Four
FEBRUARY
Three months later
7 PM, Pacific Coast Time
San Francisco, California
HANG ON A second, doc...
It was late where he was. Or early, depending on how you looked at it.
Early morning hours, I guessed. Maybe only a few hours before dawn.
I tracked each detail obsessively, looking for clues.
I’d spent weeks after he left trying to figure out where he was exactly, taking any hint he gave me, any glimpse of his surroundings, any breath of presence or snapshot of the buildings or people he walked through or beside.
I still paid attention to every flicker of detail, no matter how small.
I’d watched him in meetings in high-ceilinged rooms. I’d watched him on the street, snowflakes melting as they touched the skin of his face and lips. I’d seen him on bridges, lying in beds, sitting on couches and in leather chairs. I’d seen him in coffee shops, in restaurants. I’d seen him with other people.
So far, at least––I hadn’t seen him screwing any of them, though.
He’d gotten offers. Lots and lots of offers.
Of course, I had no idea how much he hid from me.
I knew he sat on a windowsill now in a darkened apartment, staring down at a cobblestone street. I glimpsed flickers of awareness around him as he checked for others watching this particular stretch of dark road. I felt him looking for open windows, using his mind to scan for stray thoughts and presences. I felt the low hum of his own mind in the background, his attempts to distract me as he focused down on a green-painted door damaged by water and wind.
He couldn’t keep me out anymore though. Not like before.
Something had changed between us.
I had no idea what that thing was.
Our minds were tangled together in ways I couldn’t explain to myself––or to him, although I hadn’t really tried to do either. I didn’t talk to him about it. I didn’t want him to know really, since I suspected he might just use that information to find some new way to shut me out.
I felt his heart beat in his chest.
I felt him slow his breathing. I saw clouds of vapor as he exhaled through the open window.
It was cold. Not snowing, but cold. His gloved fingers were almost numb.
He repositioned his arms, squinting through the scope as he stared down on a dark street. He’d been given a time to be here, an exact location. They’d been precise.
Even now, as he checked his watch, noting just how precise they’d been, I felt him wonder fleetingly how they could have possibly known he would need to be in a place like this at this particular time. Downstairs in that building, people shot up heroin and fucked prostitutes. I felt the thought create a ripple of pain in him and fought not to react to that, too––not to take it personally. Really, if anything, it was a good sign.
I had to hope that his hair-trigger reactions to pretty much anything to do with sex stemmed mostly from the fact that he wasn’t getting any.
He’d agreed to this job. It wasn’t the first one he’d agreed to.
Of course, it was a leap of faith that they’d been telling him the truth about this person, about what he was. But all of the research Black had done on his own confirmed the basic facts.
The guy liked to watch women killed.
He didn’t like it to be prostitutes either, so he paid to have them kidnapped prior to their torture and death. Most were poor girls, immigrants. Dark eyes, dark hair, olive skin. Some were from Eastern Europe, but increasingly, they were from the south.
He got off on watching them beaten to death.
Black grimaced, reminding himself this was a time-limited thing.
It was a job. But it was temporary.
In the meantime, he could try to do a little good. Get one more sadistic psychopath off the streets. In the end it was only six months of his life. They owned his ass for six months.
He repeated that to himself. Reassured himself.
I kept my thoughts quiet, a glass mirror in the background.
I’d ceased to feel guilty for eavesdropping on where he was... what he was doing... even what he was thinking. I wasn’t doing it to invade his privacy. I wasn’t even doing it because both of us had gotten possessive enough for it be outright alarming at times. In all, my watching him had very little to do with the fact that he and I were more or less dating––if you could call it dating, given how things stood between us.
I wasn’t spying on him to be controlling.
I was worried about him.
When the slight-framed blond man emerged from the stained green door at the bottom of an ancient apartment building on a narrow, cobblestone alleyway, the second hand on Black’s watch had just ticked onto the top part of the minute.
Oh-three-hundred and fifty-three... precisely.
I felt him try to push me further out of his immediate consciousness, right before he switched his attention back to the earpiece he wore.
“That him?” he said only.
He felt the person on the other end checking.
He didn’t ask how they verified his target, but I felt him wonder about that, too. Were they seer? If so, he couldn’t feel it on them. For all he knew, they had a drone hovering overhead. For all he knew, involving him at all was utterly redundant.
