On The Ropes (13 page)

Next time, wake me before you leave, and I’ll tomfool you twice before breakfast.

She was my slice of normal. A sliver of light in the center of so much dark.

I’d fight to keep it for as long as I could.

“
I
can’t park
this car. Why does he have a car like this? It’s ridiculous.”

Amused, I watched my sister attempt to parallel park between a Cadillac and a giant SUV. “Fox has a ‘Vette because he’s rich. As are you, now. So you could buy something tiny that fits your senior citizen ways. Like a go-cart.”

“Shut up.” She grinned in triumph as she lined up her wheels with the curb. “There, I did it.”

“You did. And I’m sure it won’t cost that much to have that mirror put back on,” I said cheerfully, bending to pick up my purse.

“What? What mirror?” Mia craned her neck to look toward the passenger side of the vehicle. “How did I miss—” She narrowed her eyes as I cough-laughed into my cupped hand. “You are a liar who lies.”

“Only on Fridays.” I pushed open my door and glanced back at my sister. “Why are we here anyway? Will you just tell me already?”

“I want your opinion, without prejudgments. So no, I won’t tell you.” She got out and waited for me on the sidewalk. “It’s just up here,” she said, taking off on her ridiculously long legs.

My legs weren’t that long, and I was wearing strappy heeled sandals, because I hadn’t realized we were going on a walking tour of Brooklyn.

“Why didn’t we park closer?” I asked as we cleared the first block and reached the second.

“Do you see parking on this street? No. Besides, you can use the exercise. Baking brownies at two a.m. last night,” she said, shaking her head as I finally caught up with her.

Yeah, because I’d had the munchies after a late night hookup with Gio, which she didn’t need to know anything about since we were sneaking around and all. The secrecy might’ve bothered me, if I hadn’t appreciated the simplicity. Besides, the sex seemed even hotter when I couldn’t tell anyone about having it.

Who was I kidding? The sex was hot as hell to begin with.

I would’ve just made the brownies at his place, but he didn’t have ingredients in his kitchen to make much of anything. I intended to rectify that soon, if only to please my own late night baking tendencies. In the past couple of weeks we’d been meeting on the downlow, he’d had groceries in his kitchen exactly once, and that could not stand. And if he thought me buying eggs and flour was a violation of our casual friends-and-sex verbal agreement, then he could just bite me.

A quick glance down at my inner wrist made me grin.
Oh lookie, he already did.

Mia stopped in front of a nondescript glass door beside a shuttered storefront with a giant grate pulled down over the windows. Graffiti covered the metal, various slang words in interesting combinations. And in the bottom right, a crude drawing of a sex act I’d enjoyed more than once.

“Hmm,” I said, cocking my head. “Interesting place.”

“Not there. That’s a different storefront. Not connected. This is the place.” She produced a key from her pocket and turned it in the lock before opening the door and motioning me inside. “Straight down the hall. We’ll start there first. The stairs go to a second level.”

“That’s usually what stairs do.”

She pointed inside, and I went. I could tell when my sister was nervous, and when she was nervous, I got nervous too. She was unflappable most of the time, so if something had her vexed, it probably wasn’t good.

“What is this?” I wandered down the short hall with its threadbare, ancient carpet and opened up another a glass door. Stepping inside took my breath away. “A dance studio?”

“Used to be, yeah.” She stopped beside me and viewed the space with her hands in her back pockets and her lower lip caught between her teeth. She bit her lip all the time too, just like I did. Somehow I’d never noticed before.

I walked over to the ballet barre and ran my hand over the dusty wood, imagining how many other hands, small and large, had gripped it.

“What do you think?” Mia hadn’t moved from the doorway.

“It’s a pretty place. Lots of light.” I walked to the back of the room where sunlight poured in through the large windows and highlighted the tracks of dust on the grimy hardwood floors. It needed some TLC, but I could see the possibilities. I stared out at the wild shrubbery in back, backing up to a chain link fence. Though there wasn’t much of a yard, unsurprisingly, the stone patio was a nice surprise. “Why do you have a key?”

“Because I’m buying it.”

“Huh?”

“I’m purchasing it. It’s going to be mine. Well, ours, if you want to come on board.”

