Meant For Me (16 page)

“Drink?” I asked her, shouting in her ear so she could hear me over the band.

She shook her head, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her sister. Anya was on stage in a black bra and a very tiny skirt. She had the same shape as Chloe, but she had done something to push her chest up and out in a prominent way that shifted focus away from her naturally thin frame straight to her chest. They were definitely fraternal twins though. Anya’s eyes and forehead were different, but she was beautiful. I wondered what she would look like without the heavy eye makeup I’d seen in every photo of her and that she was sporting again on stage.

I had been curious to hear her voice, to try to gauge if Chloe would sound the same, but her singing voice was more like a screaming voice and I couldn’t tell anything really about her speaking voice. Her irritation through the intercom had been clear, her voice huskier than I had imagined. This voice was shrill. Neither of those seemed to suit Chloe. Anya definitely moved with a confidence and even a defiance that Chloe lacked.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Chloe, kissing the top of her head. She gave me an absent-minded nod.

This night required vodka. One drink wasn’t going to kill me. I turned and gestured to the bartender. She was wearing tight high-waisted jeans and a crop top, a bottle opener tucked into her back pocket. I ordered a shot of Stoli and offered her one too. She gave me a frown.

“I’m not hitting on you,” I told her. “I’m a bartender myself. Just offering a little professional courtesy.”

Her shoulders relaxed. “Sure, what the hell?”

After she poured we saluted each other with our shot glasses and drank. The burn felt fantastic going down. It was a tight grip stretching my tongue down into my stomach, like a rubber band then letting it snap back. It shocked me into greater awareness. I paid her and went back to Chloe, limbs looser.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded. But she pulled her phone and typed on it and showed it to me.

It’s weird, seeing her. I’ve waited so long and here it is and it’s just… weird.

It was my turn to nod. “I know. She’s a stranger. She’s your sister but she’s still a stranger.” That had been my fear. That the four year old Anya was so removed from the adult Anya that Chloe would be disappointed. But she didn’t look disappointed. She looked sad. Deeply, profoundly sad. Like in finding Anya, she realized she’d lost her a long time ago.

I want to hug her. Just once. And I wanted her to speak.

That made my chest tighten. I put my arm around her. “I know, baby,” I repeated. “I know. Do you want to leave a note for her or something?”

She nodded. Taking a piece of paper out of her small purse, she set it on the bartop and scrawled on it. Then she folded it up and looked at me. I took a twenty out of my wallet.

“Give it to her in the tips bucket.”

Chloe did, weaving through the crowd while I watched her from the bar. I noticed that Anya watched her carefully through narrowed eyes, even while she sang. Then she gestured to someone off stage to the left. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it became obvious when a guy in a club T-shirt accosted Chloe, taking her by the elbow and forcibly leading her off the dance floor. I moved forward.

“Hey! Get your fucking hands off her.”

The bouncer glanced over at me. “I’m tossing her. She was stealing tips.”

“The hell she was.” I wedged myself between him and Chloe. “We’ll leave, but get your fucking hands off her right now.” Anya had wanted Chloe thrown out. What a bitch. She knew full well Chloe was her sister. I was convinced of it. Otherwise she wouldn’t know what Chloe looked like and she wouldn’t give a shit if a chick in a yellow sundress dropped a twenty in the tip bucket.

When the guy didn’t let go of Chloe I put my hand on his and removed his grip from her skin. “Back the fuck off.”

Setting her behind me, I squared off with him.

“Look who’s tough,” he sneered. “Rich boy from Connecticut.”

“Maine, actually,” I said, smirking right back. I stared him down.

His gaze flickered to the right. We were causing a scene. “Just get her out of here,” he said.

Chloe was typing on her phone. I took her hand and pulled her out of the club, making sure I kept an eye on the bouncer and the doorman. No one gave us any further hassle but I didn’t relax until we were a block away. Chloe showed me her phone.

Anya had me thrown out, didn’t she?

“Yes.” There was no point in lying to her. She was smart enough to figure out that was what had happened. “Clearly she does actually remember otherwise she wouldn’t have recognized you.”

Why?
She mouthed to me.

