Page 18 of Ruthless Daddy
That was the report the analyst had handed me. That was the report I was now reading.
I wanted him.
I had wanted him from the moment I had looked up across the floor and registered him in the booth above the rail. I had not known I had wanted him at the time. I had registered, at the time, that he was a threat, and I had logged the threat, and the part of my body that had begun, somewhere underneath the logging, to do something else entirely—that part had been outvoted, because the logging part had been louder. But it had been there. The pulse had started there. The thing I was sitting with now had started the second his eyes had found mine across that room and not let go.
He had looked at me like I was the only person in the building.
I had felt the look go through me like a hot wire pulled tight, and the wire had landed in the place between my hips that I had assumed two years ago had been permanently switched off.
Turns out, it had not been switched off.
It had been waiting.
I shifted in the booth. The formica was cold under my forearms. The coffee was cold in the cup. My pulse was not cold. My pulse was somewhere lower than my pulse should have been, doing something I had not given it permission to do, a slow heavy beat between my thighs that did not respond to me telling it to stop. I pressed my legs together under the table. The pressure was the wrong thing. The pressure made it worse. I uncrossed them and put both feet flat on the floor and made myself breathe, and the breathing did not help either, because the breathing made me think about the breath I had not heard from him when I had bitten him.
My body was throbbing. I was actually wet. I could feel it, hot and humiliating, between my legs. I had not been wet for any man in two years. I had not even been wet for myself. I had nottouched myself in eighteen months, not since the trial. And now here I was, in a diner booth, with my pulse between my legs and my mouth full of the memory of his hand, and I felt alive. For the first time in two years, every single nerve in my body was on, and the man who had turned them on was a gangster—a man I should hate.
I put my face in my hands.
I did not cry. I had not cried in eighteen months either. The tears, like the wetness, like the want, were a luxury I couldn’t afford.
The waitress drifted past and topped up my coffee without asking. I did not look up. I heard her go.
I am, I told the analyst, a deeply stupid woman.
The analyst did not disagree. The analyst was sitting across from me in the booth with her hands folded and her hair in the bun she had worn in court, and she was looking at me the way she had looked at the partners on the day they were sentenced — without judgment, exactly, but with the small still attention of someone watching a structure she had warned about for years finally come down.
The coffee, when I picked it up again, had gone cold.
I drank it anyway.
IhadtoleaveChicago.
That was the report the analyst handed me when I finished the coffee. They had found me. I did not know who they were—Halberd people, Valenti people, another group of hired thugs. Frankly, it didn’t matter who they were.
They had been tracking me, and they were good. They’d almost taken me at the club, and I had a feeling that next time,they wouldn’t fail. There would be no-one to save me. They would come somewhere I could not be saved.
I asked myself where to go, and the answer effortlessly swam up from my subconscious.
Detroit.
I had thought about Detroit before. From Detroit I could go four ways: north into Canada if I could find a way over the border, west toward Chicago, south to Toledo and then anywhere, or east toward Cleveland and Pittsburgh and the places that were forgettable enough to forget me back. Detroit was a hinge. Detroit was a place to disappear from, not a place to disappear in.
I picked up my phone. I opened the Greyhound app. The 6:05 to Detroit, with one stop in Kalamazoo, arriving at 1:40 in the afternoon. Forty-two dollars. Money was exceptionally tight, but I could make it work.
I paid the bill. I left a dollar on the table for the waitress, who had not looked at me twice and who deserved more, but she would have to settle for what I could afford. I shouldered my bag. I checked the door before I opened it, the way I had been checking doors for six weeks, the small forensic glance for anything wrong on the other side. Nothing wrong. The street was empty. The wind was up.
I stepped out into the cold.
Five blocks. I had mapped them while I was paying. Three north, two east. The streets at this hour were the streets I had walked an hour ago—empty, every-third-streetlight, the small red lights of closed shops. I was so tired, so impossibly, eye-stingingly tired. A salt truck went past me at one point and I stepped back into a doorway and waited for it to pass and then I came out and kept walking.
I tried not to think about him.
I thought about him.
I tried to think about him as a problem set, as a category. The analyst in me was patient. The analyst said, look at what he is. The analyst said, he is exactly the thing you ran from. The analyst said, you do not get to keep the people who almost touch your wrist. The analyst said, this is not a thing that was going to happen. This is not a thing that could ever have happened. You are doing the right thing.
I knew I was doing the right thing, but I did notfeellike I was doing the right thing.
