Chapter Five

Eli

It was noon on a frigid Sunday and there wasn’t a soul in Toasty’s.

The only sounds of life were the ticking of the old owner’s grandfather clock and the thud of footsteps from Margot and Bethel upstairs. Margot was the neighbor that two Freaks tried to mug. Bethel was the widow of the previous owner of Toasty’s, Teddy. They both lived upstairs, beneath my crumb-ass apartment. And then, of course, there was me.

I poured half of a frosty beer into a tumbler, lifted it to my reflection behind the bar, and winked. As usual, I looked like I had rolled out of bed and decided to maraud around the city, in spite of being one of the few good guys. “Cheers, you dog,” I grumbled, tipping up. Bubbles and hops burned down my throat.

Behind me, in the glass, the front doors of the bar shuttered open and a blonde came staggering in, wearing high heels, skintight jeans, and a snug white sweater with an elaborate blue design surrounding the collar. None of her clothes were thick enough to support her body heat in the falling nighttime temperature, and her feet must be sore in those heels.

I twisted and blinked hard at the newcomer. I didn’t accept it consciously, but my eyes didn’t lie. I knew who it was before I even focused on her face.

Nina Gusteau struggled across the hardwood floor like she was freezing to death, arms knotted at her midsection, trembling slightly, barely able to walk straight in those stilts she called shoes. But the blue collar on the sweater made her cornflower blue eyes seem even more piercing than they were before.

She reached the bar and gazed up at me. Her demeanor was thick with all kinds of subtext I couldn’t read. Her honey-colored curls hung sideways from the wind, and her face was remarkably pale.

I reached out and embraced her arms without thinking. I rubbed her sleeves up and down, trying to shuck the chill off of her. “Is it cold out there? You’re shaking all—” I realized what I was doing when my hands were halfway down her back, running over a bra strap, and I quickly shoved my mitts onto my side of the bar again. “Shaking all over,” I finished, clearing my throat.

“Nothing that a stiff drink won’t remedy,” Nina replied brightly, dropping onto a stool right across from me. As if this was a social call. Like we were friends. “What would you recommend?”

“A different bar.”

The corners of Nina’s lips turned down. “Don’t be like that,” she pouted. “You know I don’t have anywhere else to go. You know I’m not here for a drink.” She lowered her voice and let some real desperation seep into it. There we go: a little honesty with herself. “I’m here for some goddamn answers.” She was either a hell of an actress, or I believed her.

“All right. All right,” I allowed. “What do you like?”

“Something tall, hot, and bitter.”

I cocked my head to the side and gave her a quizzical look, not sure if she meant to be describing me, and then mixed her some Kahlua with coffee and slid the mug across the bar.

“Mmm.” Nina’s eyelashes closed, and she smiled softly as her lips pressed closer to the steam, but she didn’t drink yet. She experienced the heat and the smell. I couldn’t tear my eyes off her as she lost herself in her senses. Her lips finally cracked apart and pressed to the hot ceramic mug’s rim. She gave a sip and groaned with satisfaction, eyes still crushed closed.

My dick twitched awake. Shut the fuck up, I commanded him. I listened to him last night. He had to listen to me now.

I took a deep breath, and my lingering erection simmered down again. I didn’t like someone who clearly adored Jon-Pierre being inside Toasty’s, I reminded myself. Toasty’s was my home, and Nina wasn’t the average beautiful woman. She was the beautiful spawn of the worst man I’d ever known.

“What the fuck do you want to know?” I asked her, keeping my tone uninviting but complacent.

“Everything,” she breathed. Her cheeks turned shiny and pink with the warmth of the coffee, and she gulped another several drinks before setting her mug down again. “You can’t drop that kind of bomb on a woman and walk away.”

“You didn’t believe me anyway, right?” I reminded her.

She hesitated. “I didn’t believe you,” she admitted, “but when I asked him about it, he was aggressively defensive.”

My gaze sharpened on her, and my fists tightened automatically. I seethed. “Did he hit you?”

Nina leaned back an inch and shook her head, eyes glassy with confusion. “No… God, no. Of course not.”

I grimaced at the way her nose twitched, as if that would be unimaginable. I had pretty clear memories of it.

My eyes bore into hers. “Did you tell him anything about me?”

“I said that you have a lot of muscles,” she breathed. “But that’s it. Why?”

“No reason,” I muttered to myself, upending my beer and downing it in one swig. I raked my forearm over my mouth to clear the dampness away. “Let’s do it, I guess. I’ll answer your questions. Whatever you want to know about Jon-Pierre Gusteau up to 2005.”

