“What am I doing here, Ian?” she asks finally. Her exhale is so heavy that her entire chest heaves.
“Making sure I don’t have to jerk off every day?” I say lightly.
“No, really.” She tightens her belt and shoves a hand through her hair. Because of the tangles, her hand gets caught and she jerks it away from her head with a small curse. “I feel like a complete freeloader. I’m working a job that you arranged. I live in your house. I’m driven to work by your driver-slash-bodyguard. You won’t let me spend money on anything. If you really had your way, I’d be lying on the roof working on a tan.” She throws out her arms in exasperation.
I’d known she’d been feeling discontent, but I hadn’t realized how deep it went. Worry creeps in and I have the urge to take her back to bed. Imprint myself on her. That’s healthy, I mock myself silently.
I tip her head up so she’s looking me in the eyes. “Your mom just died. You were grieving. Still are. You aren’t freeloading. You’re allowing me to take care of you, which is a gift.” I press a kiss against her forehead but am deeply concerned by the tension that is vibrating through her frame.
“What about Richard Howe?” she asks.
I jerk back in surprise. “What about him?”
“Maybe if you’d let me help you take him down, I’d feel better. Like I did something for you for a change.”
Little furrows appear between her brows. I try to smooth them away with my finger. “Let me worry about Howe.”
“But, Ian,” she protests. “He’s a boil on the ass of humanity. He needs to be gone.”
She isn’t saying anything I disagree with. I was thirteen when my father died and fifteen when my mother committed suicide. Both events I related directly to Richard Howe. He needs to be finished, but the last thing I want is for her to get more deeply involved in my revenge scheme—a scheme that I had to revise because I couldn’t bait the hook with another woman because that would hurt Tiny.
I was wrong to allow that shit to even touch her, and now I’m paying for it. Wrapping her in my embrace, I try to rub out the anxiety I feel with long sweeps of my hands down her strained back.
“It’s just not something you need to be concerned about.”
I feel her open and then shut her mouth. She tries again, her throat a little hoarse with emotion. “I just feel like one of us deserves to have their mother. Cancer stole mine, but he took yours from you. I want him to suffer. I want him to feel pain. I want him to be afraid to close his eyes at night because of the nightmare we inflict upon him. I hate him. I hate him for you. I hate him for me. I hate him for us.”
Though her fierceness makes me love her more, I don’t want her even breathing the same air as him. I try to explain this to her.
“I want you to be safe,” I say quietly. “To that end, your role in this fiasco is done.”
“You can’t give up on taking him down,” she protests breaking away.
“I have no intention of giving up.” I just don’t want her involved anymore. “But I can’t have you flirting with him, touching him. I don’t want you to look at him. I don’t want him to even think about you in any manner. It ruins me.”
“Ian, if you’re baiting the hook with a woman, that means you have to spend time with her. And that would ruin me.” She stabs a thumb into her chest.
“Which is why we should drop it.” Letting go of the past is a bitter and hard pill, but as I told my friend, Kaga, Tiny is far more important to me. At the very least, I need to re-analyze my options.
Her eyes are grief filled. “I didn’t realize what a monster he was. I just can’t stand that he’s breathing and she’s not.”
On the last word her voice catches and the tears she’s so valiantly tried to hold back spill over. She’s not crying just about Howe. It’s about loss in general. The loss of her mother. The feeling of being out of control and helpless. I understand all of it.
“I hate that I’m crying. I’m blaming that on Howe, too,” she says, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“Crying isn’t a sign of weakness.” Tiny hates being viewed as fragile.
“Oh, right. I see you bawling all over.”
“Not crying doesn’t make me the better person. Just an emotionally deficient one.”
When I got to jail and was told my mother had hung herself with the scarf that I’d brought her the day before—at her request—I wanted to howl in grief, but I didn’t have anyone to hold me or to stand with me.
“You are not deficient,” she says fiercely.
“And you are not weak.”
I try to pick her up and carry her back to the bedroom, but she pushes away, wiping the wetness with the back of her hands, the overlong sleeves of the robe dragging across her face. While she struggles for control, I grapple with my own desire to fix everything for her.
“Stay home today,” I suggest, but when she glares at me I realize it’s the wrong thing to say. By suggesting she stay home, I’ve inadvertently stamped her as too frail to survive a full day. I revise. “Let’s both stay home today.”
“I’m tired of sitting here moping,” she says and stomps to the dressing room. At least I’ve distracted her momentarily from the Howe thing by making her angry.
In the closet there I’ve cleared space for her amongst the mahogany shelves that house my myriad suits, jeans, T-shirts, and other clothing, all purchased for me by my personal shopper. I dumped out the contents of one whole set of drawers for her a couple of weeks ago.
Frank, my shopper, had apparently set aside one drawer for each accessory—sunglasses, watches, belts, and ties all resided in their own separate cases. I threw all the shit in the belt drawer. Anything that didn’t fit got tossed out.
He’d probably have a coronary, but making sure Tiny felt at home was more important than the careful arrangement of a few Patek Phillipe timepieces. And who needed more than one pair of sunglasses? I kept one pair of Aviators and sent the rest to be donated.
But many of the drawers remained empty, and the hanging space I cleared looked bare. Tiny still hadn’t let go of her fifth-story walkup. “My rent is paid,” she’d said mulishly when I brought up the topic. She also had belongings at Central Towers, a place where she and her mom had lived temporarily before her mom passed away four weeks ago. Tiny went back once, took a look at the bedroom where her mother had slept, and walked back out. I grabbed a few of her things, and we left. She hadn’t yet returned—at least as far as I knew.