Chapter 16
16
Jake
“Here.” Kit hands me a sheet of paper almost as soon as I walk in the next day. “Schedule.”
“Thanks.” I don’t look at it, focusing instead on her face. “You good?”
“Yep.” Her smile is wide and plastic, which tells me only that she’s uncomfortable. It fritters a little when she gets a good look at my eye. “What’s that bruise? What happened?”
“Nothing to worry about.” I shove the paper into my pocket and turn away from the sudden annoyance on her face, heading into the kitchen to start setting up for the shift.
My knuckles are a mess from last night, not to mention this morning’s activities.
When I woke up to the sound of fists against a heavy bag this morning, hitting someone again seemed like just what I was missing. Only sanctioned hitting this time.
I’m an idiot, I guess, but I needed something, anything, to get all this ramped up shit out of my veins.
Problem is, no matter how hard I work my body, the antidote to what ails me can’t be found in the ring.
A while later, Kit comes back into the kitchen. “Hey, you mind adding a person to tonight’s staff meal?”
“No problem. I made more than enough.” I always make more than enough now that I know how often Kit likes to give food away.
“We sometimes have guests,” she told me the first time. Now I just add the extra portions automatically.
Guests, in this case, turns out to be a party of one, a kid who can’t be more than twelve or thirteen and looks enough like Toni, our dishwasher, to be related.
“Hey,” Toni says to me. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.” I set two steaming platters of mushroom risotto on the ten-top we typically eat at. Cora and Riley get flatware and plates and Frida follows up with a green salad. I point my chin at where Kit’s filling a water pitcher behind the bar and say, “You should thank the boss.”
“Jake, this is my sibling. Raf.”
“Nice to meet you, Raf.”
Raf gives me an inaudible hello, clearly too timid to dig in.
“Raf, um, eats here when our parents kick them out.”
My brows fly up. “That happen a lot?”
Raf shrugs, which I’ll take to be a resounding Yes .
Before sitting down with the others, I mosey over to the bar and grab a stack of glasses.
“Wasn’t it a different kid a couple days ago?” I ask under my breath.
She nods, eyes on what she’s doing.
“You take in all the strays?”
Her shrug is almost defensive. “I’ll feed whoever’s hungry.”
“That’s one way to run a business.”
“That’s the only way.”
Her gaze meets mine and my stomach clenches, though I can’t exactly say why.
No, that’s a lie. I know exactly what it is.
This brings me back to when Dad used to give coffees to the homeless guys who stopped by every morning and sent whole meals home with the couple who came to clean the diner at night. I remember Mom getting pissed because, as she put it, these little gifts, “Ate into the profits,” but in the end, Dad’s funeral was a packed, loving celebration of his life and, well, I don’t know what happened at Mom’s. I couldn’t make it that day.
I’m about to go back to the table when she looks up at me, her expression changing when she catches sight of my full face. “You okay?” she asks.
It takes me a second to realize she’s staring at the bruise beside my eye. “Oh, yeah, just went a little rough at the gym this morning.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Are you a boxer?”
“I fight occasionally.”
“Fight.” The air around her fizzes. She’s probably thinking about last night.
“In a ring.” I give her a smirk. “With a referee. Not always in back alleys. Or parking lots.”
She looks over at the gathered staff and lowers her voice even more. “So. Um, hey. Did you, uh…” Is she blushing? Fuck, she’s pretty. Those big warm eyes—grey-green-brown—that sweet, wide mouth. I can’t stop staring at the little dips above her collarbones and up, up to where I see the faint red imprint of my teeth. Fuck if the sight of it doesn’t make me want to bend her over the bar again. “Did you look?”
“Look at what?”
She steps closer to whisper. “At the schedule. The one I gave you.”
Confusion settles over me until I remember the paper she handed me at the start of the shift. A schedule. I did something with it.
Where is it? Slowly, I set the glasses on the bar, reach back and pull the paper from my pocket.