“What about the last thirteen years?” she asked.

I strode around the side of the bar and passed to the front doors, clapping them tightly shut and sliding several metal bars and latches into place. I didn’t want to worry about people drifting in and out while we were trying to have an important conversation, and the place was a ghost town, anyway. “If you’re going to ask questions in the present tense, I need to be able to trust you,” I called over my shoulder, placing the final heavy bar over the entire front door.

“You’re talking about trusting me while you lock me in here?” Nina shrilled from behind me. She came to a stand, the click of her heels trailing me. “What about trusting you?”

“I’m closing the bar, so we can speak privately, bright eyes.” I turned and scanned her figure strategically, but as my eyes scooped over her curvy thighs in those skintight jeans, I kind of forgot my objective and swallowed. My eyes drifted back up to her and found her hesitating, realizing what had happened—I was looking at her. Her mouth half-quirked.

“Are you wearing a wire?” I asked her pointedly. “Camera? Tracking device? Anything?”

“What? No,” Nina scoffed. “I mean, I have my phone. That’s all.”

“No weapons?”

“Of course not! What are you talking about?” She settled back down onto her stool. “I own a bookstore. I don’t even know your name yet.”

“Your father and his people need to stay away from this bar. You can warn them if you have to,” I informed her. “This is my territory, and it is heavily armed. I’ll defend this bar and the people inside to the death. You need to know that.”

Her brow furrowed with more seemingly genuine worry. “I’m not sure that I do.” An uncertain but hopeful smile broke across her lips and caught me off-guard. “So, he’s got a secret family… That doesn’t make him violent. Come on. My dad is a small business owner. He’s a regular guy.”

I leveled a dubious look at her but said nothing. It was the vaguest career description I’d ever heard. Pimps were also technically small business owners.

“You can trust me,” she added, simple and quiet.

I stared at her, weighing her words, and she stared back, letting me. The crazy part was that I wanted to believe her.

“You wanna get out of here?” I asked, reaching behind the bar and pulling out an oversized, jangling set of keys.

“And go where?” Nina’s ass was already off the stool. She took two more deep pulls on her mug and set it on the bar with a hollow clatter.

“On a drive.” I tugged my black leather jacket from the coatrack in the office and shrugged it on but didn’t zip it over my chest yet. I nodded toward the garage, though Nina wouldn’t know that. “I need to think.”

Nina swallowed and shook her head lightly, her crystal-blue eyes fastened to me. “Um…” That disarming smile popped up again, and she shrugged her shoulders. “You know what? Sure.” She said her next words with intentional weight behind them. “I trust you.”

I smirked at her, knowing that was bullshit, and led her into the garage where my deep blue Kawasaki baby was leaning. Freshly waxed.

I passed Nina a small silver-colored helmet. Her eyes tracked me with something like shock as I straddled the bike and nodded to her, indicating she follow. “Come on,” I called, my own helmet still stuffed under my arm. “Come on. Don’t be shy.”

Nina obediently approached and spread her thighs to settle behind me. Her soft breasts pressed into my back, and I exhaled through my nose, my jaw tight enough to crush an animal.

“I’ve got something to tell you, and I don’t want to talk about it while I’m driving,” I told her. “We can talk about it when we park.”

“Okay.” She worked her helmet down over her voluminous hair and fastened the strap beneath her chin.

I used a small remote control to trigger the garage doors, and they slowly clattered up into the air, exposing a bleak, chilly afternoon sky and all of Hinton’s skyscrapers.

“My name is Eli Connelly, and technically, I’m your brother,” I told her.

“What?” Nina shrieked.

I jammed the motorcycle helmet over my head and stomped down on the gas. The motorcycle engine roared to life, silencing anything else she might say, and Nina’s arms wrapped tight around my torso. We tore out of the garage and off into the clotted city streets.

Breaking through Hinton’s congested downtown traffic took a few minutes, but there were enough blaring horns and thumping basses that Nina still couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Then we were free again, unhindered by the short streets and the million signs and walkways and pedestrians. Out here, there was nothing but a straight shot of narrow road, trees shooting past on both sides, and the crisp, blue sky. Out here, we could fly.

Nina clung to my back, which was strangely relaxing. I felt like Superman, she held me so tight.

After a solid twenty minutes going seventy miles per hour, I was ready to settle somewhere scenic. This far away from the grime of Hinton it wasn’t hard to find, and my motorcycle drifted into an overgrown overlook. A small post on the side of the road had a map of the forest under glass. Down in the valley, the lights of some suburban neighborhood shimmered. Above us, the sky was strewn with stars.

