Chapter 2
two
The next time buzzing wakes me, it’s morning.
I roll out of bed, pull on sweats and running shoes, and hit the pavement.
It won’t be long now before I’m no longer jogging alone.
Mac, my unit’s Master Chief, has finally served his twenty and retired.
He’s divorced a woman who is one of the few people on the planet, other than my family, that I can honestly say I hate and is moving to New York.
We ran together every day when I reported to him, even when we weren’t training, and I’m looking forward to running with him again.
I’m also looking forward to talking with him about the daddy thing. He’s what Logan is—a dominant—but I don’t think he’s a daddy. Still, he’ll understand the weirdness. Mac’s one of the most unflinching people I’ve ever met. He doesn’t sugar-coat shit; if I’m fucking up, he’ll tell me.
A five-mile run in the late August heat leaves me sweaty but calm.
Ready to go back to the fun and exciting task of building a database of Wilsons.
I’ve got two other small jobs I’m doing for Manny, who handles the bodyguarding side of the business.
I’ll knock those out while the database compiles.
Focused and ready to tackle my morning, I take the stairs up to my apartment.
There’s a kid sitting with his back against my front door.
He’s so skinny he could be just a bundle of sticks held together by a T-shirt and basketball shorts.
His head’s on his knees with his thin arms wrapped around them, his sponge twists disarrayed like he’s been tugging on them.
I can’t see his face, but I can see the still-oozing scrapes on his knees, knuckles, and elbows. He’s been in a fight. Again.
“My man,” I say as I walk up to him. I offered him a key months ago, but he gave it back to me after his mother found it, freaked out, and said I must be some kind of pedophile.
She’s another of the few people I can honestly say I hate.
“You have the best timing in the world. I was just about to order a pizza.”
I wasn’t. I usually save pizza for dinner and it’s not even late enough for brunch yet. But I’ve never known Tyrone to turn down pizza.
Tyrone lifts his face, cheeks still round with baby fat despite his skinny, adolescent body. Tears stain his cheeks charcoal. He hastily wipes them away with the collar of his shirt and pushes up my door to get out of my way.
“I’ll eat some if you don’t get those gross fish,” he says.
He always sounds a little belligerent when he first arrives on my doorstep.
In an hour, when he’s cooled down from whatever fight landed him scraped and tearful on my door instead of at school, when he’s got a belly full of food and is playing on my gaming rig, he’ll be as light and funny and playful as Emily.
“Anchovies are the food of the gods, my man.”
He makes puking noises as he follows me into my apartment. After tapping in a pizza order—no anchovies but plenty of meat for us growing boys—I head up into the loft and grab a T-shirt and baller shorts for each of us, then duck into the bathroom and turn on the shower.
“You want the hot water, you better get in there first,” I tell him. “You got that kid stank onya again.”
He pulls a face at me but takes the spare clothes and heads into the bathroom. He does stink but it’s sweat and blood from the fight, not poor hygiene. One of the few things Ty’s mother does right is make him bathe every day.
When he’s finished, I duck in and wash off the sweat from my run.
Ty’s left the toothbrush and hair pick I got for him on the edge of the sink.
I tuck them away as I towel-dry my own hair, which is buzzed military-short on the sides with a longer fringe that I run wax through to keep it out of my face for the rest of the day.
I check my phone to see where the pizza is.
When I see it’s still ten minutes away, I use the time to trim up my short beard.
I hear gunfire as I click off my razor. For a moment, I panic. I grip the edge of the sink, breathing hard, until I can get a grip on it.
I’m in my apartment, in New York, a long fucking way from the Gulf of Aden or Syria. The guns are digital, not mechanical. They can’t hurt me. They can’t hurt my friends.
I blow out a long breath, fogging the bathroom mirror, and unclench my fingers from the counter.
“Max, where’s the Coke?” Ty whines from the kitchen.
“No more soda for you, my man. Water or juice.”
“Aww.”
I grin at the mirror. Tyrone stayed overnight a week ago, when his mother couldn’t be fucking bothered to come home.
I watched him steadily chug soda all night, discovered that she doesn’t regulate his soda intake, and that he regularly doesn’t fall asleep until one or two in the morning as a result.
I emptied my kitchen of anything carbonated the next day.
