Chapter 8 #2
She swallows and glances at the building, the cracked paint on the door, anywhere but me. “Never mind.”
Before I can press, she pushes the mug through the window into my hands. “I came down to take out the trash, and there you were, slumped in your seat looking pitiful.” She lifts a shoulder. “Spare cup was going to waste. Don’t read into it.”
I wrap both hands around the warmth of it. “You made me coffee.”
“For the road,” she stresses, already turning back toward the door.
I take a slow sip and look up at her over the rim. “You’re really not going to feed me breakfast?”
“No.”
I let my face drop. “I sat out here all night on your account. I’ve had nothing since that soup. You’d send a starving man home empty?”
“You’re not starving.”
“I’m fading fast.” I press a hand to my stomach and stare at her mournfully. “I could keel over any minute.”
Her mouth twitches. She fights it, loses ground, and drags it back down. I’ve learned to hunt for that twitch over the last week. It means she’s close to giving in.
“Fine.” She lets the word out on a pained breath. “But you’re not sitting at my table with night-old breath. You want feeding, you buy yourself a toothbrush first.”
“There’s a store two streets over.” I’ve got the door open before she finishes. “Ten minutes.”
She steps back to let me climb out, shaking her head, plainly disgusted with herself for caving. “The girls are still out. Wake them before I’ve finished my coffee and you’re uninvited.”
I jog the two streets, buy a toothbrush off a bored kid at the register, and let myself back into the building inside the ten minutes I promised.
Upstairs, the robe’s gone. Jessa’s changed into a pale blouse with slacks, her hair twisted up off her neck, a stray piece already loose at her temple. The sight of her stops me a half-beat in the doorway, and I force myself to keep moving before she notices.
A door bangs open down the hall, and the girls spill out.
“Uncle Marc!” Bella’s across the room before she’s fully awake, slamming into my legs, both arms locked around my waist. “You’re here!”
I rake a hand through her sleep-wild hair.
Mia hangs back by the doorframe, rocking heel to toe, watching Bella cling to me, the caution still in her eyes. I crouch and hold my free arm out to her.
“What, no hello for me?”
The hesitation breaks all at once. She barrels in, crashing into my side, and I scoop them both off the floor, one in each arm.
They squeal, pounding at my shoulders till I groan and pretend to buckle under the weight.
Mia’s laughing right against my ear, not a scrap of wariness left in her, and the wolf gives a low, pleased rumble that I have to swallow down.
Bella twists in my grip to peer up at me. “Are you taking me home now?”
“That’s up to your hostess.” I find Jessa across the room. “I was hoping we’d eat first.”
Jessa folds her arms. “You’re getting eggs and bacon. That’s the whole menu. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll eat anything you put down in front of me.” I set the girls back on their feet. “Long as there’s no carrot in it.”
That drags a huff out of her that’s almost a laugh.
She cooks. I make myself useful, digging out the bread, the butter, and a second pan for the bacon while the girls set to dismantling the cushion fort still slumped against the couch.
Bella folds a blanket with real care, smoothing the creases, stacking the cushions back where they live.
I lean in close to Jessa’s shoulder at the stove and pitch my voice under the girls’ chatter.
“I’ve never once seen that child do a chore.” The bacon spits in the pan between us. “She’s the laziest creature alive at home. I have to beg her to make her own bed.”
Jessa pauses, spatula in the air. “Lazy?” She sounds personally wounded by the word. “Bella is the furthest thing from it. She had the spoons out last night before I’d finished the sentence. Getting Mia to move that fast takes me three tries.”
We look at each other over the pan, and the smile gets away from both of us before either thinks to stop it. For a moment, the kitchen feels too warm, and it has nothing to do with the stove. She catches herself first, turning back to the bacon, color rising up her throat.
The wolf preens. I tell it to behave.
Breakfast goes down loud, the girls talking over each other about the film they fell asleep to, Mia stealing bacon off Bella’s plate, Bella too smitten to object. I eat everything I’m given, carrots nowhere in sight, and catch Jessa watching me clear the plate with grudging approval.
The plates are barely cleared when Mia comes at her mother, the question ready.
“Can we go to the park? Please? Bella’s never been to the one near our house.”
Jessa wipes her hands on a towel. “I’ve got work I can’t put off, baby. Month-end won’t close itself.”
“I’ll run them over.” The offer’s out before I think better of it. “You get your work done. I’ll have them back whenever you say.”