She looked heartbroken. Devastated. There were tears shining in her eyes she was valiantly trying to hold back. Damn it. My chest tightened.

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know, baby. Maybe it’s just hard for her to dredge up the past. She wasn’t adopted the way you were. She ended up in foster care.”

We were only a few blocks from the hotel and the night air was cooler than the afternoon heat had been but it still smelled like the Village. Like rotting trash and a pervasive odor of cooked food wafting out from apartments and neighborhood restaurants. I loved the energy of New York. Hated the traffic and the smell in high summer. It might be September but it still smelled like August. Sweat and sweet and sour pork. There was a car honking somewhere behind us and a car alarm was going off. I hated that we were in public and Chloe was on the verge of losing it. I just wanted to hold her in private and comfort her.

Find the words that would make this right for her.

Not that any words could do that.

But I wanted to try.

But Chloe didn’t look like she belonged in the City. She belonged in Maine, on the coast, the waves crashing behind her. On the beach on a blanket with me staring down into her trusting eyes. This environment only amplified her vulnerability. It put me on edge. I wanted to protect her, but I wasn’t even sure from what, exactly. She wasn’t walking fast enough and I realized I was half-dragging her. Taking a deep breath, I slowed my gait down to match hers.

When we reached the hotel we had to brush past a confrontation in the lobby between the desk clerk and a guy who looked like he was probably homeless and had wandered in. Up in our room, I made a decision. “Grab your stuff. We’re not staying here.”

She looked at me in question. I could see she was about to launch a protest.

“I don’t mean leaving New York. Just this flea-bitten hotel. I can’t stand the thought of you lying on these sheets.”

Screw the cost. This wasn’t going to happen. I did a quick search on my phone, found a hotel a few blocks away that had good guest reviews and hit call. “Yes, do you have any rooms available tonight?”

“Yes, we do.”

“I’ll take a king size please. I’ll be there in less than ten minutes.”

I gave the clerk my information and then I grabbed my bag and Chloe’s. “Let’s go. This hotel has a garage so we can drive there.”

Chloe’s eyes were still shiny, but at least she didn’t look in imminent danger of crying. She looked bruised, though. Defeated. I didn’t know how to fix that, how to make everything okay for her.

We had to drive past the club. Unfortunately, Anya was standing outside smoking, talking to the doorman. I thought Chloe was going to jump out of the car, but instead as she gestured for me to slow down, she rolled the window down and just stared.

Anya looked over and started, before recovering. She narrowed her eyes at Chloe, her arm coming up to hug across her body. With affected nonchalance, she lifted her cigarette to her mouth and took a deep drag. Chloe had dug in her backpack. She tossed something out the open window. I heard it hit the sidewalk. It sounded like a bag of coins or something.

“What was that?” I asked. Even though traffic was light, I still needed to pull away. “Do you need that back?” I’d have to find a place to park.

But Chloe shook her head without turning to look at me. As I hit the gas, I glanced in the rearview mirror. Anya had moved to pick up the tossed object. She stared after us. Chloe finally turned and settled back against her seat. Her shoulders slumped. I saw them start to shake as she cried silently.

Shit. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could say. So I just shut my mouth. If she needed me she would let me know. And I figured right then all I could do was just put my arms around her. I drove with one hand on her leg, caressing up and down in a way I hoped was reassuring.

The second hotel was about a hundred times better than the first, which it should be given the price. I handed over my credit card, figuring it was worth it. I’d deal with paying it later. I just wanted to get Chloe into a quiet room with a clean bed and let her talk or cry or whatever she needed to do.

But the more upscale nature of the hotel made the desk clerk look at us out of the corner of his eye as I checked in. Maybe we looked young. Chloe certainly did.

After he eyed Chloe for about the fifth time and was only polite at best to me, he finally asked her, “Are you okay? Do you need help?”

Considering that she still looked like she was about to cry, it was a fair question. She shook her head.

“Can I just hear you say that you’re okay?” he asked, his voice gentle but firm.

I had to give the guy props. He wasn’t about to let a guest beat the crap out of his girlfriend while he was at the desk.

“She doesn’t speak English,” I told him. “She’s Russian.”