Either way, Black knew he had the right person. He would never pull a trigger without knowing exactly who or what waited at the other end of his gun.
He also knew the final word wasn’t up to him.
“Target confirmed. Engage when ready.”
Black’s his jaw tightened, but again, he didn’t ask.
The first clear line he had, he took.
The kickback from the rifle pushed his shoulder and body back. He compensated with a precision that awed me, moving slightly on his seat on the wooden sill even as he kept his firing line utterly still. He had another bullet chambered by the bolt before he’d looked back through the scope to assess the results of the first shot.
“Direct hit,” the voice said through the earpiece. “Nicely done, Mr. Black.”
Black kept the gun aimed at the body now bleeding out on the icy sidewalk.
“Insurance?” he queried.
He’d learned to ask. They didn’t want him to take a piss without their okay.
There was another silence, then the voice rose.
“No,” it said. “First shot was fatal. You can go, Mr. Black. In fact, I was just advised to tell you to leave now. The body has been seen by another party. Authorities are being notified as we speak. You’ll be shielded from here, but if additional measures are required to keep yourself from being ID’d, I am told you may use them at your discretion...”
Black didn’t bother to answer.
He knew exactly who the “other party” was that the man in his earpiece referred to.
Ian Stone had been hunting Black the same as Black had been hunting him. Cat and mouse, wolf and rabbit––they switched roles hourly, daily, sometimes by the minute.
Lowering the gun, Black slid out of view of the window.
He dropped to the floor, immediately disassembling the rifle and putting the pieces in the long case that lay on the thin, olive-green carpet. Again, he worked with a speed and an efficiency that fascinated me. He already had most of those pieces back in their foam molds inside the case when he reached up to turn off the headset, then shifted the direction of his consciousness back towards me.
You still there, Miri? he sent.
I’d learned to play dumb. It probably should have made me nervous, just how good I was getting at playing the oblivious girlfriend. Then again, I’d been trained to use whatever I had when circumstances demanded it.
Do I even want to know what that was? I let my thoughts hold a faint edge.
I felt Black sigh.
I tried to give him opportunities to tell me things, to open up to me about where he was, what he was doing, how he really felt. I tried to keep an open line between us, in case he changed his mind... in case he needed me like that.
So far he hadn’t. Not once.
I felt the shame there, even now, lingering in the background like smoke. In the foreground, I felt him thinking quietly that he needed to get better about blocking me. I felt him thinking I was too much in his light now for him to be sloppy about holding that line. He couldn’t afford to be half-assed about partitioning his thoughts, not while he was here.
When he didn’t answer, I pressed him again.
What are you doing right now, Black? That time, I let him feel more of my real feelings. Concern bled through my thoughts and I felt it disarm him, making his jaw clench. You must know I’m worried about you...
Fighting back his reaction, he sent me a pulse of reassurance. Just some work for a client, he sent back, and more or less truthfully. I know you’re sick of hearing this, but I really can’t tell you any more than that right now, Miri. I would if I could.
What client? I sent. Who? Can you tell me that much at least?
You already know who.
Black...
I’m not quite as dumb as you think either, baby.
I started to protest, but felt him smile.
He sent me a pulse of heat.
When I reacted sharply, my light flaring into his, he pulled back, clenching his jaw a second time. I felt his own pain worsen. I felt a denser want there, keening upwards, nearly violent before he brought it back under control. I felt him thinking about sex. Images flickered there... wanting. The job made it worse. The stress. He wanted the comfort. He wanted the comfort and the connection. Hell, he wanted the physical outlet.
He didn’t know how much more of this he could take.
I remained quiet, just outside the wall he’d thrown up between us.
I hadn’t reacted like that on purpose, much less done it to hurt him, but I still felt guilty. I honestly couldn’t help it anymore. Whatever kept us so tightly bound together now––whatever made it so easy to hear his thoughts and the voices that lingered around him––that same thing also made me want him so badly at times I could barely control myself. When I was this tangled in his mind, I had to do everything in my power not to pull on him.
I felt him missing me.
For both of us now, it was like an ongoing, physical ache.
He’d come close to telling me that a few times, too.
Close. But he hadn’t done it.
I felt him thinking what a fucking coward he was with me still.
The wall between us shifted, grew porous.
I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can, he promised. I’m finishing this as fast as I can, Miri. I swear to the gods I am... I promise.
