The Glass Kitchen (25 page)

Portia smiled back. “It was just me on the fire escape. And I survived.”

“Yes, you did. And now that man and his daughters have moved in. Are you living with him?”

“No!”

Stanley snorted.

Marcus wiggled his eyebrows at her. “I still haven’t managed to catch a glimpse of him. Though Stanley says he’s something to be seen. All rugged and manly.”

“Good God, man, you can’t let the neighbors know that I’m ogling them!” Stanley said.

Marcus laughed, and Stanley began slowly eating his nuts. A few minutes later, Portia found herself in their kitchen, making a cup of hot chamomile tea. She brought it back out to Stanley, who sipped it, and soon his breathing grew easier. A tension in Marcus’s face, which she hadn’t realized was there until it was gone, also eased.

“I’d better go.” Portia wrote down her cell number. “If you need anything, I’m right next door.”

“Evie always said you were like her own children. She loved it when you came to visit.”

“We loved visiting.” Portia squeezed Stanley’s hand, hugged Marcus, and headed home. That was one of the things she had made herself forget when she pushed the knowing away: It always brought about unexpected interactions with strangers. Food had a way of bringing people together.

But every peaceful thought evaporated when she walked into her kitchen and found that someone had taken all the candied figs and nuts. The question circled in her head. Why? And, more important, who?

Twenty-four

A
RIEL USED HER KEY
to get in the town house. The muted sound of rock music drifted down to her through the walls. She dropped her backpack in the foyer, tilting her chin up to look at the ceiling, trying to understand where the noise was coming from. “Dad?”

But Dad wouldn’t be home. It was barely three. And he sure as heck wouldn’t be listening to any sort of music that thumped and buzzed.

“Miranda?” No answer.

“Portia?” No way Portia would be playing loud music in their house.

She headed up the stairs to the second floor, then on to the third, the music getting louder the higher she went. The whole thing made Ariel feel nervous. But she was pretty sure Miranda was up in the attic doing who knew what.

When she got all the way up, the door was closed, but the music was impossibly loud now, thumping through the wood door. Ariel hesitated, her hand on the knob, then opened the door.

If she thought the music couldn’t get louder, she was wrong. The beat pounded through the room, making her body buzz and her eardrums hurt. No one noticed her, not any of the three guys who lounged around the floor, or the two girls, plus Miranda, who sat Indian style next to them. Ariel only recognized the creep Dustin.

All of them were laughing hysterically. Not that Ariel could hear the sound of their laughter over the music, but she could see how their faces contorted and moved, like watching a silent movie where everyone on-screen was laughing.

It took another second before the smell hit her. A weird sweet smoke smell. And wine. Like her mother used to drink in their house in New Jersey with its big formal living room and dining room, the giant kitchen and den. Ariel still held out hope that her dad would see the light and take them back to Montclair. Weird stuff like Miranda smoking pot and drinking alcohol didn’t happen back in New Jersey.

Ariel stood there frozen, smoke wrapping around her stinging her nose and eyes, as she wondered what to do.

The teenagers still didn’t know she was there. They kept laughing and throwing little chocolate-covered balls, trying to get them into each other’s mouths. As if this were really funny.

The creep noticed her first. He reached over and turned down the sound system. “Hey.” Dustin laughed. “Dude.”

Seriously?

“What’s up?” he added.

Miranda jerked around, her hair flying around her shoulders. When she saw Ariel, her eyes narrowed to mean, thin slits. “Are you spying again?”

“I am not spying!”

“I am not spying!” Miranda mimicked cruelly, making the other kids laugh.

Ariel felt a burn, thinking it was embarrassment, but even that didn’t deter her. “You’re smoking pot. And drinking. Dad could come home any minute.”

“Yep,” one of the girls said, still laughing. “She’s spying. Little sisters are a pain in the ass.”

Miranda glared. “Dad isn’t home. And he’s not coming home anytime soon. So just go and mind your own business, freak.”

The name hurt worse than it should have. Ariel knew people thought she was a freak. Even she had put the description in the title of her journal. But Miranda had never called her that. Since their mom died, Miranda hadn’t been that nice to her, but she hadn’t been outright cruel like she was being now.

Ariel pushed back the tears in her throat, dashing at her eyes that burned and teared, and not for the first time she wished she were a tougher sort of sister, one who would put shaving cream in her sister’s bed, or pour ice-cold water on her feet when she was sleeping. “You’re going to get in trouble, Miranda,” was all she managed, the words sticking in her throat. “Big trouble. You’re smoking
pot.
”

All of a sudden, the creep leaped at her. Ariel felt her eyes pop open like some sort of cartoon character and she started to back up.

He grabbed her around the shoulders and spun her around. “She isn’t a spy! She’s cool! Right, dude?”

