Chapter 8
Brittany
As I walked into the coffee shop, I realized there was no way I’d be able to focus in class today. I set my textbook and notes on the table in front of me. I’d snuck quickly out of my apartment, making sure Dalton and that neighbor were gone before running down the hallway. I didn’t want to walk by them after what happened, and I was afraid Dalton’s door would swing open as I scurried past it. What scared me the most was that I actually hoped that it would swing open, and Dalton would emerge, exclaiming, “I don’t care who knows, let Mrs. Zewkowski watch,” then grab me and pull me into his room.
“Double dirty chai, miss.” With a jolt, I was yanked from my fantasy when the barista brought my coffee over to my table.
“Thanks.” I had taken a bus to the harbor for this little coffee shop, one of the few who knew to spell my name with two t’s on the cup. Local artwork adorned the walls, some boasting barnacle-like appendages and a thickness that reached off the canvas. I went to study here before class instead of the place closer to home because I didn’t want to run into Dalton again. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I passed him in the hallway, or needed something fixed in my apartment. I couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss, his weight pressing down on top of me, holding me in place. I couldn’t move, and I hadn’t wanted to, either. His skin had smelled slightly of metal and something resembling pine needles.
When that neighbor had interrupted us, an irrational voice had screamed inside me telling me that my father had caught us. When that thought had crossed my mind, I wanted Dalton to dig his tongue deeper into me, pressing all of him against me as my father disapproved and as I waved my middle finger in the air at him. I laughed at the insane thought, thinking that this would have been something Talia would have enjoyed.
“Stop thinking about him,” I ordered myself, taking a chug of the hot espresso-laced tea and forcing my attention back to my studies. I didn’t so much as hear the chime of the new customer entering the coffee shop as I did smell the breeze carry in the scent of metal and pine. There was Dalton, once again darkening my view with his thick arms under which he had tucked an abstract painting with no frame, appearing in the coffee shop I had chosen specifically to avoid running into him. Some of the paint seemed fresh, and his hands had speckles of dry paint on the knuckles as if some of the painting had rubbed off on him on his way here. The barista greeted him, but before he could order, he spotted me. His eyes caught mine, which had been staring at his bicep pressing against the new paint on the canvas and wondering if it was leaving its mark on him over his tattoos. I blushed and threw my eyes down to my textbook.
“Are you stalking me?” he asked with a chuckle, coming over to my table and leaning over with his free arm on the chair across from me.
“Seriously, I was about to ask you the same question.” I closed my textbook with a loud thump. “Why are you here, did you follow me?”
“Whoa, you don’t own the city. Calm down, Princess.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’m sorry.” Dalton immediately looked regretful. “No, I’m not following you.”
“It feels like you’re following me.”
“I just came out this way to buy something for the first-floor hallway, and I needed some coffee for the trip back. We must just be like magnets or something. Smart people thinking the same, you know?” Dalton motioned to the painting. “I’d been meaning to pick this up for a while, and you reminded me about it.” He took a breath and removed a toothpick he’d had hidden behind his ear and put it in his mouth, rolling it around under his tongue before biting it hard between his teeth. He seemed nervous, something that looked unnatural to him. “Also, sorry about earlier, I mean in the hallway with Mrs. Zewkowski. I normally pride myself on my professionalism and I let myself get carried away.”
I didn’t know what to say. I had been afraid of this moment because I knew I would freeze up. I was worried he’d try to kiss me again, I was worried he wouldn’t try to kiss me again, but I hadn’t expected him to apologize about his professionalism. “You’re sorry?”
“Yeah, it won’t happen—”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not sorry.” It just spilled out of me. I could feel myself smiling, my heart fluttering around and my mouth moving on its own.
Dalton looked confused at first, and then smirked. “Then I’m not sorry, either.”
“Good.” I watched him, waiting to see what he would do next.
He set the painting down next to the chair across from me. “Mind if I join you for a little bit?”
As if I would have been able to study anyway, now that he had appeared in my secret coffee shop. My father would have killed me on the spot if he knew that my textbook had been closed so that the tattooed man who fixed my apartment for me, could sit across from me in a secluded coffee shop.