When I emerge from the bathroom, I find the kid raiding my ‘fridge even though pizza’s on the way, because thirteen-year-olds are snack-holes.
I’ve stocked it for him and he emerges with paper-wrapped, turkey slices from the deli down the street in one hand and string cheese in the other.
He grins sheepishly as he heads through to my office where we usually eat, plonks down in a beanbag chair next to my desk, and starts eating.
I grab two bottles of water and follow him, relaxing back into the deep embrace of the second beanbag.
“Any of your cuts need bandaging?” I ask him after I’ve cracked open the water and we’ve both had a long drink.
“I used the kit under the sink,” he says.
I nod. He’s been in enough fights now that he knows how to clean himself up afterwards.
“Gang or girl?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “Girls are stupid.”
“No, girls are smart. They’re already interested in the stuff your dumb butt won’t think is important for another five years.”
He snorts. “None of the girls at school are interested in Dutiful. I’ll still be playing in five years. They’re dumb. Except Dakota. She’s okay.”
“Were you fighting over Dakota?”
Tyrone shrugs as he stuffs his face full of turkey.
“I usually sit behind her on the bus but Zackary got there first today and he was talkin’ to her and when I said it was my seat, he pushed me and we got into it and he said she was ugly ‘cause she has braces and made her cry and I got thrown off the bus.” He scowls fiercely at the bottle of water. “She’s not ugly.”
“You got a picture of her?”
“No. Ma found a picture of a girl on my phone and she’d be all over my .
. . butt.” He slants me a guilty glance.
I haven’t made any rules about how he behaves in my home, but I don’t swear in front of him, and he’s smart enough to know I don’t want him swearing, either. “But I got her socials. Hold on.”
He pulls a battered smart phone out of the pocket of the dirty shorts he’s folded and left to the side of the bean bag.
The screen’s cracked again, probably in today’s fight since I just replaced it last week.
I make a mental note to replace it again while he fiddles with it until he gets to a picture of a white girl with lots of shiny, brown hair, big, brown eyes, and full, pink lips.
She has some growing to do, but there’s no question she’s going to be a beauty when she does.
“Definitely not ugly,” I confirm. “You should ask her out.”
“I don’t like her!”
“Smart man knows what he wants and goes after it,” I say. “She’s not dumb. She’s already pretty but give her a couple of years and she’s gonna be a knockout. You want her on your arm or Zackary’s then?”
He glares at the picture. “She don’t belong with Zackary. He thinks he’s a playa. He’ll hurt her.”
“Then you should ask her out first. I could spring for you to take her to the movies, if something’s out she wants to see.”
“She likes those dumb dragon movies.”
Emily likes those dragon movies, too, and I’ve never envied my friend more than when he cuddles up on the couch with her while she beams and coos over Toothless.
“They’re not so bad,” I tell him so he doesn’t have to pretend to hate them to impress me.
“You’ve seen them?”
I nod. “Watching a movie your girl likes doesn’t make you less of a man.”
Tyrone pretends to be looking around my apartment. “Where’s your girl?”
“I’m still looking for her.”
That truth lands in my gut like a punch. A few months ago, I’d have said I wasn’t looking. Then Logan brought Emily home and I realized I was looking, just in the wrong places.
After Tyrone inhales three-quarters of the pizza, I offer to replace his phone screen, unless he wants to contact Dakota.
Furtively, he does, so I busy myself at my desk, smiling grimly when I see the pirate site has gone down.
Another one will pop up, I have no doubt.
But I’ve got searches combing the Net now for any mention of Emily’s books and Whack-a-Mole always was one of my favorite games as a kid.
Glancing over at Tyrone, who is grinning like a fool into his phone, listening while a soft, high voice tells him she’ll save him a seat on the bus going home, I realize that I’m Uncle Max now.
I don’t know how that happened, only that seeing the kid sitting on the stairwell doing his homework night after night when his mother kicked him out so she could get high and screw her latest dealer in their one-bedroom apartment brought back too many bad memories.
The only way to silence them was to let the kid into my apartment where he could study in peace without having to shuffle out of the way every time someone went up or down the stairs.
That led to him using my spare gaming rig when his homework was done.
That led to pizza dinners and a new futon sofa for him to sleep on and a spare toothbrush in my bathroom. Uncle Max had one for me, too.