Jessa stills at the sink. She looks to Mia, then back to me, the old wariness surfacing fast.
“You can trust me.” I keep it gentle. “I won’t let either of them out of my sight. Nothing’s going to happen to them.”
“It isn’t that.” Her jaw tightens on whatever she won’t say.
“Then what is it?”
She holds my eyes a beat, and pain crosses behind them before she shuts it down. “Nothing. It’s fine. Take them.”
The park’s a short walk from her building, a green strip with a climbing frame, two benches, and a hot dog cart parked by the gate. Both girls are through the gate the instant I unhook it, tearing for the swings, and I claim the bench with the clearest view of them.
They climb the frame, chase each other across it, and hang upside down off the bars till the blood pools red in their faces. Mia plays the same here as on the pitch, all nerve, daring Bella up higher than my niece would ever climb alone. Bella follows her anywhere. Watching it does me good.
When the heat finally chases them off the frame, I buy three hot dogs from the cart, and we crowd onto the bench to eat.
“So what was it like back in the city?” I ask around a mouthful. “Before your mom dragged you out to the middle of nowhere.”
Mia knocks her heels against the bench leg. “It was busy. Mom worked a ton. She always came home, though, so we’d do things together, like movie nights or the big park with the boats, not a dinky one like this.”
“She sounds like a good mom.”
“She’s the best.”
“What about your dad?” I keep my eyes on the cart. “Still back in the city?”
She goes quiet. The heels stop knocking. “He left ages ago. I don’t really remember him.”
I don’t push it. “Your mom have many friends out there?”
“She’s got friends.” Mia nods, sure of herself.
I bite down on a smile because she’s sailed clean past what I meant. Before I can find another way in, Bella leans across her hot dog, delighted to help.
“He means boyfriends, dummy.”
Mia cracks up, nearly choking on her bite. “Mom doesn’t do boyfriends. There’s no time for that. She says I’m all she needs.”
Even knowing the answer, I still fish for it. “So there’s no husband, nobody off working somewhere far away.”
The girls trade a scheming look, then turn matching grins on me.
“Do you like my mom?” Mia asks, and there’s nothing shy about the question.
The nerve of her nearly makes me choke. “What if I do? Would that bother you?”
Mia swings to Bella, already working it out. “Does that mean me and Bella get to be sisters?”
“I only said like,” I cut in before the two of them run off with it.
Mia giggles. “I don’t think Mom’ll make it easy. She doesn’t like dating guys.”
That has me pausing. “She’d sooner date women, then?”
Mia blinks at me, lost, then catches my meaning and dissolves into giggles. “No, silly! She says you can’t trust them, that men are no good.”
I keep my face easy, though what she’s said unsettles me. No kid her age should be walking around sure that half the world’s out to hurt her. Whatever’s behind it—and I’m starting to think it runs deeper than a deadbeat ex—Jessa’s got no business drilling it into her girl.
Mia bends to dig at her shin, scowling. “Something bit me.”
“Let’s see.” I set my hot dog down on its wrapper. “Put it up here. Stick your leg out.”
She hauls her leg across my knee and shoves the denim up. Above her ankle, a red welt swells, angry where her nails have been at it. “A mosquito got you, by the look of it. We’ll get it cleaned so it doesn’t turn nasty.”
I reach to tug the cuff back down for her. As I do, she cranes around toward whatever Bella’s pointing at across the green, and the loose neck of her shirt slides off one shoulder, baring the top of her back.
There, high on her left shoulder where it meets her spine, sits a small dark mark, no bigger than a thumbprint, one edge of it notched clean through.
Everything in me goes still. “Mia, what’s that?”
Mia twists her neck to follow my stare, then shrugs the collar back up, bored already. “Oh, that’s just my birthmark. I’ve had it forever.”
She’s already swinging her leg down off my knee, the bite forgotten, the mark forgotten, every part of her straining back toward the roundabout where Bella’s waving her over.
“Bella, wait up!” She hops off the bench at a dead run. “You said we’d do the spinny one!”
Then she’s gone, ponytail streaming behind her, sprinting across the grass to her best friend without a single glance back at me, frozen on the bench with the ground gone out from under me.
I’ve seen that mark before, in the mirror, whenever I’ve turned around. An identical dark curl with the same notch broken through one edge, the brand every wolf of Steele blood is born marked with.
Why does Jessa’s daughter have the same birthmark?