Chapter 6 Amara
AMARA
“Please pick up,” I whisper as the phone rings over and over.
I’m getting weird looks as I wait at the busy New York City crosswalk.
It’s hard to tune out the cacophony of noises, from wailing car horns to people yammering around me to the crosswalk signal beeping to music thumping from the barbershop on the corner.
I both love the city and hate it. It’s exciting, energetic, like a living thing in its own right. But it’s also never, ever quiet.
In fact, it’s so loud that I almost miss Eliza finally answering my call. “Hey, Mar! Hold on. Hold… Hold… Okay, here I am. Sorry it took me a second; I just finished up a blowout.”
A smile stretches across my face. “Making good money?”
“Not shabby… for a licensed cosmetologist!”
My grin doubles in size just as the street signal goes white in my direction, coaxing this amoeba of New Yorkers to start moving across the street.
“So you got your certificate?!” I yelp.
“I did! I am officially official.” She laughs and I love the sound, mostly because it’s been so rare for these last few years. Meanwhile, tears sting my eyes.
“Well, I am very proud of you. The second Parker sister to make something of themselves and stick it to the man.”
“I’m not sticking it as hard as you.” I hear a clattering in the background, probably Eliza cleaning up her workspace. “You assist one of the richest men in the city on the daily. I just do hair.”
I glance down at the watch on my wrist and pick up my walking pace a bit. “Oh, hush. If there weren’t people like you, my job interview would have gone very poorly. Imagine me walking into Apex with a bird’s nest on my head. They woulda laughed me out of there.”
My sister laughs again. God, I wish I could hear that more.
We are two of four Parker kids, and even though I am older than Eliza by seven years, we’ve stayed close.
Mostly because our dad sucks and the other two are even younger and I’ve been taking care of them all since I was a kid myself.
That’s the default of being a woman, I suppose. Be it all, do it all.
It’s also the only option when your mom leaves you.
“How’s Gianni?” I ask. “Still working at the garage?”
“At the garage, at our garage. I swear that boy eats, sleeps, and breathes cars.” I can hear the eyeroll in my sister’s response, but I know she’s as proud of our younger brother as I am.
At the tender age of seventeen, he’s already found something to be passionate about.
Easier said than done when you have no male role model because your dad is a piece of shit.
Did I say that already? I said that already. I’ll say it again, probably. I’ll keep saying it until the heat death of the universe.
“I’m just glad he’s found something he’s good at. Even if it is messy and smelly and stains a lot of clothes. But Bella… I worry about Bella.”
I am fast approaching the restaurant. I know I’m going to get an earful from Electra if I’m not on time, but it’s my weekly check-in call with my sister and I need to know if Bells is doing okay, too.
“Bella is Bella. Good grades, snarky attitude and looks more like twenty-one than fifteen.”
I sigh with a smile. “I saw that coming. The girl is way too pretty for her own good. Hopefully she hasn’t used that to her advantage?”
“If you’re asking if she has a fake ID, I’ve checked. But honestly, Amara, she doesn’t seem to have an interest in drinking. I think The Man has traumatized that out of her.”
My stomach sours a little. My siblings refer to our dad as The Man. Not because they think he’s the man but because they’ve officially dissociated too much to call him Dad. Gianni calls him something more colorful half the time, and I can’t even bring myself to scold him for it,
“I’m going to have to cut this short,” I say, making my way up to the restaurant. “But let me know if you guys need anything. I get paid tomorrow and—”
“Amara, you send more than enough. More than you should.”
“I send the right amount, trust me. I love you. Tell the others I love them, too. Talk to you soon.”
“Love you. Bye.”
I shove my phone in my purse and let out a decompressive breath. If switching hats was an Olympic sport, I swear I’d get the gold medal.
As soon as I walk inside Flower Child, a chic lunch spot offering local produce and grassfed proteins, I spot Electra. She’s sitting at a table in the middle of it all and she’s already got two glasses of wine, one for me and one for her.
I wave but she doesn’t notice me. She’s looking down at her phone with a smirk. I wonder if Bug Boy or his successor is responsible for making her grin.
“Hey, girl!” I say as I pull up a chair.
“One second. Let me just hit this double heart thing and… okay. Swiped right.”
“Let me guess, your date with Alfonzo didn’t go well?” I ask, setting down my purse by my feet and reaching for my glass of wine. It’s one P.M. on a Saturday which means no work. And that means I can drink without worrying I’m going to get sloppy.
“His name was Alejandro, and no, it did not go well.”
We order our food. She gets a rice bowl with steak and curried sweet potatoes and I get a lemon kale salad with roasted beats, walnuts, and goat cheese.
“So what happened?” I ask, glass of wine in hand. “Did he try to get in your pants too fast?”
“We didn’t even make it that far.”
I hold up my hands, waiting for the big reveal. “Well?!”
She lets out a dramatic sigh. “He moans while he kisses.”
I stop. “Wait… he does what?”
“Like, full-blown sex noises while kissing. And not even making out—just a five second goodnight kiss. After that weirdness, it wasn’t just goodnight. It was good riddance. Which brings me to Duo!”
I regret the question before I even ask it. “And—I can’t believe I’m playing along with this—what, pray tell, is Duo?”