I let him feel my skepticism.
Not that he was lying about trying to get back to me.
More that he was downplaying the danger he was in, as well as how bad things really were for him there.
You’re really not going to tell me anything? I sent. Nothing about what you’re doing, or what this is really about... or why you agreed to it?
Bringing down the lid of the case and fastening the metal clasps on either end before he spun the combination lock on the outside, locking the gun within, he sighed. I felt him struggle with a heavier feeling that wanted to take over his light.
Shoving it aside, he shook his head, rising to his feet with the handle firmly grasped in his fingers.
No, baby, he sent softly, weaving an apology into the words. ... I’m not.
IT WAS FEBRUARY.
It was a cold, windy, sometimes-rainy and sometimes-blue skies February, and I sat in an Italian restaurant on California street, my mushroom gnocchi with cream sauce growing colder by the minute. I hadn’t even touched it. It just sat there on a plate between my elbows, and now even the smell made my stomach roil with nausea.
I bit my lip, fighting frustration as I stared at the man sitting across from me.
We’d had this conversation before, he and I.
Not these exact words.
More, it was the whole gist of the conversation, which felt a lot too similar to a conversation I’d had with him in Bangkok a few months earlier. He’d refused to take me seriously in that conversation, too. He’d also refused to believe that Black was in danger.
Just like that time in Bangkok, Kiko sat next to him, listening to us argue, her dark eyes probing as they scanned my face.
“––Dex, please,” I said, holding up a hand as I cut him off. “I don’t need to hear all this. I’m not arguing protocol with you. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the company’s operational protocols. I’m telling you, something is wrong. Something that falls outside of your damned protocol...” Biting my lip to keep from raising my voice more, I deliberately subdued it instead. “Aren’t you intelligence trained? Do you really need to list out protocols to shut me up? Or do you want to listen to what I’m saying and think for yourself?”
Dex frowned, glancing at Kiko, who raised her eyebrows.
The only thing noticeably different––in my mind, at least––between the conversation we were having now and the one we had in Bangkok were the clothes the three of us wore.
Rather than a sundress and sandals, Kiko, a small-bodied but densely-muscled Japanese woman, wore form-fitting black pants and a black T-shirt, the basic uniform of Black’s team. She looked like what she was in that outfit––ex-military.
Dex, the handsome, thirties-ish African-American man sitting next to her on the leather booth, wore a tailored, charcoal-colored suit, presumably because he’d been to see a client earlier that day, or would be seeing one after lunch. He looked significantly less military now than he had when I first met him in Bangkok, but I knew him as another of Black’s vets, and definitely one with an intelligence background, despite my jab.
Like Bangkok, this meeting had been my idea.
Like Bangkok, they’d been stonewalling me at every goddamned turn.
Unlike Bangkok, I found I cared a lot less about my previous “rules” around when to use my psychic ability on other people.
Truthfully, I was struggling more every day with the emotional side of things, and that made this conversation a lot harder. I’d talked to my shrink about it––a sweet, ex-combat vet by the name of Roger who did trauma counseling for people who’d experienced violent ordeals. Nick insisted I go see someone when he finally heard the bare bones of the story around what happened to me in Bangkok.
I hadn’t told Nick details, definitely not about the seer side of things, but he knew what Black’s employees knew––namely the part about me being abducted and held by a mercenary who worked for human traffickers out of Russia.
Nick had been horrified, of course.
Predictably, he’d also blamed Black.
He immediately insisted I go see Roger as well, who did crisis counseling work for the police. And yes, Nick was right to pressure me to see someone professionally, although I fought him on it when he first brought it up.
Roger seemed to think my new hyper-emotionality was a normal side-effect of the trauma, and ultimately a good sign I was working through things.
Personally, I wasn’t so sure.
I couldn’t tell Roger that though, or anyone else really... including the two people sitting across from me now.
I’d asked them to meet me down here, at a small, family-owned Italian restaurant across the street from the office building on California Street. So far, it looked like I was completely wasting my time.
“You’ve been talking to him more than us, doc.” Dex’s voice remained studiously casual, but I felt him watching me warily with his coffee-colored eyes. “I’m not sure what you expect us to do about it. If you want him to come home, tell him to come home.”
I bit my lip, looking between the two of them.
“Do you know who he’s working for right now?” I said.