Apparently the clerk was Russian too. Or at least Eastern European with a comprehension of Russian because he spoke again, and while my uneducated ear thought it was Russian, I wasn’t exactly one hundred percent. I took a second look at his name tag. Ivan. Figured. Now Chloe wasn’t going to answer and I was going to get arrested for domestic violence or some such shit when all I freaking wanted to do was give her some privacy and comfort in a clean room.

But to my complete and total shock Chloe answered him. In Russian. I couldn’t understand, and it was only what sounded like a word or two, but she spoke. Out loud. She looked as stunned as I felt. Her voice was soft, melodic, very feminine. It was everything I would have expected her to sound like based on her laugh, and influenced in my mind by her music. She sounded like her piano playing- delicate, lyrical. There wasn’t anything harsh about her speaking voice.

Whatever she had said reassured the clerk because he nodded and handed me the room keys.

“Room twelve-fourteen, elevators to your right. Enjoy your stay.”

“Thanks.” I put my hand on the small of her back and led Chloe in the direction indicated. We stopped in front of the bank of elevators and I pushed the button, my heart pounding heavily in my chest. I didn’t know what to say. Where words had once come easily to me, now they seemed to stick in my throat. Hell, they didn’t even form. My thoughts were erratic, even a little angry.

At Anya. At Chloe’s biological and adopted mothers. At myself. Even at Chloe.

Finally as the doors dinged open I asked in a low voice, “What did you say to him?”

She touched my arm, forcing me to look at her. Ok, she mouthed.

“That you were okay?”

She nodded.

“Did…” I didn’t know how to ask. “Did you mean to do that? Did it just happen?”

Chloe shrugged.

It wasn’t fair that she could speak to the desk clerk and not to me. That was what I thinking, and it was selfish and childish and dickish. What, this was about me? But I couldn’t help it. I wanted to hear her thoughts and she couldn’t give them to me. But she could to the random guy behind the counter at the Lexington Hotel? What the fuck?

We went up in silence. I tried to shake it off. Let it go. This was about her. She’d seen her sister and after a seventeen year wait it hadn’t exactly been a stellar reunion. So I took her hand. “What did you drop out the window?”

But Chloe just shook her head.

I sighed. I couldn’t help it. It was an awesome thing to have feelings for a girl again. To look at someone and want the best for her and to want to know what you could do to make her life just a little bit easier. To feel that swell in your chest when you saw her and know that you could be made to be a better human being because you weren’t all about you. But at the same time, it was frustrating and agonizing to love a girl like Chloe, who couldn’t tell me anything. I could read her expressions, sure, but I wanted to share conversation with her, I wanted her to reassure me that if she could, she would.

I wanted to be important. To be the one that she confided in. The one she let into her secret world of Chloe thoughts.

Which was just me being selfish again.

On the twelfth floor I found our room and slid the card to unlock the door. Holding it open, I let Chloe pass. Following her in, I dumped our bags on the floor and gave a quick inspection. It was clean. Small, as most rooms in New York were, but it was definitely newer and stylish. I pulled back the sheets and found they were crisp white, recently washed. “Sorry about that other place,” I said, sitting down with a sigh. There was a crick in my neck. I wanted a hot shower, but I knew sleep would elude me. I was too tense for sleep, and that vodka had only made me crave more.

When I turned around Chloe was right there behind me and she threw her arms around my neck. Before I even had a chance to react she was rubbing herself on me, hip to hip against me, and kissing me passionately. For a second, my body responded enthusiastically, but it was so out of character and so unexpected I couldn’t roll with it. Setting her back slightly I searched her face.

“Chloe. What are you doing? Don’t you want to talk about what happened?”

She shook her head and tried to kiss me again.

I hesitated. She had been on the verge of tears ten minutes earlier. This seemed like a bad time for our first night together. “I don’t feel right about this. I feel like you’re upset and this isn’t smart for us to do this.”

Chloe pouted. And put her hand squarely on my dick. She may not have subtlety or finesse on her side, but she had a raw and innocent determination that was appealing as hell. She wanted me and I wanted her and clearly I was a fucking moron to be hesitating. Yet I didn’t want her to have regrets and I didn’t want her to use sex as a way to ignore what had happened with Anya.