“It’s a new extension of the Hooked dating app where you can go on double dates with friends!”
I blink. “Why can’t you just go on a double date with friends? The normal way? You know, like I set you up on a blind date and—”
“Let me stop you right there.” Electra sticks up a hand. “Are you currently dating anyone?”
“Well… no.”
“And do you know anyone you could hook me up with?”
“Also, no.”
“I rest my case. This is why we need Duo! The app that links friends and then finds dates for them to go out with! Isn’t that brilliant?”
“Are you getting paid to say this?” I ask exhaustedly.
“No, but we could be getting laid to say this!” she retorts with a fierce grin.
Our food comes and I take a bite. I need nourishment before we go any further into Electra’s La La Land.
“I know this might sound a little crazy, but why not try meeting someone organically. Like, in person. A bar, a gym, a pottery class?”
Electra’s nose crinkles in disgust and she nearly chokes on her wine. “You mean meet a man in the wild?! You’re right. That is crazy. Duo takes out all the guesswork. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Oh, I don’t know, you end up on a date with someone from the mafia?” I snort.
Electra gives me the eyeroll of the century. “This is real life, Amara. My real life, specifically! And yours, too.”
This time, I am the one choking. “Wait, wait, wait. Leave my dating life out of it. I don’t want to go on a double date with two creeps some AI algorithm picked out for us!”
“Why not? You said you aren’t seeing anyone.”
I brush my hair back, looking at my food, at my feet, at the ceiling, anywhere but at her. “I’m not.”
“Hold on… Are you interested in someone?”
“Like who?” I snap too quickly. “I mean, no. Of course not. I’m at work all the time—who would I be fawning over?”
My best friend studies me for a moment and I swear my heart full blown stops. After a long second, she defibrillates my heart again by moving on. “Listen, I will take the guesswork out for you. I already created a profile for you—”
“Electra!”
“And added you and me to the Duo feature—”
“Oh my God—”
“And we have already matched with a bunch of other friend pairs.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…” I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“You’ll thank me later.” She grins, scoots her chair around to my side of the table close enough that our shoulders are touching, and shows me her screen.
I blink myself back into reality. “They’re not… bad-looking. Brothers?”
“Fraternal twins. I like the one with the longer hair except his nose is kind of crooked.”
I take another bite of food. I do love to catch up with Electra and my new job has made that hard. But I am also very, very hungry. “So you want the one with the shorter hair and the straighter nose?”
Her mouth twists as she thinks about that. “I wish I could just like morph the two into one. Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Yes. Do you think the app has a Genetic Mutation feature? Or maybe there’s a Build-A-Man app and you can just cherry pick all the best noses.”
Electra flips me off, not subtly, and swipes to the next two guys. I keep munching. “So these two are childhood best friends. It says they do literally everything together. Isn’t that cute?”
“Cute, maybe; creepy, more likely. Like, everything everything…?”
Electra looks mortified. “Oh my God, I doubt it!” Then her lips creep into a cautious smirk. “But maybe…”
“Next,” I say.
The last two look more or less normal. Attractive, even. At least, they would be if my heart wasn’t completely committed in another direction. Problematically, my bestie can’t know about that. For one, she’d blow my cover. And two, I’d never live it down if she knew to what level I am into my boss.
“If I connect with these two, will you go with me? Dinner, drinks, maybe more?” Electra winks and runs the tip of her tongue across her perfectly white teeth.
“Drinks, no dinner, and definitely not something more.”
“Drinks, at least one app, and you don’t act like a raging bitch the whole night.”
I think about that and concede. “Fine.”
I don’t want to. At all. But I’ve learned that Electra isn’t great at respecting the boundaries of my dating life.
Those boundaries being that I am not interested in dating or being hooked up on dates in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.
If I don’t consent, she will just sprout a man up in front of me like a Chia Pet and then I really have no choice.
So this is the only viable option. At least, this way I know what I am getting.
After my lunch date with Electra, I go home and slip into some comfier clothes. Then I grab a glass of wine (one wasn’t enough for the lunch I just endured) and cozy up on the couch with my laptop. I still haven’t had time to look into the photos I took of Ransom’s notebook the other day.
So with a nervous breath, I cue it up.
For a moment, I just admire his handwriting. I think I like it so much because everyone types everything these days. Ransome’s penmanship is masculine but legible. Most of it, unfortunately, leads me nowhere.
Names that seem to be untraceable.
Places that don’t show up even on Google Maps.
It’s almost like it’s all code for something. But I am not a member of this club, apparently.
I finish my wine and switch to red velvet ice cream, tying my hair back like a regular Betty Cooper as I dive deeper.
Honestly, I enjoy this Scooby Doo stuff.
I blame our lack of cable TV for that. When the only channels you have growing up are sports, news and Lifetime, you spend a lot of nights after your siblings go to bed watching true crime and cold case shows.
Ransome is a hard egg to crack. I finish my ice cream with virtually no answers about who he is in the afterhours, but it doesn’t bother me. If anything, it’s exciting.
One thing is for certain: there’s more to him. And I am determined to uncover just what’s under those dark eyes and stiff collars, bloodstains and all.