Silence. I sat back in my chair, forcing my expression still.
“Do you?” I said.
“No, doc,” Dex sighed. “And frankly, it’s none of our––”
“––He’s working for Mr. Lucky.”
Ignoring Dex’s annoyed scowl, I looked between them, noting recognition even as I used my psychic ability to read them to confirm the extent of it.
“He got bullied into a minimum six month contract with him,” I added. “...doing God knows what. So... you understand my concern, right? He’s working for a mafia lord based out of Russia. A human and drug trafficker who’s rumored to cut his opponents into pieces and feed them to his dogs when they piss him off. I’ve been reading about him... this ‘Mr. Lucky.’ In your very own files. They say he keeps children as pets. That he has women chained to his dining room floor to give blowjobs to the guests at dinner parties...”
Seeing Kiko in particular wince and grimace, glancing around us in the restaurant, I glared between the two of them, ignoring her unspoken request to keep my voice down.
“If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Lucky is the human trafficker operating out of Europe these days. Maybe in the whole world. You really think Black would work for him willingly?”
Could that be true? I heard Kiko think. Why the hell would Black tell her that, even if it was true? Adjusting her butt on the seat, she glanced around the restaurant again nervously. Black wouldn’t work for that psychopath... would he?
I felt her doubt, even as she wondered at possible angles.
Dex’s thoughts made it more swiftly to his lips.
“No way Black would work for that piece of shit, doc,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know where you got that information, but it’s wrong. And yes, I know who ‘Mr. Lucky’ is. You don’t know Black at all if you think Black would work for him... for any reason.”
“You’re not listening to me,” I said coldly.
“I’m listening just fine––”
“No,” I cut in. “...You’re not. I just said he was doing it under duress. Do you get what under fucking duress means? It means he’s not doing it of his own volition.”
I saw Dex’s jaw harden, enough to push out the muscles in his face.
He glanced at Kiko, and again I didn’t need to read him to pick up his thoughts.
I bit my lip, controlling my anger with an effort.
“...Or were you going to give me another condescending speech about how that could never happen? Even given what I just told you about who’s putting pressure on him?”
“How could you possibly know that, doc?” Dex said, holding up his hands. “How? You wanna enlighten us on your source?”
“Black admitted it to me,” I snapped. “He fucking admitted he’s working for him. He cut a deal with him in Bangkok... not only for me, but for his friend Lawless, too. And for those kids he’s been protecting through his organization. He thinks it’s the only way to keep us alive.”
Kiko held up a hand, looking between me and Dex.
“You need to talk about this quieter, doc,” she said, her voice warning.
She looked worried now as she stared at me, though.
She really believes that, I heard her think. She really thinks Black is running some kind of contract with that group out of Russia. Her full lips pursed. But why the hell would he do that? He’s had that Moscow network under surveillance for years...
I felt her dismiss the possibility again seconds later.
... He wouldn’t work for Lucky. Not for any reason. And why would Lucky care about Miriam? Or about Black himself for that matter, assuming Lucky’s using her to get to him? Black’s rich but he would barely register to someone like Lucky...
That time, I had to bite my lip to remain silent.
I looked back at Dex.
“Just look into it, will you?” I turned to stare at Kiko. “One of you. Look into it... please. I’m telling you, he’s working for Lucky and he’s in over his head.”
Dex shook his head, his brown eyes even more skeptical.
When I pressed my lips together, struggling to control my temper, he laid a hand on the table, an obvious calming gesture that really didn’t help.
“Look,” Dex said, taking a deep breath before talking lower. “You’ll get no argument from either of us that Lucky and his private army of butchers out of Moscow are some scary-ass motherfuckers. But truthfully, doc, if Lucky and his ilk wanted Black dead... boss’d more than likely be dead already. I know you think we’re so stupid we don’t understand that, but believe me... we do. Black’s good. He’s really fucking good. Which means he’s also good enough to know when he’s out-gunned. He’s always been pretty careful to keep us well away from organized crime, particularly at the level of that group. That’s been true of anything within our direct operating scope, and even with his humanitarian work, where he’s crossed paths with them in minor ways but never in a way that would truly threaten them...”
I was already shaking my head.
“I know all that,” I said.
“Then what, doc? What are you saying right now?”
