Worse, he wasn’t certain Robin even knew there was a next step.
And there to help him through the minefield was the ever-helpful, ever-present Evan Iverson. If there was one person who personified the differences that loomed so huge between Jake and Robin, it was him—capital A, capital Hole. God knew there were enough reminders without Evan. For starters, Aaron Lear, who hadn’t called his daughter since Robin had decided to choose the course of her own life. Norma Manning, who lectured Jake about the perils and pitfalls of loving a woman with more money than God. Mia and Michael, permanent and empty fixtures in Robin’s living room, a perpetual sneer on their surgically enhanced faces. Lucy and Zaney, smart people that they were, who came from the same place as Jake, but were not, as far as he could see, stupid enough to aspire to Robin’s world like him.
But among all of those contenders, it was Evan who magnified their differences and held them up for inspection. Evan, who could, just by walking in the room, spotlight all of Jake’s glaring inadequacies. And as Evan and Robin happily plotted the last stages of her grand acquisition, the man came to embody for Jake all the reasons why Robin would never—should never—commit to him.
It was not any single thing Evan did, but every thing he did. From the little gifts he foisted on Robin, to his ability to sound so damned smart about this acquisition thing. It was the way he dressed in clothes that cost more than a house, or the fact that he did not appear to have even an ounce of fat on him. It was the way he looked at Jake with complete contempt, as if he was a mass murderer pretending to be a choirboy.
His little gifts came under the guise of congratulating Robin on her work, or thanking her for some silly thing. Gifts like tropical flowers, imported candy, and trinkets in silk-covered boxes that came waltzing in, just so Robin could ignore them or eye them dispassionately. Gifts that bored her, gifts that Jake couldn’t contemplate affording on his annual income, much less on a whim.
He tried to take solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only one to be disgusted. On the days Lucy came to the house, she, too, seemed pretty put off by the whole gift scene. “What a waste of money,” she said one day as she looked in a blue Tiffany box that had arrived the day before.
“I know,” Robin muttered absently.
Lucy pulled a little porcelain something or other out of the box; it looked too small to be anything practical. “You know,” Lucy remarked, “for what he probably paid for this, you could buy Z a new brain or something.” She was, of course, referring to Zaney, now known as simply “Z” within the bounds of their improbable friendship. Lucy was always one to call them as she saw them, and on this point, Jake couldn’t have agreed with her more.
And Jake hated the way Robin and Evan would pore over work papers, their heads so close to one another as they punched numbers into a calculator. He hated the way Robin would look at Evan at times when he explained things, hated it so much that he could not wait to finish the job, get out of her house, and onto something where he could feel himself again.
Right. And when exactly did he expect to feel himself again? There would still be the issue of money between them. Not his lack of it, precisely, but Material Girl’s irreverence of it. She bought whatever, whenever, whether she needed it or not, and every time she came home with a handful of brightly colored bags, that old Madonna song would jingle in his head. All right, he knew she had a lot of dough, an amount he was pretty sure was too huge for his brain to even conceive. Every time she paid according to their contract, she rounded up to the nearest thousand. The nearest thousand. “You never know what might crop up,” she said airily when he protested. Any other job, he would have been stunned and relieved. But on this job, it made him feel like a charity case.
Yep, the money thing was really beginning to grate.
Robin never seemed to think of it all, just acted as if it would always be there, and in mass quantities. The weekend Robin called her sister Rachel on a whim and suggested they meet in Chicago for a “jazz thingie” alarmed him. The week she and Mia took off for Paris (not Paris, Texas—Paris, France) for a little shopping astounded him. “We’ll be back before you know it,” she had said, kissing him as she flew out the door.