Chapter Eight

__________

 

Dominic

 

 

 

After driving Leah home from the airport and debriefing with Thomas, he gave me the okay to go home, so I went by my apartment to shower and change before calling to check on things back home. For once, my mom actually answered her phone.

“Dom! Hey!” This was how she usually spoke to me, and always had. Like we were casual friends.

“Hey, Mom. What’s going on?”

“Not much. Cory’s staying at her dad’s tonight so I’m going to have some friends over. I’m trying to clean the place up a bit before they get here.”

“Good for you.” I knew having friends over usually involved alcohol and sometimes more, but I didn’t care what she did as long as Cory wasn’t around. “Where’s Lucas?”

“I don’t even know,” she said, and then laughed. “I know that makes me sound like a shitty parent. But it’s summer, and he likes to be out with his friends. You know how it is.”

Yeah, I knew how it was. Basically, that she had no fucking idea how to parent him, and he was going to keep getting in trouble worse and worse. But you couldn’t tell her any of that. “Last time I talked to Luke, he mentioned coming out here to stay with me for a few days. You okay with that? I’d buy his ticket.”

“Sure.” She sounded almost delighted by the prospect. “He’d love that. As long as it’s before school starts.”

“Have you confirmed he’s actually going back to school this year?” He was sixteen now, and there was nothing forcing him to go to school if he didn’t want to be there. Unfortunately, it would not surprise me if he decided to drop out.

“Oh, yeah, no. He’s going to school. Of course.”

“Let me know if you catch him skipping again or any of that, alright?”

“Yeah. I sure will. When do you think you might have him out to stay with you?”

“Let me put the details together and I’ll get back with you sometime tomorrow.”

We spent about twenty minutes talking after that, all the normal catching up about our jobs and shit we’d done since talking last. My mom’s parenting skills irritated the shit out of me, but she was still my mom. I couldn’t help that anymore than I could help any of it. Sometimes I felt guilty for leaving, like I should be home helping to take care of them. It was why I called every night and gave as much input as I could.

Moving to New York had been an impulse at first, an idea my friend Travis had that I’d latched onto when we were nineteen. Lucas had been nine or ten when I’d left, and Cory hadn’t even been born yet. Honestly, if she’d been around, I probably never would have left. And that prospect was depressing as hell for me. Travis had gone back to Chicago after something like a year, and he was married and had two kids now, but I’d never even considered going back. Even through the series of bad roommates and shitty server jobs I’d had at first, I loved living out here. My current roommate was a bartender named Ethan I knew from my club days, and it was a perfect fit for both of us. I worked days, he worked nights, we rarely saw each other. And it was starting to look like he might be moving in with his boyfriend soon, which was even better. I was finally at a place financially where I could afford to live alone. It might have been completely selfish of me, but I couldn’t give up the life and career I had to go back to Chicago.

Two days later, Thomas called me into his office and gave me the news that I was going to be added to the rotation of guys stationed to watch Mr. Bertelli’s house and, more importantly, his daughters. It was technically a promotion, though it didn’t feel like one, and it was only for the summer until Leah was back at college and the younger one started school again. When I met with Davis in one of the conference rooms so he could give me a rundown of the job duties, I couldn’t hide my displeasure.

“Dude, this is a good thing,” he said plainly. “Bertelli has to approve you, and the fact that he did means that he trusts you. And the job’s easy as fuck. Most of the time you’re just sitting around watching the monitors. Occasionally you’ll have to take the girls somewhere, shopping or whatever, but it’s not too bad. And their friends are usually pretty hot, so there’s that.”

“Isn’t the younger one in high school? And you’re checking out her friends?”

Davis was the senior security specialist on our team, a tall thirty-something with dark red hair and absolutely no shame. “They’re, like, seventeen. I can look. And you need to stop calling her ‘the younger one’. Her name’s Eleanor, and she’s super nice. Down to earth girls, both of them. Not your typical rich bitches at all. Anyway, it’s most likely only until Leah goes back to school and they don’t need as much security. You’ll be taking over Isaacs’ position, which means you’ll be assigned to Leah. O’Neil will stay with Eleanor.”

“Fantastic,” I muttered.

And that was how I found myself taking Leah on her errands a few days later. It was a glorified babysitting job. I felt like a fucking nanny.

“Where we going?” I asked in a tight voice as she climbed in next to me. I wasn’t trying to be a dick, but I was not happy with this at all. And, meanwhile, Leah looked like someone had just handed her a puppy.

“Shopping first,” she said. “I have three or four places I want to go, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been shopping, so it may take a while.”