“They don’t want him dead. They’re trying to, I don’t know...” I fought with how much to say, waving a hand vaguely over my plate. “...recruit him. They want him to work for them. Full time. This contract is just an excuse... a way to keep him close and probably test him until they can win him over all the way.”
When I looked up, Dex’s eyes had narrowed.
“Why the hell would they want that?” he said, his voice openly skeptical. “Black’s not a trafficker. He’s about as far from a trafficker as a person could get.”
“I don’t know,” I lied. “But I know I’m right. Black hasn’t admitted that part to me, but he hasn’t denied it, either.”
“If Black tells you so much,” Dex said. “Why do you need us at all, doc?”
I didn’t have to read him that time, either.
Dex’s voice made it crystal clear he thought I was lying.
My jaw hardened to stone. I started to answer but Kiko held up a hand between us as if to head off the explosion, glaring at Dex.
“Stop needling her, Dex,” she said to the broad-shouldered man, her voice an open warning. “I mean it. You’re just pissing her off. Black’s not going to thank you for it.”
When Dex frowned, but seemed to acknowledge her words, she turned to me.
“Look, doc... there’s only so much we can do.” Her almond-shaped eyes grew serious. “You can think it’s stupid if you want, but Black has strict protocols around when he goes dark like this. We can’t go against those... not without a really damned good reason. Dex is being an ass about it, but what he’s trying to tell you...” She glared at the big ex-soldier, who rolled his eyes. “...Is that you’ve probably got more power in this situation than we do.”
“And then some,” Dex seconded, grunting.
“You’ve got a personal relationship with him, Miriam,” Kiko said, her voice softer. “Ours is strictly professional. Moreover, you may have noticed, but he demands military-strict chain of command with all of us when it comes to how he’s set up his company. There’s a reason he hires mostly vets. That doesn’t give us the luxury to question orders...”
“Damned straight,” Dex muttered.
Kiko glared at him again, but he only shrugged, his eyes unapologetic. Picking up his fork, he went back to attacking his spinach ravioli with vodka cream sauce.
I watched him eat, shaking my head a little before I purposefully calmed my voice. “You have absolutely nothing in place for when you believe your boss may be acting under duress?”
Dex let out another disbelieving snort, dropping his fork with a clatter.
I ignored him, looking only at Kiko.
“I get that you both think I’m just some hyper-emotional girlfriend who doesn’t know Black as well as I think I do,” I said, my voice a notch colder as I glared at Dex. Since that’s more or less exactly what he’d been thinking while he’d been eating his ravioli, I saw him blanch. “...But maybe you’re forgetting what happened in Bangkok not that long ago?”
Dex’s broad shoulders stiffened. He glared at me, his warm brown eyes suddenly a few shades colder as well.
“You were wrong about that too, doc,” he said, his voice openly angry. He aimed his fork straight at my face. “That fucker didn’t go after Black, like you said he would. He went after you. Like Black said he would. Like I said he would, if you recall...”
“I know that,” I said, exasperated. “You’re missing my point.”
“I don’t think we are,” Kiko said.
Her voice came out sadder than Dex’s, and held more of an apology, but I heard the firmness there, too.
“...We’re telling you there’s not much we can do when Black specifically orders us away like this, Miri. We could be putting him in danger by disobeying him. For that reason alone, we’re not going to do it. We’ve no concrete reason to believe anything is wrong on his end. He’s never given us any reason not to trust him when he tells us that everything is fine.”
When I shook my head, clenching my jaw, she laid a hand cautiously on my arm.
“Miri. We do have protocols in place for when he’s acting under duress. Code phrases, key words. He hasn’t used any of them. Not one. Given that, we have to assume he knows what he’s doing. He could be undercover, or working with someone with ties to––”
“I get all that,” I snapped, shaking off her hand. “Are you fucking deaf? I’m telling you... that’s not what’s happening!”
I didn’t realize how loud I said it until our segment of the restaurant grew quiet.
Glancing around at the stares I’d gathered with my little outburst, I bit my lip.
Looking back at Kiko, I kept my gaze flat.
Dex gave me a disbelieving look from where he sat by the window, once more holding his fork. Outside, I could see rain coming down as people passed by, now holding umbrellas.
“So you’re not going to help me.” It wasn’t really a question.
“Help you?” Dex said, exasperated. “Help you with what?”
