Lie to Me (32 page)

Marcus looks down, and I hear that telltale rumble in his chest.

I have about a second before he has me flat on my back, my legs wrapped around his waist, my arms around his neck. I’m laughing with just sheer joy, feeling free, lighter than I have in years, and by the time he looks up from playing with my breasts, I can see that he’s just as giddy. Just as happy. And that fills me with happiness all over again.

“Jesus, I love you,” he says. Like he’s discovering a new species, or a new element. “So much.”

“I know,” I say again, and kiss his nose.

“No,” he says, quietly. “But you will.”

And it’s changed again; it’s shifted. Like it did years ago. He parts my thighs and enters me slowly, achingly slowly, watching my eyes every second. And this time I don’t need to shy away from this tenderness, I don’t need to be overwhelmed with sexual release to let it wash over me. I can just let him in. And when I do, it’s like that first time again. All the things I’ve felt about Marcus, all the pain, all the loss, all the love, all of it comes to the surface, all of it comes together in one beautiful whole, and I realize that he’s changed me again. I hadn’t known how to forgive before. I’d never forgiven myself, or the world, or anyone for the pain that I’d felt or the people that I’d lost. But now, maybe I can.

He’s helped me grow again. We’ve helped each other. We belong to each other even more.

“You belong to me,” I tell him.

Then he shows me that I belong to him.

chapter 19

MARCUS

I wake up with Harlow next to me, the morning sun shining in on her beautiful face, and all I can think is that one man doesn’t deserve to be this lucky.

I watch her sleep, her face so peaceful and pretty, and I can’t believe how dumb I was. I’ve been having that thought in general about the past five years, but today it’s specific, too. I should have figured that talking to Alex Wolfe would make her afraid that I might leave her again.

All I wanted to do when I saw him there was head off a disaster. I saw Alex walk in the door like he was coming to war, like he was there just to screw it up and intimidate people, and I knew that now was the time. Harlow and Shantha didn’t know they were poking a hornets’ nest when they decided to go up against Alex and actually be successful at it, but it was pretty much the only thing I was thinking about at that fundraiser. Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Feeling like a scumbag for not telling Lo all about it, too.

But I couldn’t tell her. That’s one of those threads where if I’d let her get at it and she had started to pull, the whole thing would start to unravel. She’d find out everything too soon, and she’d flip, and then she’d be a real threat to Alex Wolfe and he’d go after her. That’s the thing I’ve been trying to prevent.

So I didn’t tell her.

Again.

And she forgave me anyway.

I can’t convey how much that blows my mind. Not knowing why I left, not knowing what choice I made, not knowing why I still refuse to tell her, not knowing about what Alex Wolfe is capable of—and still, she just decided to believe me. Decided to put her faith in me. Again.

I don’t deserve her. I don’t think there’s a man on this Earth that deserves her, though I understand I might be biased in that assessment, but I know for damn sure that I don’t deserve her.

So I’ll work on it.

I’m still watching her sleep. I smile, thinking about how if she woke up to this, she’d laugh and call me creepy, but she’d still know that I’ll always watch over her. And it’s right then that I realize what my mistake has been all these years.

I hid things from Harlow in order to protect her. In order to give her the life she wanted. But that meant I made choices that I thought were best for her without even thinking about the fact that they weren’t my goddamn choices. Or at least not only mine.

I don’t know if it’s because I got used to doing things for her, to looking out for her, when things got really bad after her parents passed. Or maybe that’s just the best excuse that I can come up with. But I’m a grown man now, and I’m done making childish mistakes.

This is when I resolve to tell her everything.

And I’m perfectly happy just lying there, watching her sleep like a total sap, waiting for to her wake so I can tell her all this stuff, when my phone buzzes.

It takes me a second to figure out where it’s coming from, but eventually I find my pants on the floor. I take just a moment to look back at Harlow, lying naked and gorgeous in the growing light, and smile just once more at my life.

And then I check my phone.

Brison.