Fuck. Following a woman around all day while she shopped was my personal idea of hell. “You know, they have this thing called online shopping? No crowds, bigger selection, everything all in one place. I mean, it’s just more efficient.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “Can’t try anything on, have to wait for shipping, and I might not like it when I see it in person. Doesn’t sound very efficient to me. Also, I don’t need your input on my shopping choices. Just drive, please.”

I hadn’t known Leah for that long, but her haughty little princess voice managed to get under my skin like few other things could. Flatly, I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and shifted into drive.

“Look, I don’t like having a bodyguard anymore than you like being one. Actually, I’m positive I hate it much more than you, and I’m not the one being paid. It would be pretty easy to lose you in the city if you’re going to keep giving me this mood. And we all know how well that turned out for Isaacs.”

I scoffed. “Yeah, you got him fired, but that obviously doesn’t keep you up at night.”

“No, not really. He was an asshole, and he was bad at his job.”

Okay, it was true Isaacs was a cocky and disrespectful little shit, so I couldn’t really argue with that. “Well, I can definitely be an asshole, but guess what?” I glanced over at her, and she met my eyes with a slight lift of her eyebrows. “I’m not Isaacs. And I’m not letting you get away from me.”

She blinked and looked away, like I’d actually managed to surprise her, but then she laughed and came back with, “Are you serious? You let me get away within like twenty minutes of meeting me.”

“Because I mistakenly thought you were a reasonable person. My assumptions on that have since been corrected.”

“I’m reasonable, but that doesn’t mean I bend to the will of arrogant lackeys I don’t even know. Not unless they handcuff me, of course.”

I shook my head. “You’re not getting over that any time soon, are you?”

She pulled a face like she was thinking it over. “I don’t know. Let’s see how I feel after a few hours of retail therapy.”

I couldn’t help but wince at that. A few hours? At least she didn’t bother to pretend she wasn’t getting some satisfaction out of this. “Let’s agree on something. You don’t like having a bodyguard, and I don’t like being one. No secret there. But for now we’re stuck with each other, so maybe we should both – ” I put some emphasis on both, because mostly I meant her – “make an effort to get through this with as little pain as possible.”

“Okay. So that means you need to stop acting mad about it.”

“I will as long as you don’t try to ditch me or make my job harder on purpose.”

“I won’t ditch you,” she said. I noticed she didn’t agree to the second part, but it wasn’t worth pushing.

“So tell me, then, and make it a little more specific this time. Where are we going?”

She gave me an address in Chelsea, which is about a fifty minute drive from Scarsdale outside of rush hour. I didn’t start driving in New York until I started working security, and it’s still not my favorite thing, but you get used to it. Honking is like its own language here, and unleashed aggression is the only way to navigate through the traffic. It always takes most of my concentration, but luckily Leah wasn’t feeling chatty and turned her attention to her phone once we got going. The location she gave me was named Misc., which turned out to be a brightly-lit, ridiculously expensive clothing store. To my surprise, though, she was ready to go after about fifteen minutes, having only bought a single dress.

“Where to now?” My tone was mostly disinterested, because I’d already resigned myself to following her around for what would probably be forever.

“It’s up a block this way, I think. It’s called Monster Ink.” She started walking the direction, and I kept pace behind her even as my brain was a bit slower to process what she’d just said.

“Monster…you mean, the tattoo place? Why?”

“Because I want to get a tattoo,” she said, as casually as if she wanted to get a gyro at the street vendor up on the corner.

“Wait, are you serious? I thought you wanted to go shopping.”

“I don’t really like shopping,” she said, glancing back at me with a sheepish but decidedly not guilty look on her face. “I actually do almost always shop online, but I wanted to get out of the house and I needed a dress for Liz’s party next week. And now, I’m getting a tattoo.”

For a second I didn’t know whether to be annoyed that she’d lied just to torture me, or relieved that I didn’t have to spend hours watching her shop. The second option won out. “Have you ever had a tattoo before?” I asked, curious. “Do you know how long it takes?”

“It’ll be small. It won’t take that long.”

Okay. It was preferable to standing around in snooty boutiques all afternoon. I followed her into the tiny front room of the tattoo place, where we were immediately hit by cool AC and an 80s rock ballad. There were no other customers in the small space, just a woman at the front desk who had black hair and full sleeve tattoos.

“Hey, guys,” the woman said. “What can I help you with?”

“I want to get a tattoo and was hoping you have an opening,” Leah said. I could practically feel her trying to relax and act cool, like she got tattoos every day. I would bet anything she’d never had one before.

