Chapter 24
Against all odds, Taylor had made it through her ordeal unscathed.
“Oh, thank God. What that poor animal must have been through these past few weeks,” said Bill’s mom when he called to give her the vet’s report.
Whatever Taylor had endured while she was gone, it would remain as mysterious to Bill as Sake’s past in San Francisco.
Bill knew that Sake was no innocent. But she was also nothing like the defiant thug she tried so hard to convince everyone she was. Inside that rough exterior was a precious gem.
She showed up the next day with another box.
“What’s this?” he teased, rubbing his stomach. “Not another whole cake, I hope.”
“Fresh produce from the farmers market. You can’t have your dessert until you eat a healthy lunch.”
“Come here,” he said, with an altogether different concept of dessert in mind. After losing out to a wire-haired terrier the previous afternoon, Bill’s morning had lasted an eternity, waiting for Sake’s shift to end. With every passing day, the stronger his body grew, the weaker his resistance to her charms.
He pulled her down to kiss her lips. “You’re a godsend.”
“I don’t know about that. What I am is hungry. Let me go throw something together for us.”
From his chair, he watched her work. She was familiar with his kitchen now. She didn’t have to stop and think where to find the olive oil or the salt or the napkins. She moved smoothly back and forth between the fridge and the sink and the table.
“Come and get it.”
“Be careful what you ask for.”
Watching him drag himself over to the table to eat properly, she grinned. “I’m not very athletic, but I’m pretty sure I could outrun you.”
After his meal, when Sake offered him a shoulder to hobble back to the living room on, he pretended that was easier than his crutch and took it, just to lean against her body.
Once Sake had got him situated again with his laptop and books and TV remote, Bill took her wrist. “Sit with me a minute.”
He scooted around to face her, still holding on to her. “Have I told you how much I appreciate you?”
To say nothing of how much I want to read every inch of that fine body like a blind man reading braille? He touched her small but capable fingers, imagining the ways in which they could bring him pleasure.
“It’s the least I can do. I figure by the time I leave, we’ll be even.”
By the time I leave . . . That was another thing that he’d thought about during his long, empty days.
“Is that all this is to you? Coming to see your dog? Paying off a debt?”
“You’re still helping me. What else am I going to do with my time? My life is on hold, too. I can’t go anywhere until my birthday.”
“And what exactly happens then, assuming you stay out of trouble and get your GED?”
“Papa promised to set me up, same way he set up my sisters. You know. Paid for their college and everything.”
She put her hands on the edge of the couch in preparation to get up again, to his regret.
“Anyway. Tossing a salad is nothing to brag about. I feel like there’s so much more I could be doing for you. Wait till tomorrow. The chef at Mon Rêve is doing choux à la crème.”
He kept talking to keep her there. “Salad is exactly what I need. If my mom were here, she’d be feeding me starch with a side of starch.”
“Don’t knock it. I wish my mo—”
Sake caught herself.
“Tell me.”
She averted her eyes.
“Don’t run away from me. Tell me about your mother.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said curtly. But she sat back anyway, looking around at the walls of his living room, anywhere but at him.
Bill entwined his fingers with hers, giving them a squeeze of encouragement. “I don’t believe you. You don’t just fall out of the sky here one day, twenty-two years old, full of rage—”
Out of the blue, Sake turned on him full-throttle. “Tell me you wouldn’t be angry if your fucked-up female parental dumped you with different ‘friends’ at the beginning of every month when the check came, left you for whatever man she’s sprung on, and didn’t come back for days. And then she was hungover, sick, and bruised, all the money gone! That’s the way it was, month after month, year after year. For the longest time, I thought Papa quit visiting me because he didn’t love me anymore. . . .”
Ping!
In the pocket of Sake’s uniform, her phone rang.
“I know you’re going to tell me to get that,” she said, using Bill’s penchant for doing the right thing against him.
Normally, he would have. But not this time. Right now, he wanted her all to himself, safe from past influences that might drag her down. Or back to the city, away from him.
Straightening out of his embrace, she raised her phone to eye level. When she saw who it was, she dropped her hand into her lap, then rose on a sigh and stepped outside his front door, effectively shutting him out.
“Hi. I want to talk.”
Sake frowned at the phone. Was this really Rico? He sounded so . . . sober.
“Is it Haha? Did something happen to her?”
“I haven’t seen your mother.”
“Then what’d you want to talk about?”
“I went to see the D.A.”
Sake’s head swam with possibilities, none of them good. “What for?”
“I told him to drop the charges against you. Boom. End of problem.”
“Rico. You can’t ‘tell’ the D.A. to drop the charges. It doesn’t work that way. It’s up to him.”
“I know. But I’m the victim—”
Technically.
“—and the victim’s word counts for something. He said he’d take it under consideration.”
Sake looked down at the tiny square of suburban green where she stood, outside Bill’s building. She wondered where Rico was standing, what he was looking at as he talked to her. Random mental snapshots took Sake back to San Francisco. Suddenly she missed her home turf with a ferocity that rocked her like a ten on the Richter scale. She missed walking barefoot on hot concrete, like she had every other August of her life. The unexpected vista of the Pacific Ocean between the houses up on Tank Hill, a reminder that you lived on the edge of a huge land mass. The intriguing scents, the city folk in their mad celebration of individuality. Whatever else San Francisco was, it was a place where you could be yourself.
“Are you planning on going to the arraignment in September?” she asked. It would be the first time she and Rico would see each other since the day she left in such a hurry.
“If you want me to. And I’ll tell them you didn’t do anything wrong. It was all my fault.”
Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t. At least it sounded like if he did show up, he wouldn’t say anything against her.
“I miss you, Sake. I love you. Come back. You said you would.”
Sake wasn’t sure what she wanted anymore.