“For a little bit. I have class soon.” I kept my textbook closed, and watched Dalton walk back to the barista to put in his order. He slid his paint speckled hands into the back pockets of his work pants, his thick, calloused fingers tightening the fabric around his backside leaving very little for me to imagine on my own. I checked my phone for the current time, trying to distract myself and focus. Quickly, before Dalton could come back, I programmed an alarm to go off on my phone so that I could use it as an excuse to leave for class. If I hadn’t set it, I would have been worried I’d play hooky and sit with Dalton straight through the time I needed to have my butt in the classroom.
He came back with a tall cup of plain drip coffee, nothing else added to the dark liquid.
“A boring cup of joe for my boring apartment manager,” I teased him, watching him bend over to move the painting he’d deposited next to the table in order and sit down.
The muscle on his right arm rippled underneath his tight shirt, a streak of orange paint slicing through a tattoo of a snake. It was quite a snake, too, emerging anew from out of an old skin that an inked hawk was ripping off of its back. It seemed too grotesque for this man repositioning a piece of abstract art he’d just bought before finding his way into an artist’s coffee shop. The snake was hiding behind twisting lines forming no definite shape covering most of the rest of his upper arm, peeking out from beneath the short sleeve. I wondered how far the tattoos crawled over his skin, if they reached down his protruding collarbone to his chest where only small wisps of hair revealed themselves from his neckline.
“It is pretty boring, isn’t it? I got used to drinking my coffee like this back when,” Dalton hesitated, staring down at his coffee, then shook his head, “back in another life. I once lived somewhere that I could only get my hands on cheap coffee powder. You get used to things like that in life.” His phone began buzzing in his pocket, but he silenced it without looking at it.
“How long did you live there for?”
“Six months, but that was a long time ago, a different life.”
“Before Daddy set you up as handyman and errand boy for his building, going out to buy his décor for him?” I meant to tease him lightly again, but my words came out harsher than I intended.
“He doesn’t know about the painting; it was my idea. I paid for it with my hard-earned money. My ‘daddy’” he said the word ‘daddy’ with contempt, “may be helping me right now, but I won’t take any handouts from anybody. I make my own with my own hands.”
“That’s something she would have said.” I felt the subconscious catch in my throat, that unwillingness to mention her name ever since that day at home when I had said it in front of mother, as if speaking it out loud would shatter her memory and prove with finality that Talia no longer existed.
“Something your sister would have said?”
I wished I hadn’t brought it up, I didn’t know why the words had escaped from my mouth. “Stubborn, pushing anyone’s help away because she could do anything herself.” Anger started to bubble up inside me, and I wasn’t quite sure where it was coming from or what to do with it. I took a swig of my tea to stifle the feeling, and when I set my cup down Dalton extended his hand to touch mine where it sat holding my cup in the middle of our table. The grooves of his rough fingers brushed along my fingers, and I froze up at first but then loosened my grip from the cup as massaged the tips of my fingers with his own. “I know I sound angry at her, but I’m not. It was one of her best traits. I’m just angry. I don’t know why.”
“You’re angry because she didn’t have to die.” Dalton began applying firm pressure where he held my hand, and I looked up to see him clenching his jaw and staring down at his own coffee. “It was too soon, aggravatingly so.”
I didn’t want him to let go of my hand because he was absorbing my searing hot anger, almost removing it somehow from my fingertips with his solid grip. I wanted him to suck all the heat out of me until nothing remained. I felt as if a skillet had been placed directly on my chest, my bellybutton and down in between my thighs. Dalton looked up and seized my eyes with his. I couldn’t swallow. I wanted him to jump over the table and silence my racing mind while leaning into me, running his hand up my arm until he was firmly holding me down by the shoulders, stopping me from talking anymore as he leaned in the rest of the way to lock my lips in his.
I felt ready to pop, as if Talia were here, egging me on. Thinking about her hurt too much, and I knew I shouldn’t, but I enjoyed that Dalton had yet to remove his hand from mine. Finally, I managed to clear the frog in my throat and say, “Can we not talk about this?”
Suddenly, my phone alarm buzzed on the table where I’d set it down. Dalton quickly removed his hand, and checked his watch. “Time to turn into a pumpkin?”
“Yeah, I have to get to class.” I started to reluctantly pack up my books.
“I have to get going too, got a lot on my to-do list for the rest of the day.” Dalton abruptly stood, almost knocking over the painting at his feet. He deftly caught it before it fell completely over, and hefted it under his arm. The paint still seemed to brush off against his skin, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t mind at all. He was a man who was not afraid to get dirty.
I watched him pick up his coffee cup and hesitate for a moment, hovering over the table with his wide shoulders and blocking the light from the windows behind him.