“Yeah, if you’ll have a seat, Rob will come out in a few minutes to discuss what you’re needing.”

Rob was a black guy around my age who had a shaved head, short beard, and almost every inch of skin except for his face covered in tattoos. “Hey, what’s going on, guys? What are you looking at getting done today?”

Leah briefly described the design she wanted, which was a small black compass on her back below her right shoulder. She had a design saved on her phone to show him. Rob asked some questions and sketched the design in about two minutes, and after she approved it he checked her ID and took her payment. We were then ushered into a small work space in the back.

“Is your friend staying?” Rob asked, in the sort of tone that said he wished I wouldn’t. It was kind of cramped back there, but I had no intention of leaving her side.

“I’m staying.”

“Alright, then. Let’s get started. Leah, do you want to sit or lay down?”

She looked at me as if searching for an answer, but I just shrugged and shook my head. This was all on her. “I have no idea,” she said. “Which is better?”

“It’s up to you, but at that location it’s a bit easier if you sit in the chair.”

She took his advice, straddling the chair he pointed to and then accepting an elastic band when he asked her to put her hair up. She fumbled a bit trying to wrap her hair into a bun, and I could tell she was starting to get nervous. I, in turn, was starting to feel entertained for the first time all day.

“Alright, what I’m going to do is make a stencil to transfer the design onto your skin, and then we’ll fill it in. Can you lower the straps of your shirt and bra so I can prep the area, please?”

She darted a glance at me as she did this, almost like she was self-conscious to do it in front of me. “You could sit down,” she said, pulling the straps down with some reluctance.

“Yeah, man,” Rob said. “There’s a chair over there, feel free to have a seat.”

I accepted the offer, grabbing the metal black chair in the corner and pulling it over so I could sit in front of Leah. “Getting nervous?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied sharply, giving me a look. But then in the next minute she asked, “Is it going to hurt?”

“Nah. You might feel kind of a burning sensation.”

Her forehead crinkled like I’d managed to make her even more worried. “How many tattoos do you have?”

“A few. I’m not sure. Ten, or twelve, maybe?”

“How can you not know how many tattoos you have?”

“I don’t keep an inventory, and some of them kind of run together. I got my first one when I was thirteen, from a friend’s older brother. If I could handle it, so can you.”

“Thirteen? Is that even legal?”

I couldn’t help but smirk at how naïve she sounded sometimes. “I doubt he cared. He wasn’t even a real tattoo artist. He got the supplies off the internet and did it for fun.”

Rob snorted. “That’s what keeps those tattoo regret websites up and running.”

“Yeah. I can’t say I don’t regret it. I always meant to cover it up but never got around to it.”

“What is it? The tattoo, I mean.” She seemed a little more relaxed now, so I figured I should keep her talking. No one needed to be stressed out during their first tattoo experience, and I was in a better mood now that she’d dropped the hours-long shopping trip and was acting almost decent.

“A devil woman,” I told her. In my only defense, I was thirteen. It had seemed cool at the time.

She gave a snort of laughter. “Oh, my God, really? Let me see it.”

“Not a chance.”

She didn’t say anything for a few seconds, and I thought maybe she was going to drop the conversation, but then her eyes wandered down. “What’s that design on your side, then?”

My eyes followed her pointed finger to where I had the Maori styled shark tattoo that curved up my left side. Of course, it was currently covered by my shirt. Amused, and because I liked pressing her buttons, I said, “When did you see that? In the bathroom back at the hotel?” I remembered her being the very picture of offended outrage, and I enjoyed the thought that she might have been looking more than she’d let on.

Her face frosted over. “I didn’t really have a choice. You handcuffed me in the bathroom and started taking off your clothes, remember?”

I heard Rob say under his breath, “Wow.”

As a peace offering, I pivoted my torso slightly and lifted my shirt to show her the shark tattoo on my side.

“Oh, it’s cute.” I’m sure she intentionally picked the least manly description possible. “Do the designs inside the shark mean anything?”

“No.” Technically the design represented courage and strength, but telling people that was the sort of thing that made you sound like an asshole. And I wasn’t about to give her that sort of ammunition. “I just thought it was cool.”

Rob spoke up then. “Alright, I’ve got everything ready here, so check the stencil to make sure it looks good, and then I’ll fill it in.”

Leah stiffened up again just like that, walking over to the mirror as slowly as humanly possible.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I felt obligated to point out.

“No.” She turned to face me, then Rob. “It looks great. I’m ready.”