I knew it. Alex wants a deal. I’m skeptical that he’ll play fair, and just leave Harlow’s neighborhood alone, but you never know. Redemption comes at the unlikeliest times. I should know.

“Brison,” I say into my phone. I keep my voice down, even though there’s no point. Lo sleeps like the dead, and needs her eight hours to feel human. Still, I don’t want to disturb the scene. She looks so happy.

“We want to talk,” Brison says.

“Good. When?”

“Now,” Brison says. “Outside.”

I frown. Pretty much the only thing that could get me to leave this bedroom right now is the prospect of coming back with something that will make Harlow happy, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.

I hang up the phone and pull on the suit pants I had on the night before, throw on the jacket. I look ridiculous, but who cares? I’m about to get my girl everything she wants.

I’m actually smiling as I head down the stairs.

Brison’s there, in a town car, across the street. Idling like he’s some New Jersey mob guy, this serious expression on his face just barely visible through the tinted windows. I smile to myself because I think he must know they’re beat.

I jog across the street, still happy, and rap on the window just to wake Brison up before I open the door and slip inside. Brison gives me a once over, taking in my shirtless suit style, and shakes his head.

“This is not Miami,” he says.

I laugh. “Fuck off.”

Brison pulls back into the street in silence.

“Where’s Alex?” I ask him.

Brison shakes his head, and for the first time I notice he has that little muscle in his jaw that stands out when he gets pissed, just like I do. I can’t resist goading him. I’m still pissed off that he came to the bar to talk to Harlow. That is a line that never should have been crossed.

“Still doing his errands, huh?” I say.

Brison’s hands tighten on the wheel. I notice he’s headed for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and I frown. That’s farther than I thought we’d go, and I hadn’t planned to be away from Harlow that long.

“I’m taking you where I’m supposed to take you,” Brison says through clenched teeth.

“So you don’t talk?” I say. “You don’t have a say?”

Silence.

“I don’t get you,” Brison says finally.

“Why?” I ask him. “Because I don’t come around to intimidate women? Or because I don’t do everything Alex Wolfe tells me to?”

Brison shoots me a look that would be lethal if it wasn’t like looking into a mirror. He says, “You’re here now, aren’t you?”

For some reason those words hit me hard. I ball my hands up, knowing they’re itching for a fight, but it’s only because those words reminded me of what Harlow told me last night. That the way she sees it, Alex Wolfe shows up, and I disappear. Alex Wolfe comes calling, and I leave.

That’s not what this is. But I can’t pretend it never happened.

***

Alex didn’t let the subject of Harlow drop for long. It took me a while to figure out that Alex really did have plans for me, and that he must have had those plans for a while. He was never going to let me go on being Juan Roma’s son forever, but Juan dying maybe got him to press fast forward a little bit. Or maybe it was Harlow who got him all panicky. Either way, he stepped up the pressure.

Those dinners out, they became more like interviews.

What were my interests in business? What were my strengths? All this stuff I’d only ever thought about in the abstract, figuring it would take me a lifetime of work to get to the point where anyone gave a crap about what I thought or what my interests were.

It’s difficult to adjust to the idea of having a parent who cares about you. I guess a part of me didn’t trust it. Seemed too good to be true, you know? But Alex, man, he was smart. He knew that. He started slow.

And he kept asking about Harlow.

Just poking around a little bit. Did I see a future with her? Hell yes. What other family did she have? None that cared. What were her prospects?

What the hell did that even mean? I didn’t have prospects until Alex Wolfe showed up and told me I did.

One evening he came to pick me up at the gym, walked in in a three-piece suit, said hi to Pops. Looked at me like he was making a decision, the way a bookmaker might look over a horse, thinking, does he have what it takes. Then he says, “Ok, we’ll talk.”

What? Man, I’d just been working the speed bag. I had no idea what he meant.

“What are you talking about?” I asked him.

“Get dressed. I have an offer for you.”

I won’t deny I got a rush from that. As I said before, I am not proud of it, but I will admit to weakness when I have it, and knowing Alex Wolfe thought me capable of things made me feel important. Made me feel good. Like I said, I was young and dumb. Naïve.

