Quinn here?” Everything about this man screams anger, from the curled top lip to the narrowed eyes, almost lost in an excess of what appears to be ball-sack skin.
He rumbles something unintelligible and points one gnarled finger down the hallway. “Are you illiterate, or just an imp? This is number twenty-six, she’s number twenty-nine!”
I glance back to the elevator for a second, picturing the apartment intercom at street level. “No…it definitely said number twenty-six. Maybe—”
“Don’t try and tell me where I live, you gigantic nitwit!” the man barks, drawing my alarmed attention back to him. “Now get off my stoop and leave me be!”
“Sir, I apologize. I have a—” The door slams in my face before I can finish. Sure enough, there is a shiny brass twenty-six nailed to the door. “Photographic memory,” I finish to myself, realizing that someone—kids, most likely—have switched the names around on the apartment buzzer system.
More to the point, what the hell is a nitwit?
Dragging a hand through my hair, I sigh and walk the few short strides to the door he indicated. My knock echoes off the plain walls. Almost immediately the door flings open to reveal a teenage girl.
“Finally! We’ve been waiting ages.” The flurry of Pepto Bismol pink hair drags me by the sleeve of my suit jacket into a cramped apartment with a vibrant clash of colors.
What is more surprising, and prevents me from objecting, is the gaggle of women perched on various items of mismatched furniture, each with a different-sized easel set before them.
“Get them out, then,” the girl at my side says bluntly when I don’t move, drawing my perplexed attention back to her.
“Excuse me?”
“Your dogs, dude. Get them out?” She frowns at me like I’m the crazy one—which is rich, considering she has bubblegum-blue eyeshadow—and gestures at my shiny black loafers.
“I don’t—”
“Your feet, honey. She’s talking about your feet.” A middle-aged lady perched on a burgundy fringe footstool, wearing a lime green boho skirt and more wooden bangles than I can count, sighs and looks fondly at the teenager.
“My feet?” I stare around at the others, none of whom seem remotely aware of how bizarre this is. Have I just walked into some kind of women-only commune where shoes aren’t allowed?
“Don’t be shy, babe. Come on and take a seat.” A woman about my age with wild ginger curls pats the top of a corduroy recliner which has been dragged to the center of the open-plan living room and left vacant. “We can’t paint ’em if we can’t see ’em. I think he’s shy, Maura.”
“I think you’re right, Kathy,” I hear from behind somewhere.
“You can’t…what?” Realization steals over me, prompted by the slender paintbrush that is stuffed behind the ginger woman’s ear. The easels.
“Per-leeeasseee, can we get a move on?” Pepto whines at my side, dragging me further into the room. “I’ve got this really cool concept of like a foot, but as a plant pot with a big burst of botanical foliage coming out of it.”
The bizarre canvas on the wall behind her of a zebra smoking a cigar makes a lot more sense now. The girl bounces on her heels, looking like an over-excited puppy about to go on her first ever beach walk.
Maybe it’s that, or maybe it’s the seven women around me happily adjusting their easels, or beginning to mix paints, but I find myself grumbling and lowering myself into the cushy armchair.
“To hell with it,” I mutter, kicking off my shoes.