It’s a calendar. A bunch of dates are marked with big Xs. Not a work schedule, I’m guessing.
“Jake, you know what, maybe this wasn’t…”
Fuck. Me.
It’s a goddamn sex schedule. A whole three weeks of it. Spaced out so there are two per week. Near the end, there are five days that say PERIOD in block letters.
My cock’s instantly hard.
I swallow. “No. This works.” A quick glance at her rosy cheeks, her bright, skittish eyes. “You do that stuff where you, uh, take your temperature? In the morning?”
“Yeah, but…” She won’t look at me, not directly. “You can get pregnant any time. Even during your period.” She points at the paper. “I blacked those days out, though. I know guys?—”
I’ve never considered it before, but I open my mouth and say, “We’ll see.”
Her thick, dark brows lift in surprise. “Oh. Okay. Yeah. TBD, then.” She takes a shuddering breath. “Might already be pregnant, anyway. But, if not, when you get a chance, maybe just confirm which of these dates you can?—”
“All right,” I tell her, folding it more carefully before putting it away. “I’ll let you know.”
“Wow. That’s…great. Um, so, about the hotel, it’s kind of expensive and?—”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant. I should be paying you for this, not?—”
“Getting paid to fuck you might be a little weird.”
She looks horrified. “Oh, right. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean?—”
“I was kidding, Kit.”
“Okay, but if you need anything?—”
“Like money?” I dead eye her.
“Yeah.”
“No.” I heft the glasses and water pitcher.
“Right.” She lets out a loud, exhausted sigh. “So, do you mind my place? For the…”
“Event?” I’m smirking. The woman’s fucking cute when she’s embarrassed.
“Yes.”
“Your place is fine.” I glance over at the staff table and catch Frida’s attention on me, then on Kit, head tilted, eyes narrowed, then back to me. One grey eyebrow lifts in question. I turn back to Kit. “Better go eat.”
“Right.” She nods and scoots out from behind the bar, as awkward as I’ve ever seen her. Makes me want to wrap my arms around her and pull her up against my chest, tuck her head right up under my chin. Makes me want to promise shit I’ve got no business thinking about.
I’m putting it all out of my mind this very fucking second.
But then I remember the way she bit her lip just now, the way she didn’t for one second protest my fucking her behind the bar last night, not to mention the fact that she just handed me a goddamn sex schedule, and decide that with three weeks left, bending the rules is exactly what this situation calls for.
Kit
The phone rings just before the doors open. I pick it up.
“Collect call from the State Penitentiary Facility.”
With my usual excitement at hearing from my brother, I press the button to accept.
“Frank?”
“Hey, sis. What’s up?”
“Not much. You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah, got some news.”
“What’s that?”
“So, there’s a parole hearing coming up.”
“Right. Next year.”
“Yeah.” He pauses. “Listen, don’t get your hopes up. I’ll let you know how that goes, okay?”
“Yeah. Please do. I’ll come and speak for you and?—”
“So, you meet my buddy Jake? He stop by to see you?”
My mouth stays open, mid-word. “Um… Uh, yeah.”
Frank’s low chuckle comes through the phone. “Yeah? That’s all you got to say? What, you didn’t like him?”
“He’s, um, cooking here, actually. While he’s in town.”
Silence.
“Cooking, huh? For you?”
“Well, not for me. For the restaurant. But, yeah. He’s good at it.”
“Don’t doubt it.” He sniffs. I push the phone to my ear and concentrate through the music and rattle of flatware on the prison background noises I’ve grown used to. The murmur of voices, the occasional yell. Something banging with a hollow thud. As it has every time I’ve talked to my brother in the last fourteen years, my throat closes up and tears try to press their way out. “So, does that mean he’s planning on sticking around?”
The question sends an unexpected wave of something through me, some uncomfortable emotion that I can’t quite look at head-on.
“Oh. No. He’s going to the North Sea, I think.”
“Hm. Okay. That’s too bad.”