I turned and stared at my sister across the enormous studio. The fact that it was a former dance place wasn’t lost on me. It made me itchy, and wonder if the two halves of my life were on a collision course.

But of course they weren’t. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and sometimes an old, abandoned dance studio with windchimes hanging from the ceiling fixture was just that.

“Yours and mine for what? You better start ‘splainin’, Lucy.”

“You know I wanted to do that shelter,” she began, moving around as if she couldn’t keep still. Another sure sign of nerves. “A safe place for people to go after a traumatic event. Not just for counseling necessarily, but for anything they need. There are a couple smaller studios that branch off this one. Here, and here.” She walked from one door to another without opening them. She trailed her fingers over the grungy doors and turned back to me. “They could just be quiet places. Somewhere without judgment, without having to think beyond the next moment. There’s another room over there, a smaller one, that might work for a counselor’s office.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was pretty sure I’d lost my voice entirely.

“It’s just in the planning stages right now, but I sorta put an offer together. The owner rejected my first one, so I talked to Tray’s dad, and he helped me figure out what I should counter with if I decide to try again. I needed you to see it, to tell me if you feel what I do.”

“What do you feel?” I whispered.

“Hope.” She gripped the barre with her good hand—she’d gotten her cast off a couple of days ago, but she was still being careful with her injured arm—and tipped back her head, studying the ceiling windchimes as I had. “I’m probably projecting, because this is where I’d hoped to open. This neighborhood, I mean. I wanted a storefront, not somewhere tucked too far away in a building no one could find. There isn’t anything but that one door, but that’s enough. We can paint the name on the glass, make sure it’s really visible. And your section is to the left of the building. You probably didn’t see the staircase around the side. The second floor has a small storefront, big enough for your display window—”

“What display window?” My head was spinning, my chest was too tight. “What are you talking about?”

“Your bakery. Well, it doesn’t have to be a bakery. You can make whatever you like. A café, maybe? That could work too. But I thought the space would be perfect. Your cooking soothes you, so maybe it would soothe someone else. They could leave here, go upstairs, get a cup of tea and a cookie. Or not. I just want to offer…comfort,” she finished, lifting her hands and letting them fall. “In whatever form that takes. For everyone it’s different.”

“A bakery.” Already I could see it. Cheerful pink, yellow and blue cupcakes in the window. Pies and cakes in a revolving tower. A fancy lighted case for all the other goodies I could create. “Mine?”

“Yours.” Her eyes dampened and she cleared her throat. “If you wanted it, that is. I’m sorry, I forget to ask. Just assumed.”

“As if I could say no.”

“You can. You can always say no. It’s your choice.”

I wasn’t ready to think about choices, to let my mind wander from today to that night a few weeks ago. One had nothing to do with the other, and I didn’t want all this good tainted by what had happened in the club. Somehow that had turned into good too, with what was happening with me and Gio. I didn’t know all his secrets, and he didn’t know mine—or Mia’s. We were living on borrowed time, and any day now, the thing we had going could end. Maybe that was why it was so precious. Temporary or not, it was very good.

So was this, and that was what I had to focus on. Not times when I hadn’t had a choice. Or when Mia hadn’t had one.

Making the choice to be happy, to live in the moment, was the hardest of all.

“If I’m going to be a partner, I have to pay my share.”

“I have the money. I want to get us going. When the profits start rolling in, then we’ll talk about you paying me back, if you still want to.”

“I will,” I said quickly. “I won’t lean on you. That money is yours, Ame.”

Her face pinched, as it always did when I slipped and called her by her given name. She’d been Amelia once, before the kidnapping. Years later, she’d changed her name legally to Mia to try to escape some of the stranglehold of her past.

I didn’t know if that was possible. Some events dug hooks so deep in you, you spent the rest of your life trying to fill the holes. And what I’d been through wasn’t a fraction of what she’d endured.

To think I’d once harbored some sort of sick envy that she’d gotten all the attention and I hadn’t. Now I knew bad attention was worse than none at all.

“It’s ours. You’re my family. My blood.” She walked forward and took my hands. “Without you, I wouldn’t be standing here today. You gave me a reason to fight.” She reached up and brushed my hair out of my face. “You’re so beautiful, and smart, and talented. Looking at you, I know everything was worth it.”

