She stacks a small tower of glasses on her tray and gives me an exasperated look. “Can we just not do this right now?”
“Sure. If you tell me you’ll never have sex with him again, I’ll go away. Right now. End of conversation.”
Her mouth tightens. As she wipes the table off with a damp cloth, she glances up at his office. It pisses me off how soft her face goes when she looks up. The tension fades and she looks like a woman in love. I hate it. I hate him.
She looks back at me.
“No, Dani. I won’t. And stay out of this. It’s none of your business. This is grown-up stuff between grown-ups.” She turns away and heads for the bar with her cluttered tray. Distantly I hear Fae calling orders, trying to get her attention, but I don’t care. I want her attention.
I freeze-frame in behind her hard and fast, causing a wicked breeze in the subclub and nearly knocking the tray from her hands. She has to work hard to catch it. Almost doesn’t. Ryodan’s not the only one that can screw with people and things.
“Don’t walk away from me. I’m not done yet.”
“Yes, you are.”
I hiss in her ear, “Don’t you get it? Dude’s never going to love you. He’s not wired that way. He’s just using you and he’s going to throw you away, and then there you’re going to be like a dirty piece of toilet paper he doesn’t want anymore.”
She sucks in a breath and gives me a look over her shoulder that just fecking slays me.
I drown in instant self-hate for saying what I just said. And I hate him because I know it’s true. Jo will never be able to keep Ryodan’s interest. She’s too good. Clean and nice inside. She doesn’t have an ounce of malice or deceit or unkind feelings or anything bad in her. She’s not complicated enough for him. He’s twisted like that. I chose the wrong person to chew out. I should have chosen him. He’s going to hurt her and I’m never going to forgive him. So, here I am, hurting her first. Dude, stupid much?
“Do you really think I don’t know that?” If we weren’t in Chester’s, I’m pretty sure the wet in her eyes would start to slide down her cheeks.
All the sudden I’m miserable I said anything about any of it. I want to hug her. I want to run away. I don’t want Jo to hurt. I should have kept my mouth shut. I can’t keep my mouth shut. Grown-ups are so strange. But I don’t understand! “Then why? Why would you do something that you know is going to end up bad? Why would anyone ever do something they know is going to hurt them?”
“You’re too young to be talking about this kind of stuff.”
“Aw, c’mon, Jo, it’s me. I was never young. Life didn’t happen that way in my world. Tell me.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Like everything isn’t. Try.”
She doesn’t say anything so I just stand and wait. A long silence usually makes people fill it up with something.
It stretches. Finally she looks away like she’s embarrassed and, so soft it’s almost like she’s talking to herself, not me at all, she says, “Every morning he comes to the top of the stairs and looks down over the club and he stands there, so big and powerful and beautiful and …” She swallows hard like her mouth just went totally dry. “Sexy. God, so unbelievably sexy.” Her eyes get a weird, intense look like she’s remembering something, then she makes a soft noise and doesn’t say anything for a second. “And he’s funny. Do you know he’s funny? You must know that. You spend a lot of time with him.”
I fist my hands. Sure I do. I didn’t know she did. What do they do? Crack jokes with each other like Dancer and me?
Her expression is far off, seeing a memory. “Every morning when the night shift ends, he singles out a woman in the crowd and he nods at her. She goes upstairs and when she eventually shows up in the club again she looks like …” She shivers like she just got goose bumps. “And you wonder what he did that made her look like that. You watch her walking around, smiling, moving different than she moved before she went to him, and you know something happened up there that made her feel more alive than she ever felt before, that she got to be the way you hope you’ll get to be with a man, even if it’s just once in your life. A man has to see women a certain way for it to be that way. You try not to think about him, but it doesn’t work. I swore if he ever gave me that nod, I wouldn’t go.”
“Dude, wake-up call. You went.”
“I know.”
She’s glowing again like she won some kind of prize instead of got picked by a class-A sociopath to be his disposable lube.
“Why him?” I don’t understand and I want to. I don’t want to feel like Jo’s a traitor. I lost Mac. I don’t want to lose Jo, too. “You know what he’s like!”
“He’s not a bad man, Dani.”
“Bullshit.”
“Everything isn’t black and white like you want it to be.”
Some things are, and Ryodan’s blacker than black. He’s one of the bad guys, period, end of subject. I’m pissed. She needs to wake up and smell the coffee burning before the whole fecking coffeemaker goes up in flames. “And when he comes to those stairs tomorrow and chooses someone else?” I say. “It’s only a matter of time, Jo. You know he will. You’ll be standing here looking all dreamy like you do right now and it’ll be the waitress next to you that he chooses and you’ll never go upstairs again because a dude like that don’t press the replay button. When he’s done he’s done. How are you going to feel then?”
She turns away.
I go after her, grab her elbow, make her stop. “Well? What do you think, Jo? That you’re special? That you’ll be the one that changes him? Give me a fecking break! You think you and him are going to go pick out china patterns together? Register for flatware?”
She inhales like she forgot to breathe, then when she remembered couldn’t get air fast enough. “I know what I’m doing, Dani.”
“Good, then you can explain it to me! ’Cause it sure looks like every shade of stupid from where I’m standing!”
She’s distant again, talking soft, like I’m not even here. Even with my superhearing I lean in to catch it.
“There are men you build a future with, Dani. And then there are men that you know, going in, that you’re only making a memory with. I know the difference.”
Doesn’t look like it to me.
“Some memories are worth the price. I’ll deal with it.”
But she won’t. I know she won’t. I know Jo. She’s brilliant and kind and has the heart of a warrior but she doesn’t have ice and razor blades inside where your soul is supposed to be. She loves. And she doesn’t know how to take it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns it into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces. She’s not going to be able to deal with it good at all. And I’m going to have to clean up the mess he made, and kill him. I suck in a breath. “You’re too stupid to live and I’m not talking to you anymore. You need to pull your head out.”
“You need to quit judging everyone.”
“You don’t know shit about me. And I’d rather judge people than be a pansy-ass that can’t make her mind up about anyone or anything and gets sucked into all kinds of stupid shit.”
“Dani, please don’t—”
“My ears are full. I can’t hear anymore!” I turn away and start to slip into freeze-frame. I have no idea what makes me look up. Kind of like a rubber-band feeling, like it’s fused into my gut, and like something at the top of the stairs is pulling at my opposite end.
Ryodan is standing at the top of the stairs looking down at me. And I think what Jo said about him being big and powerful and beautiful.
We lock eyes.
Mine say, “Don’t you ever choose her again. You leave her alone.”
His say something I don’t get at all. Then he does that ocular-shiver thing all over me and I get a real clear: “Go home, kid.”
He looks right past me at Jo.
And he nods.