So I went out with Alex. I watched him eat his steak and creamed spinach, getting more worked up by the second, thinking about all the things I could do for Lo and me with a real job, a real future. Thinking I could buy a house for us, maybe, if Harlow didn’t want her parents’, or thinking I could hire a lawyer and get custody of Dill. Thinking I could fix all the problems by myself.

“I have a job for you,” Alex said, slicing into that steak, watching it bleed. Jesus, the things you remember. He looked over at me while he let that steak bleed all over the plate. “I want you to go California.”

“California?”

Like I said, I was kind of dumb. I sat there thinking about how I was going to get Harlow out to California with me. I’d have to find a way to get Dill.

“California,” Alex said again. “I have a project out there I could use your help on. Row houses, tracts of land, the city being a little bitch. I want you to learn the business.”

I remember smiling. I didn’t have a poker face at all back then.

“You’d be out there to learn, Marcus, at my expense,” Alex says, eying me, taking a sip of his red wine. “No distractions. You’d be out there by yourself.”

Slowly it fell into place. What he was really saying was “without Harlow.”

“No,” I said. “Can’t do it.”

Alex didn’t hear no very often. You could see it on his face, working out whether or not I’d really just said that, figuring out how to respond to it. It was like a foreign language to him. In retrospect, kind of funny.

All he said in the end was, “I see.”

But of course that wasn’t the end of it.

It kind of took me a little while to get used to the idea that Alex thought of Harlow as a burden. As someone who wasn’t going anywhere, who was trouble in any way, shape, or form. I didn’t deal with it for a while as a legitimate problem beyond that first day when he talked about her in a disrespectful way and I just thought that was how he was with women, but only because I didn’t really believe it. It was like he’d told me the sky was green. He was just wrong, and eventually he’d have to see that.

But slowly I realized that Alex wasn’t kidding. He really didn’t think Harlow was good enough for his son.

He saw her as a threat.

And once I figured that out I got pissed off all over again, no matter how much he tried to convince me to take that job in California. No matter how much money he offered me. No matter how much stock in his company he gave me.

“I stay with her, Alex,” I said to him over another fancy dinner that tasted like ash in my mouth. He was starting to make me sick. “Or she comes with me, one or the other. I go where she goes. Don’t pick a fight you’re not going to win.”

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, right? That was probably the worst thing I could have said to him. But I didn’t know that until Alex Wolfe came back with his counter offer.

***

Brison and I have been driving in silence now for a good twenty minutes, getting farther and farther away from Harlow. Every exit we pass in the wrong direction is putting me more on edge, and I can see the vein in Brison’s forehead pulsing, and I know this car is about to explode.

“You really prepared to tell the old man to go fuck himself?” Brison finally says.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m prepared to do a lot worse than that, depending on what he does next. Where are we going, Brison?”

“Jesus,” Brison says, and pulls off the highway on some no-name exit surrounded by old warehouses and empty lots.

I tense up. This doesn’t look right.

“Brison,” I say. I’m ready to fight him in this car. I know I can take him; Brison’s about my size, a strong guy, but he was never a fighter. I’d rather do it outside, though.

“He was going to pick you, you know,” Brison says, still gripping the steering wheel hard, even though we’re no longer moving. He’s pulled into a parking lot next to a warehouse. No one’s around.

“He still might pick you, even after all this, if you do what he wants,” Brison says. He’s getting angrier and angrier. I can’t blame him. I know exactly what he’s talking about.

Alex has put Brison and me in competition with one another ever since I went out to California. He let it be known that it was open season, that we’d have to fight for the right to be his heir. His daughter, the sister I don’t know at all, a woman named Colette—she wanted none of that, got the hell out.

See, Colette is smart.

Brison and I aren't.

And I won. It kills him. I can see it in his white knuckles, his nostrils flaring like a damn bull’s, that vein still pulsing away in his forehead like he’s about to give himself a stroke.