I shrug. My stomach is churning; my head is fuzzy. I’ve been reacting to Adam, not even thinking. What is the matter with me? Solo’s busy destroying my mother and I’m sighing over Adam.
It’s just that he’s so… perfect.
I’m so confused.
“Aislin,” I say, “there’s something I have to tell you. Show you. Some
“Okay. Do you have any Kleenex on you?”
I grab a couple napkins from the dispenser. “It can wait,” I say. “You’ll see, soon enough.”
Suddenly someone sits down in one of the spare chairs. It’s rude, so I shoot the interloper a chilling look.
He’s a good-looking twenty-something Asian guy. He doesn’t smile. He’s wearing a green leather jacket. It takes a few seconds before I realize that I’ve seen him before. In Golden Gate Park.
The blood drains from Aislin’s face.
“Get out of here, you piece of crap” she snarls.
The guy looks at her, vaguely interested and not at all intimidated. He crosses his arms on the table and leans forward.
“I don’t suppose either of you ladies has a spare twelve thousand dollars, do you?”
“It’s nine,” I say.
“It was nine.” He makes a sort of sympathetic shrug. “Interest rates are high.”
“Actually,” I say with all the superior condescension I can manage, “the prime rate is quite low.”
It’s an amazingly stupid thing to say, but he takes it in stride. “We’re not the Fed. Our rates are higher.”
He sees my surprise. “Yeah, I know, I’m a thug so I must be unintelligent and uneducated. Truth is, I do work with some people who are like that. But I’m three credits away from a business degree.”
“Then you should be smart enough to find another job,” I snap.
He laughs, but his laugh is one of those silent ones. “Yeah, if my mom was a billionaire I’d probably feel that way, too. You know what the unemployment rate is for guys my age?”
I don’t. I have the feeling he does.
“I don’t have any money,” I say.
“Well, that’s just a matter of time,” he says. “Maddox had the money, didn’t he? Which means he got it from you. Right? Girlfriend here doesn’t have it, so it came from you.” He shrugs and leans back. “Go get some more. Twelve large to Terra Spiker is like a quarter to me.” He digs change out of his tight jeans, finds a quarter, holds it up between thumb and forefinger. “That’s what twelve grand is to your mom.”
“My mother has—” I begin.
“But you know what twelve grand is to Maddox? It’s life, that’s what it is. Life itself.”
The strange thing is that his dark eyes aren’t cold or without feeling. He seems compassionate. Almost as if he cares.
Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill Maddox.
Answering my silent question, he says, “I hate to see things end that way. You know how I’d like things to end? You meet me tonight—I’ll text you the location—and you hand me a bag with thirteen thousand dollars in it.”
“It was twelve!”
“Our interest rates compound hourly. By tonight it’ll be thirteen.”
He starts to walk away and I yell, “You don’t even have my number.”
“Sure I do,” he says without looking back.
Aislin doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. The nameless guy with the quarter has taken care of that.
“How am I supposed to…” I begin.
“Don’t,” Aislin says. She puts her hand on my forearm. “You know what? Don’t even. You’ve done more than enough. Too much. Really. This isn’t your problem.”
“You’re my best friend. Of course it’s my problem.”
She looks at me gratefully, but then her gaze shifts. She rises without a word. There’s a doctor in line at the cash register, holding a piece of pie.
I follow her to him.
“You’re the doctor who took care of Maddox,” she says, yanking on his sleeve. “What’s happening?”
He looks cornered and not happy about it. “He’s still in the OR. It’s going to be a while. Hours.”
“Hours?” I echo.
“He took two bullets. There are fragments in his spine, damage to his liver, and major internal bleeding. If he survives all that, his large intestine is perforated, which means that all kinds of bacteria have been released into his body.”
“But he’s going to live,” Aislin says.
The doctor says, “He may.”
He may?
I look at Aislin, expecting a breakdown. Her face is almost impassive. But her eyes, they tell me the truth.
The truth shocks me. It shouldn’t, maybe, but it does. Her reaction to those two terrifying words, words conveying the possibility—no, the likelihood—that Maddox will die, causes a gleam.
It’s gone in a heartbeat. But I know I saw it.
There’s a part of Aislin that wishes Maddox would just, finally, die and free her.
Strange, maybe, but that decides it for me. I’ll get the money. Because my best friend is not going to live the rest of her life feeling like she dumped her boyfriend when he was helpless.
Maddox is going to live, if I have anything to say about it.
– 38 –
I walk the streets of San Francisco with doom in my pocket, a heavy dread in my heart, and a longing to be back at Spiker delivering bagels.
Tommy will come looking for me. I’m sure of that. I knocked him off his stride, and by escaping I’ve probably frustrated him to the point of throwing furniture.
But he can’t find me. So for now I’m safe.
Will he guess that I have the deadly information with me? Will he guess that I’ve hesitated to disseminate it?
What’s his play? Run to Terra, no doubt. Warn her that their little creep show is over.
Why doesn’t the idea of that scene make me happy? Oh, I know why: Eve. Eve has screwed everything up. Eve has messed me up. She’s scrambled my brain. She’s totally confused me.
Which is why I have to see her. To un-confuse myself.
Probably if I tried to re-create that kiss now it would have no effect on me. No bad effect, by which I mean no good effect, as in it would probably have no effect on me at all.
This is a confusing train of thought.
Probably I won’t have a completely clear head until I test out the proposition. The one about a second kiss meaning nothing to me at all. At all.
I decide to kick a bag of trash on the sidewalk.
Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, I have to go see her, see what she’s up to, see what she thinks I should do. Get her permission. Yes, her permission, no, I don’t mean that. Because she is not the boss of me.
I remember when I walked in behind her and she was working on that sim—no not a sim, was it—but that’s later knowledge and what I’m really remembering is the way her hair was kind of swept aside and it was with great difficulty that I did not walk over and kiss the back of her neck.