“I got a job,” Rico said, sounding somehow both humble and proud. “Cut way back on my drinking, too. I’m getting my shit together—”
Behind her, Sake heard the creak of a hinge. She whirled around to see Bill there in the open doorway, leaning on his crutch.
She turned back toward the street in a vain attempt to protect him. Bill thought she was the innocent one. He had no idea.
“I’m glad.”
“And—oh yeah, guess what else. I ran into Francine. Bunz got bought out by someone, and now she’s the new manager. They’re redoing the whole place. She told the new guy what happened and they want you back. She told them you’d be here on your birthday. They’re going to get a hold of you.”
“That’s good for Francine.”
“Come back, Sake. It’ll be different this time. There could never be anyone but you for me.”
“I can’t talk right now.”
“Don’t hang up—”
“Good-bye, Rico.”
Click. Sake whirled around to see the hurt in Bill’s eyes.
“It was him again, wasn’t it?”
Bill let her squeeze by him to go back in the apartment.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” he asked, closing the door behind them.
“I don’t want to bring you into all this.”
“I want to be brought into it. What happened back in San Francisco? What made your father insist on making you stay here?”
Sake sighed. “The whole thing was blown way out of proportion. Rico was drinking—”
“Rico drinks a lot.”
“All I did was swat him with my sweater. One time. He was the one who’d gotten belligerent with me for not agreeing to buy him more beer when the bar refused to serve him . . . started yelling until the neighbors called the cops. The zipper caught him just right. Slashed a big welt down his cheek. But that’s evidence. One swat was enough to get me arrested.”
Bill started to steam like a rocket about to take off. He wanted to fly to San Francisco that very minute and put his fist through Rico’s face.
“That’s when Papa found me. His lawyer friend down in the city who had been looking for me recognized my name.”
He ran his hand through his hair. “Why couldn’t your papa find you before that? Were you . . . hiding from him?”
“Not hiding.” She flopped back down on the couch. “It’s so hard to explain. I just . . . didn’t want to be found.”
Bill came over and sat down next to her.
“Maybe if Haha had never stopped liking Papa and moved us out of that pretty, light-filled apartment on Eugenia Avenue he kept us at and took me to move in with that other man, Roberto. And then when that didn’t work out, another man, and another, until I got the men’s names and faces all mixed up.”
“And then what happened?”
“I got tired of the insanity, man. So I rebelled. Quit following her on her knee-jerk whims.”
“And then?”
“She couldn’t stop herself. After a while, she quit coming home.”
Bill clenched his teeth. So many things were coming together now. He wanted to press rewind and fix Sake’s entire past. He had to settle for resting his hand on her leg.
“Left alone like that, you’d think you would have turned toward your father, instead of away from him.”
“I thought he was ashamed of me.” She brushed away a rogue tear.
Bill was appalled. “Why would any father be ashamed of his little girl? Especially you?”
“The city’s the ideal place to hide a bastard.”
There was nothing he could say to that.
“Haha has never missed my birthday. We have an unbroken tradition. We always meet at a certain shrine on September first.”
“I’ll be rid of this thing”—he nodded toward his cast—“by then. Let me take you.”
Sake lifted her head. “It’s all decided. Papa’s taking me. He wants to see Haha, too. Plus, September first is also the date of my arraignment. That day’s going to be mad busy. Rico said the place where I used to work is under new management. They want to talk to me about coming back.”
They sat there in silence for moment, each thinking their own thoughts.
Finally, Bill was resolved.
“I want you to stay.”
He dipped his head. Her mouth was a welcome distraction from his thoughts. If he couldn’t fix the past, he could make her feel good in the present. She let him gently push her back until she was half-lying down against the back of the couch. Their kisses grew more and more ardent. He rolled onto his hip, taking her along with him onto their sides, facing him, his half-bent leg with its cast high wedged high between her V. Bill reveled in the warm, delicious scent of her. The rhythm of her breathing, the play of sunlight on his living room wall. If he could imprint this scene on his psyche hard enough, he could replay the memory after she was gone.
She slipped her hand under his shirt and slid it along the skin of his back.
He did the same, finding her bra clasp. He stopped kissing her, looking into her eyes as he snapped it free. It was the first time they’d both been on the same page. A breakthrough, a stepping stone.
She pulled him down to her again, and when his hand slid around to the front of her to cup her tiny breast, she shivered. He craved getting even closer.
“Come here.” He lifted her from her waist, and next thing he knew she was astride him, her hair falling down in a curtain around his face, blocking out the rest of the world.
He pulled her shirt over her head, dispensed with her bra, and looked at her body. Then he drew her arms up over his head, bringing one nipple within reach of his worshipping mouth. After a while he set her back again and looked at her. Her eyes were pools of ebony. He touched her lower lip with his fingertip, tracing a lazy line down her creamy skin, along her windpipe, between her breasts, down to her navel.
“I want you to stay,” he repeated, firmly. And then he lowered her body to his mouth again, to suckle her other breast.
Bill cupped Sake’s rear end. In one, swift move, he hoisted her knees up over his shoulders. She gasped with surprise and fell forward, catching her weight on her hands well above his head. He felt the fabric of her skirt catch on the scruff on his chin. “I’m going to show you just how much.”
After their breathing had returned to normal, they lay side by side, Sake’s ear against Bill’s chest, Bill watching his hand making long, slow strokes down her arm. He looked down at her tattoos. “What do these symbols mean? I’ve always wondered.”
Sake looked too. She hesitated. “This one on the left says, ‘Not seeing is a flower.’”
“Translation?”
“In other words, things will never be as you imagine, so you’re better off not seeing them. Reality never measures up to expectations. Love, but don’t trust.”
He’d had to ask.
“And this one?”
“The right one says, ‘Put not your trust in princes.’”