My eyes stung and I gazed at our loosely linked fingers. “I haven’t always made good decisions, Ame. You wouldn’t think so highly of me if you knew.”

“Hey, look at me.” Once I had, she stroked my cheek, as softly as our mama used to do when she sang us lullabies. “I made bad decisions too. So many of them. Ones I’d be ashamed to admit to you.”

“Like what?” When she glanced away, I gripped her hand harder. “Please tell me.”

I needed to hear what she’d done, so I didn’t feel like such a colossal fuckup. I’d started dancing to pay the bills, to offset my schooling, to gain a measure of control in a world where I felt powerless. But I’d gone about taking control in all the wrong ways. Taking off my top for a bunch of strange men wasn’t going to give me anything more than a momentary thrill, and one that could prove dangerous.

I’d thought danger was sexy once. After what had happened at the club, and seeing the bits and pieces of what Gio was into, I didn’t. Not anymore.

But once you’d set a course, sometimes there was no way to hit reverse. I could quit dancing, but I couldn’t quit Gio. Not yet. And since they were tied together, and dancing gave me a reason to see him, to keep an eye on his activities, I couldn’t give it up either. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t fun anymore. Now it had become a means to an end.

“I made some mistakes, did some things I’m not proud of to try to pay the bills. To put some away for you and me. I wasn’t making much at the bar, and female fights never brought in the cash that male ones do. Lately, it’s changing. Women are starting to command—”

I rubbed my thumb over her knuckles. “What did you do, Ame?”

She walked away from me, pushed both hands through her hair. “I can’t believe I’m going to tell you this.” She shifted back to me. “But I am, because you’re an adult now, and you’re my best friend.”

The tears prickled again, and I nodded. “Me too. You’re mine too.”

One corner of her mouth lifted. “More than Jenna? I know I’m not exactly easy to deal with.”

“More than anyone.” I moved forward and took her hand again, trying to convey with my expression that nothing she could tell me could shock or hurt me.

Oh, if she only knew.

“I gave men blowjobs for money,” she whispered, and the horror on my face must’ve shown through, because she spun away and stabbed her fingers through her hair again, completely destroying her braid. “Oh God, I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have told you.”

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. Maybe five or ten seconds. Then I realized I didn’t have to
say
anything at all.

I wrapped my arms around her from behind, squeezing her tightly enough to tell her nothing between us had changed. I loved her every bit as much as I always had. I hated that she’d ever reached the point to do what she had, but I was so glad she’d told me.

Maybe that meant someday, she would be able to understand why I’d made the choices I had. For money, and other reasons.

“It’s okay,” I said after a moment, kissing her shoulder. “It’s all okay. Whatever happened in the past doesn’t matter now. You did it, you learned from it, it’s over.”

“Do you really think that?” She pivoted to face me, and her dark eyes were stark in her pale face. “You can tell me the truth.”

“I am. I wouldn’t begin to judge you. I’m not perfect. God, I’m so not. So whatever you did…it’s in the past.”

She pressed her lips together until they went white. “Yes, it’s in the past.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I promised. “Never.”

“Tray already knows, if you meant him.”

I blinked. “Wow. Whoa. Really? You told him?”

“Not exactly.” Her cheeks tinged pink. “He heard rumors way back at the beginning when we hooked up, then we got into a fight about it. But yeah, he knows.” She rubbed her palms on her hips. “He knows all the sordid truths about me, and yet he still sticks around. Guy must be insane.”

“A little. And in love.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Pretty much.” Smiling weakly, I took her hand. “I’m so grateful you told me. Thank you for trusting me.”

Not just because I wanted her to feel like she could trust me, but also because it made me think that perhaps one day I could come clean about my own choices. She might not hate me for them. Maybe she’d find it in her heart to understand, if not forgive me.

I didn’t need her forgiveness for the way I lived my life, but I wanted it. She’d been my parental figure for so long that I still craved her approval, even as I found ways to defy her.

God, I was still such a kid in so many ways. But I was learning.

“Thanks for not wigging out about it. I know it’s tough to swallow.” She wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Worst pun ever, considering.”