“Is it?”
“Rather have him there with you.”
“I can look out for myself, you know, Frank.”
“D’you know he does underwater welding on those platforms he works at?”
“Oh. No, I didn’t.”
“It’s the most lethal job in the world. Literally, more people die doing that than any other work.”
“What? Why does he do it, then?”
Frank lets out this condescending half-laugh that’s always annoyed me—as I know it’s meant to. “’Cause he doesn’t give a shit. ’Cause he’s got nothing to go home to. Might as well take the big risks and rake in the big bucks.”
I can think of nothing to say to that, nothing to feel but a sort of low, thumping shame that’s like a second pulse in my throat. After a few moments of silence, I ask, “You, um, you okay, Frank?”
“I’m good. Great,” he says in that over-the-top way that makes me think life in prison can’t be anything but miserable.
“I wish…” I start and then stop myself. There’s not much to say really about what I wish for at this point. I can’t turn back the clocks and make Frank not take it upon himself to punish that man.
If I could do that, I’d wish that the man hadn’t hurt Evie to begin with. I’d wish Frank hadn’t had to find out his friend had been sexually assaulted by the minister from her youth group. I’d wish, at the very least, that the police had put the pastor away for it so my righteous-minded brother hadn’t decided to go off and do something about it on his own.
I’d wish a lot of things. For me and Frank. For Toni and his sibling Raf, kids who don’t deserve to be kicked out for how they feel in their skin. I’d wish Jake hadn’t done prison time, too.
“Don’t bother wishing, Sis. It’s a waste of time.”
I don’t tell him again that I wish he was home. It only makes him feel bad.
“You get those cookies I sent?”
“Sure did. Thank you.” I can never tell if he’s lying, but I figured out a while ago that the best thing I can do is pretend I believe what he says. He gets comfort from that, I think.
And that’s the only comfort I can offer since he refuses to let me visit.
“I love you, bro.”
“Love you, sis.” A beat. “Tell Jake I love him, too.”
Those words send a little shock through me. It takes me a second to realize it’s because I’ve never heard my brother say that about—or to—another soul.
“I will.”
“All right. Have a good night. Make lots of money.”
I force a smile into my voice and say, “Sleep well,” since I can’t think of another thing to wish a man who’s got another five years in his sentence.
The phone rings again a couple minutes after I hang up and, for some silly reason, I think it’ll be him again. “Parlor,” I say, expecting the collect call message.
Instead, I hear. “Kitty. We need to talk.”
Oh, God. It’s the ex. The last person I want to talk to. Honestly now or ever.
“We’re open, Clark, this isn’t a good time and you know it.”
“Listen, you just need to listen. It’s important.”
“Actually, Clark, one of the benefits of no longer being with you is that I don’t have to listen to you anymore. Goodbye.”
I jam my finger to the button to end the call and stand there, out of breath, for a few minutes.
When I look up, Jake’s at the end of the bar, watching me. “You okay?”
I nod. “Great.”
“That your ex?”
“It’s…it’s fine, Jake.” When he doesn’t move for a few moments, I walk over to him, voice lowered, and say, “I’m fine .”
“You don’t seem it.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“I got that.”
“Frank called.”
“Yeah?”
“He says he, um,” I swallow back a weird wave of emotion. “Says he loves you.”
“Okay.” Jake goes still, his eyes doing a quick search of the room behind me before he looks at my face again. “I guess, next time, uh, you could tell him I love him back. If you don’t mind.”
“Sure.”
He nods. “Thanks.”
After he’s swung back into the kitchen, I look up and smile at a handful of diners being seated, say hi to a couple regulars, and serve a few cocktails for Riley’s big group of raucous women who come in once a month to, I believe, bitch about their home lives.
All I can think about, the whole time, is how my brother apparently loves Jake enough to tell him so, which is a big deal for men like that.
He loves Jake and Jake loves him and here I am, using the man as a sperm donor.