I propped my bike on its kickstand and climbed off, my skin still vibrating with the adrenaline of the good ride.

“This always calms me down,” I told Nina, prying my helmet off of my head and tossing my loose, sweaty hair around. It must’ve come out of its band inside my helmet.

“The drive?” Nina asked, pulling off her own helmet and tossing her own hair around. She was breathless and bright-eyed like me.

“Being under the stars,” I answered, leaning on the map post and gazing up.

I liked to feel small. If humans were small, then maybe all the horror we did was okay, because it was a speck of cosmic jelly.

I was still admiring the dust of the Milky Way when Nina’s voice called up to me and pulled me back down to Earth.

“So, you’re Dad’s son,” she guessed. She sounded shrewd, like she’d been staring at me, not the stars, all this time. “He had you with the married woman, and we’re half-brother and sister.”

“Wrong again, bright eyes.” I smiled down at her. Thank fucking God. “My mother had me with her first husband. He bailed before I was born. JP was her…” I hunted for the kindest way to say mistake. “…second try.” I ambled around the post and lowered myself onto a log on the verge of petrification.

“We aren’t related.” She followed, settling herself beside me on the log and gazing with me across the vast electrical display below.

“No, we aren’t blood, Nina.”

She looked at me with a toothy smile. “Hey, you remembered my name.”

I thought about the black-and-white glossy photograph of her departing ass in mid-sway, hanging in my darkroom right now.

“You were memorable,” I told her, my voice betraying nothing.

“And you’re Eli,” she flirted, nudging my shoulder with her shoulder. “Eli Connelly.”

I ignored her warm tone, instead noticing how her shoulders were overcome with shivers. “That’s right. Here, take my coat. You’re freezing. Jesus.” I shrugged off my leather riding jacket and looped it loosely around her shoulders.

Nina pouted thoughtfully up at me. She looked like a turtle with my big jacket around her shoulders. “You don’t call him Dad.” Her eyes tilted up and down over me, digging in with no attempt to disguise it. She practically sniffed at me.

“JP wasn’t my dad.”

“We don’t even look anything alike.”

“I told you, we aren’t kin.”

“I mean, we don’t even look like we were raised by the same man,” Nina articulated. “I mean, look at me. And look at you.”

I didn’t bother asking what she meant by that because it was so obvious. Being coy about it was unnecessary. “He was hard on me,” I confessed. That was the most she was getting out of me tonight, I swore to myself. That tiny admission was all the underbelly I’d show. “And, in the end, I was raised by the streets. Not JP.”

Nina frowned. She could not compute. “Seriously, or did you listen to a lot of rap music?”

“He kicked me out of the house when I was fifteen. I never went back.” There was a pause of two or three beats, and then Nina’s fingers wrapped around my forearm. I fought the instinct to shake her off. “Mom didn’t stop him, and I don’t blame her,” I went on, in case Mom’s small betrayal was the reason Nina sympathized. “She was… tired.”

“I’m so sorry, Eli.” Nina rubbed my forearm back and forth. Much better. That takes away the years of abuse. Her eyes were still searing into me, and I almost couldn’t take it. I was on the verge of snapping, I felt so damn examined. “It must sound like bullshit to you, but I kind of know how you feel.”

“No, you don’t,” I sneered automatically, so certain of that fact. I broke the contact between her hand and my forearm. Don’t.

“My dad may not have laid hands on me, but he hurt me in other ways.” Nina touched my face with the soft pads of her fingertips. Why the hell did she need to touch me? Why was she trying to get close? I jolted like a wild animal being petted and tugged away from her touch.

The back of her other hand smoothed over my cheek, and I panned toward it. She had me caught, and I gave in. It felt good to be touched, even if it made my chest ache at the same time. I didn’t know why it hurt. Maybe it had been too long.

“I know how it feels to be his kid,” Nina told me, and I opened my eyes, gazing down at her. “It hurts.”

Her deep blue eyes gleamed up at me, holding such vulnerability and loneliness in them.

An urge to kiss her rolled through me, but I wouldn’t. Not JP’s daughter. Not my stepsister.

Nina pressed forward and captured my lips with hers. Her mouth was soft and warm, and I froze. My heart punched against the inside of my chest.

Her lips drew away, and she gazed up at me again. Her eyes were dazed and hypnotic.

Her lips fluttered against mine one more time, and I unraveled with her. I was only a man of flesh and blood.