“I know you’re pretty busy following the good ol’ college path for ‘daddy’ and looking for that father-approved suitor,” Dalton teased, “but if you’ve got any time this week, I know this cool art spot nearby that I know you’d like if you’d care to join me? You know, to see if maybe you can revive that artistic part of you?”
I finished putting away my class supplies before replying. I took one last sip of my tea, realizing now I should tell him no. I should turn down this distraction from the path I’ve been blazing, this man who would dash my father’s hopes of me marrying a decent man, squander all the time I’d invested in not making stupid decisions like going out with a man who lives on the opposite side of my apartment wall and fixes sinks while getting his hands dirty daily. I could listen to my father’s desires, or I could listen to Talia’s voice still present in the back of my head telling me to leap.
“I am pretty busy, but maybe I’ll have some time this weekend…we’ll see.”
“Friday, eight o’clock?”
My mind knew that the right thing for me to do was say no and leave it at that, to forget the kiss in the hallway, forget the past. But the kiss wouldn’t stop resurfacing in my mind, begging to be repeated. “I can’t this Friday, maybe next week would be better,” I finally managed to say.
Dalton nodded with a smile. “If not, I understand, but you should still check out this place nearby. I know it would be right up your alley.” He rocked back on his feet, removing the toothpick from his mouth and sticking it back behind his ear. “Now be a good girl and get to class.” He winked, then turned around and left with the painting under his arm.
“Fine, Daddy,” I snapped, trying to be funny and point out how Dalton had said something that could have come from my father, but realizing what I had actually said too late. I could feel myself blushing, but luckily Dalton didn’t turn around. After giving him a few minutes of a head start to make sure I didn’t awkwardly run into him on my way out, I made my way toward campus.
Josephine, one of my friends from class, was waiting for me outside the auditorium while the previous lecture wrapped up.
“You’re all smiles today. Where’d you just come from?” she asked, glancing up from the textbook she had open in her lap.
“I just ran into my apartment manager. I’m just not sure if it was creepy or cute.” I started to bring out my own notes to squeeze in a few more minutes of review before the auditorium doors opened. Yet, here I was again, distracted by that inked man next door. “I wasn’t sure if he was stalking me, or if somehow we’re just on the same wavelength.”
“Well, if he’s a stalker the easy part is over, doesn’t him being your apartment manager mean he lives in your building?”
“I don’t think he’s a stalker...” I let myself trail off, remembering how he knew everyone in the building by name. “I think that’s just how apartment managers are, they have to know a lot about you so they can make sure you’re not some stranger walking into the building they protect, like a guard dog.”
“Does Mr. Guard Dog Apartment Manager have a name?”
“Dalton Jones.”
“The dead billionaire, Dalton Jones the II?”
“What? No, he’s the third. Who are you talking about?”
“I don’t know a lot about the Jones family since there’s a lot of conflicting news stories, but the dead billionaire’s son, Allen Jones, has loaded pockets. I’ve never heard of this Dalton the third, but from what I know about Dalton the second and his son Allen, then this Dalton the III guy must be filthy rich if they’re related.”
“My parents know the Jones family, they seem well off, but they don’t talk about money much. What I read online makes it seem that they own a small country, but that can’t be accurate.”
“One hundred percent bona fide truth. I wouldn’t be surprised if this apartment manager of yours is swimming in the dough like a duck in a downpour.” Josephine jumped up after finishing her thought as the auditorium doors flung open, releasing a flood of students.
I remained seated, thinking about what she had said. I had known that August Jones and his wife Mariah were billionaires, and I had known that Dalton was their son, but it had never really sunk in that this handyman trapped on the first floor of my building at the beck and call of his tenants could actually be a financially well-off man, something my own father would be very proud to know. He’d be happy Dalton wasn’t just some broke fixer-upper, although not too ecstatic that he’d earned none of it himself and had it all passed down to him.
Yet, something about this assessment didn’t feel right. Dalton wasn’t the rich son of a billionaire with all of his accomplishments racked up to the fact that his father had been successful so that Dalton didn’t have to be. Something told me that Dalton was more than that. He had more integrity, and his attractiveness was less about the chance of him being rich and more about how he persevered with his own hands blazing his own path the hard way.
Maybe my intuition was flawed, and I couldn’t see who Dalton truly was, but if I kept concerning myself with what secrets he held, I would never finish school. I grabbed my things and rushed into the classroom.