Kiko held up a hand, silencing him. “Give us something concrete, doc. That’s all we ask. You give us that, and we’ll help however you want.”
Dex let out a louder grunt. “Help. You want us to help you get him killed.”
When I glared at him, feeling my fingers tighten into fists on my lap, he aimed his fork at me again, another gesture of his I remembered from Bangkok.
“Listen to Kiko, doc,” he advised. “We’ll help like gangbusters, if Black really is in trouble. But you need proof if you want us to go against Black’s word. Telling us you’ve got a feeling in your little pinky toe that tells you he’s got a gun to his head? After he’s told us to leave him be? Well, shit. What do you want me to do with that?”
I didn’t flinch, but glared right back at him. “I want you to listen to me when I tell you I’ve been talking to him... and that he’s admitted to me that he’s working for Lucky. I want you to listen to me when I tell you that something’s wrong,” I said through gritted teeth.
But I might as well have been talking to my gnocchi.
“...Remember orders, doc?” Dex said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Chain of command? Remember what that’s like? He’s not just your boyfriend...”
I stiffened but he didn’t miss a beat.
“...he’s our fucking boss. Hell, he’s your boss, doc. You need to act accordingly... and think with your mind. Not with whatever the hell it is you’re thinking with...”
He waved the fork in the general area of my torso.
Fury caught in my chest, enough that I gritted my teeth more.
Kiko glared at him too, telling him with her eyes to be silent, but Dex looked only at me, once more aiming his fork at my face.
“You talk to your man, you got an issue with what he’s doing,” Dex said. “Leave us out of it. Unless you’ve got something we can act on, we’re not getting involved in whatever...” He gestured up and down at me again vaguely. “...Whatever the hell this is.”
I bit my tongue harder.
That time I remained silent because I didn’t trust myself to speak.
I knew exactly what he was implying.
I didn’t need my psychic ability to discern any aspect of the meaning there. He thought I was trying to drag them into some kind of domestic situation. He thought Black was giving me the brush off... that he’d succumbed to his usual wandering eyes and lost interest in me... and that I was deluding myself into thinking it was because he was in some kind of danger.
Dex was telling me, in his own way, to wake up and smell the cheating bastard.
Of course, the thought had already crossed my mind.
But that had been months ago.
When Black first left, I’d entertained all those doubts.
I’d gone back and forth in my head about why he hadn’t told me where he was going or why. I’d agonized over what I’d done to him the night before he left, and whether he’d been lying to me when he said he didn’t mind that I’d done it. I’d questioned why he still didn’t trust me enough to confide in me, why he’d been so distant with me in those last few minutes before he walked out of his apartment on California Street.
I’d gone through the whole process of feeling abandoned, of feeling like he’d jerked me around, of feeling lied to and probably cheated on. I’d already processed my anger that he’d done his usual disappearing act without telling me a damned thing.
And yes, I’d been angry with him.
I’d been really angry at first. Angry enough that I didn’t take his calls for weeks after he first took off. Angry enough that I kissed Nick one night in a somewhat misguided attempt to get revenge on Black.
Really, it was more than a kiss.
I might have slept with Nick, if I’d been a little drunker.
Some of that had been the difficulty of not having Black around while I still felt unsafe from what Solonik had done. Some of that had been the difficulty of not having him around when I could feel myself changing... seemingly more every day... and I didn’t know how worried I should be about those changes. Some of it had been that Black still hadn’t told me jack shit about who or what I was. Some of it was that I missed him and wanted him to regret leaving.
But I went through all those different stages, and I got over it.
Around Christmas, we started talking again.
Fingering the Native American pendant I wore around my neck, my Christmas present from Black, I bit my lip until I tasted blood. This wasn’t in my head. This wasn’t me being delusional or paranoid. This wasn’t just Black being a commitment-phobe, either.
I no longer believed Black took off because he didn’t want to be with me.
Truthfully, I don’t know that I ever believed that, despite my fears.
Dex implying that I was too delusional to see the difference between being rejected by Black and being worried about him infuriated me. The fact that I could feel some sympathy on Dex for my situation didn’t help at all. He thought he was doing me a kindness. Giving me some tough love, rather than enabling me in my fantasies about Black and wherever he might be right now, and whoever he might be with.
The bottom line was, I knew I wouldn’t get any help from him.
I wouldn’t get any help from either of them.
Like in Bangkok, I was on my own.