Chapter 22 #2
She came in and looked around the room first before she looked at me, which told me she was still in her head even after everything. Then her eyes landed on me where I was sitting and she stood there in that black dress with her shoes still on and just looked at me for a second.
“What are we actually doing?” she said. “I need you to tell me. For real. Because I can’t keep—” She stopped.
“I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what you want from me beyond what’s obvious.
And I need to know because I have a whole life, Griz.
A real one. And you’re in it now without being invited and I can’t make decisions about anything until I know what you’re actually asking me for. ”
I looked at her standing there.
“Come here,” I said.
“No.” She crossed her arms. “Answer me first.”
I stood up and she held her ground, which I expected.
I walked over to her and stopped close enough that she had to look up at me slightly and I looked at her face, this woman I had known since we were children, who had been a dream I buried a long time ago and who was standing in front of me right now real and present and asking me a real question.
“I want all of it,” I said. “Everything. You in my house, your dog in my house, your clothes in my closet, your name attached to mine. I don’t want the hotel rooms and the parking lots. I want the whole thing.”
She stared at me.
“I know that’s not a small thing to ask,” I said.
“I know you got a life built that I’m asking you to walk away from.
I know he’s not a bad man and walking away from somebody who’s not a bad man is harder than walking away from somebody who is.
” I held her eye. “But you called me every day for ten days. You showed up at that restaurant tonight and the first thing you did was go to the bathroom and try to call me before you sat down. You have been trying to reach me since the minute I stopped being reachable and that tells me what I already knew.”
She was quiet.
“You already know what this is,” I said.
“You’ve known since the bar. I need you to stop pretending you don’t.”
“You terrify me,” she said. It came out honest and direct and I could tell she hadn’t planned to say it exactly like that.
“I know,” I said.
“You showed up at my job. You sent roses to my house. You sat across the table from my fiancé tonight like you had a right to be there. You don’t operate like a normal person. Yo ass is crazy. The scariest part of it all is that I really like it.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t operate I like no crazy person, I operate like a man who knows what I want.”
“That should make me want to run.”
“But it doesn’t,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment and something in her face shifted, the last of whatever she had been holding between herself and this moment releasing all at once.
“No,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
I reached up and took the pin out of her hair and watched it fall and she stood there and let me. That was the answer to every question either one of us still had.
She dropped her dress, then slid out of her shoes. She was made for me, and just for me. We kept ending up in the same space, doing the same shit. I couldn’t let her go.
—
The hotel room had been exactly what we both needed.
No rushing, no looking at the time, no parking lots or locked office doors or borrowed minutes. Just her and me in a space that belonged to neither one of us, which somehow made it easier for both of us to be completely present in it.
She gave me everything she had and I gave it back and by the time we were done the room felt different from when we walked into it.
We laid there after. Not talking much. She was on her back and I was beside her, she had that look on her face that she got when her mind was moving. I watched the ceiling and let her have the silence because she needed it and I wasn’t in a rush.
After a while she started getting herself together. Slow, the way a woman moved when she didn’t fully want to leave but understood that she had to. I watched her find her shoes and fix her hair in the mirror across from the bed without saying anything.
At the door she stopped and turned around and looked at me.
She didn’t say anything right away. Just looked.
“Go home Ivy,” I said. It was damn near five in the morning now. I didn’t know what lie she was going to pull out of her ass, but her dude had to be a fool to believe it.
Something moved across her face. Not hurt exactly. More like reality. She nodded once and walked out.
I laid there for another few minutes after the door closed. Staring at the ceiling listening to the hotel settle around me.
I had been giving her time. Grace. Space to move at whatever pace she needed to move at because I understood that what I was asking her to do wasn’t small. Walk away from a life she built. From a man who had done nothing wrong. From a future she had planned down to the venue and the color scheme.
But grace had a limit and I was approaching it.
I needed to speed this up.
—
I left the hotel shortly after Ivy.
I wasn’t going home.
I doubled back and came around the long way, came down her street from the opposite end, and parked across from her house in a spot that gave me a clean line of sight to the front without putting me directly in view of anyone coming out. Cut the engine. Settled in.
The plan was simple. Wait until both of them left for work. Then move.
I had been sitting there maybe forty minutes when Ivy came out of the house. Earlier than I expected. She had her dog Goldie on the leash and her earbuds in, moving with the easy rhythm of somebody running a routine they’d done a hundred times.
Morning walk. She went down the block and turned the corner and I tracked her until she was out of view then sat back.
Twenty minutes later she came back up the street.
She got to the front porch and was reaching for the door and then stopped. Went inside without Goldie, rushing fast like she had forgotten something and needed to grab it quick. She hooked the leash to the porch railing and Goldie sat there, tail going, waiting on her person to come back.
I was out of the car before I fully processed that I had made the decision.
I pulled my hoodie up to cover my face and crossed the street at a pace that wasn’t running but wasn’t casual either. Purposeful. Like a man who knew where he was going and had somewhere to be. I came up the walkway, unhooked the leash from the railing in one motion, and kept walking.
Goldie looked up at me and her tail kept going because she was a dog and little dogs like that didn’t understand stranger danger when a stranger moved with enough confidence. I snatched her up quick. Then, I walked back across the street, opened my back door, and threw her in gently.
I got in the driver seat and pulled off slow.
Checked the mirror once.
The porch was empty. Ivy wasn’t back yet.
I drove two blocks before I let out a breath and looked in the rearview at this dog sitting in my backseat looking out the window like she was on a Sunday drive. Curly fur, big dumb happy eyes, tongue out.
I shook my head.
I had robbed stash houses. I had walked into warehouses full of armed men. I had put people in the ground without losing sleep.
And I had just kidnapped a golden doodle off a front porch in broad daylight.
For a woman.
If Dank could see me right now he would never let me live it down. We laughed on how he was the tender one and how I was stiff when it came to women. That’s why he couldn’t understand the Cherish situation.
But I knew Ivy. I knew what that dog meant to her. She would tear this city apart looking for Goldie and every minute that passed without answers was going to be a minute where she thought about exactly who was unhinged enough to pull something like this. To steal a sweet, innocent dog.
She was going to eventually call me crying about this. And when she called me, she was going to understand that I was done waiting.
Goldie put her head between the two front seats and looked at me and I reached over and scratched behind her ear.
“You good,” I told her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”
She licked my hand.
I kept driving. Now, I had to go get our dog some food. Maybe some clothes, and a little doggy bed.