Page 39 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
The bus was almost empty. She got the window seat and put her face against the glass and didn't take it off until we'd been moving twenty minutes. I sat with my elbow on the back of her seat. Outside, the trees were still in the bare part of the year, the branches showing every bone they had.
A man across the aisle was sitting with his hands inside his jacket. He had the jacket zipped up to the throat. He didn't move his hands the whole time I watched him. I watched him for two stops before I caught myself watching him and looked at the floor.
That's the thing my body does without asking. That. Right there.
I'd noticed it before. I noticed it carrying groceries in from the truck and looking at the tree line first. I noticed it the day Grandpa had dropped a hammer behind me and I'd been turned around with my hand at my hip before the hammer hit the floor. The hand had gone for something that wasn't there. I didn't ask what had been there. I knew not to.
I looked at Rhea instead. She was breathing on the glass and drawing a heart on the fog with one finger. She wrote her name inside it. Then she wiped it off with her sleeve so nobody would see.
The mall was a wide flat thing with a parking lot the size of a field. Inside, the floor was tile and the lights were the long bright kind and the food court smelled like fried oil from a hundred feet off. Pretzel cart on the left. A fountain in the middle of the atrium with pennies all over the bottom. The water sounded the way water sounds when someone is paid to keep it sounding that way.
Rhea's hand went straight into mine.
"That's the candle store. That's the place with the pretzels. That's where they had a Santa last winter. That's the one that sells the leggings, don't go in there, they'll think you're somebody's dad." She pointed at each one without breaking stride. "That's the bookstore. They have a cat. He doesn't like anybody but he likes me."
"He has taste."
"You don't have to say that, brother. I know."
We stopped at the ice cream counter on the lower level. She climbed up on the little step kids climbed up on and peered at the names of the flavors written on the chalkboard above the case. Then she looked at me sideways. The look had a thing behind it.
"Brother," she said. "Do you have money?"
"You dragged me an hour on a bus and you're asking me this now?"
She shrugged. She scratched the back of her head with the kind of sheepish twist seven-year-olds did when they'd been caught.
"I forgot to factor that in, brother."
"You're lucky I've been saving from the side jobs."
She threw both her arms around my middle. Her face went into the front of my jacket.
"Thank you, brother. You're the best."
Two scoops for her, the pink one and the green one. One for me, the brown one she'd decided I liked. I paid in singles out of the side pocket where I'd been carrying my mall money since the night before. She watched the woman behind the counter pile the scoops too high and her face went serious with concentration.
We sat at one of the round tables by the railing. She kicked her feet under the chair and ate her ice cream from the top down.I ate mine slower. It was good. I noticed I liked it, the way a man notices things about himself when there is very little of himself left to notice.
"Tell me one thing about your life before," she said, around a mouthful.
"You know I can't."
"I know. But tell me one thing anyway. Make it up."
I thought about it. I let it come on its own. Nothing came on its own. So I gave her something gentle.
"I think I had a sister. I don't know why I think that. But I think I did."
She nodded like that was an acceptable answer.
"Then we're trading up. I'm a better sister."
"You are. By a mile."
She grinned with the gap of her front teeth. Ice cream on her chin. She didn't wipe it off and I didn't tell her to.
The arcade was upstairs at the back. The lights were red and blue and the bells were going from every direction and somebody's pizza was warming behind a glass case in the corner. I fed a five into the change machine. Tokens fell into the metal cup with the small heavy music tokens make.