Everything around her rushed by. It was beyond insanity, she knew, but she felt something. Noticed. Which was ridiculous. Appalled at herself, she pushed at his arm. “Put me down, you Neanderthal!”

He did, then offered her a chocolate ball. “For the lady,” he said, sweeping a bow. “In fact, you can have all of mine.” He pushed a little bag filled with chocolate at her.

Ariel scowled at him. But his smile, his bow, his offer of perfect chocolate candy drew her in and she took the bag.

“You have the coolest hair,” the other girl said, as if she were her greatest friend, then turned a pointed look at the girl who had called her a spy.

“Oh, yeah, majorly cool,” that girl added.

They all started talking to her then, each of them offering her chocolate. Miranda rolled her eyes.

Ariel didn’t need Miranda to tell her that the kids didn’t really think anything about her was cool; they just wanted to make sure she didn’t tell on them. But the whole not being invisible thing seduced her even if it wasn’t real.

“Don’t you dare tell Dad,” Miranda said, dragging a deep pull of the joint into her lungs before blowing it out in a rush.

Ariel just stood there, holding tight to the bag of chocolate, smoke wrapping around her as she tried to figure out what she should do. She had just decided that it was her dad’s problem, not hers, when she realized that the burning in her throat and lungs had gotten worse. It happened fast then. Her throat started to close off in a way it hadn’t in years, teasing her into believing that she had outgrown stupid reactions to weird things in the air.

In a flash, she could hardly breathe.

Miranda and the other kids had fired up the sound system again, and the walls throbbed and swelled. Trying her hardest not to panic, Ariel dropped the chocolate and pivoted toward the door. She half ran, half tripped down the stairs to her room, frantically digging around in her backpack as she tried to suck in gasps of breath. Calculator. Antibacterial gel. Socks. Pen after pen. Her head started to throb and swell like the walls upstairs, the music growing fainter even as some part of her realized the music was really getting louder. But just as a massively tired feeling swelled through her body, her fingers clamped around the inhaler, and she jerked it out. The nail-polish picture her mother had painted on it fluttered in front of her eyes. Without thinking, she jammed Einstein into her mouth, squeezing as hard as she could, praying he was smart enough to save her.

Twenty-five

P
ORTIA WALKED INTO
the Kanes’ house at five that evening. As she was walking in, a small crew of what she knew were Miranda’s friends came out. The boy Dustin wagged an eyebrow at her. She glowered back in what she hoped was a stern schoolteacher sort of way. The boy only laughed.

Portia had been spending her days doing exactly three things: cooking, baking, and telling herself to stop thinking about Gabriel Kane. Actually, that made it four things, the fourth being the time she spent thinking about Gabriel. Which was a lot.

Then there had been the nights. But she really tried not to think too much about those. She still found it hard to believe that she was having utterly passionate, completely uncommitted sex with her upstairs neighbor. Her, Portia Cuthcart. Always safe. Always careful. Always proper. She still hadn’t even been out on a date with him. The Bandana Ball didn’t count. Olivia had all but forced him to go.

Sure, something in her old Texas soul whispered unhelpful things about cows and milk for free. But everything in this newer New York soul had her reveling in being someone so unlike the woman she had become in Texas—soft, a ghost of her former self.

Her thoughts were interrupted just as she was finishing up dinner for the Kanes when Ariel walked into the kitchen looking a bit gray. She sat down without saying more than a listless hi.

Miranda followed a few second later. “What is Ariel telling you?” she demanded, more belligerent than usual.

Portia considered. “What’s going on with you two now?”

“Nothing,” they said in tandem.

Miranda shot her sister a sharp scowl, then wheeled around and left. A moment later Ariel got up and walked out, too. Portia heard first one bedroom door slam, then another.

Don’t get involved,
she told herself.
A smart woman doesn’t get involved with her secret lover’s children.

Which just got her mind circling back to the same thing she wasn’t supposed to be thinking about. Gabriel.

Last night he had come down the fire escape in that way he did. When she had opened the door, she found him standing there, his hair still damp from a shower, raked back with his hands. He wore a T-shirt instead of a button-down, old jeans that hung low on his hips, and a pair of Converse with no socks. He stepped inside without asking, as if he couldn’t do anything else, a strong man giving in to her in a way that made her feel heady with a foreign sort of power. This strong man wanted her. This powerful man couldn’t stay away from her. A thrill ran through her at the thought.

Standing at the door, he showed no trace of the civilized businessman who stepped out of his town car every evening. He walked into the room as if he owned it and pulled his T-shirt over his head, throwing it to the side.

The twist in Portia’s stomach at the sight of him was so raw and primal that she couldn’t shape words.

“Portia,” he said finally, the word dragged out on a breath, then just stood there.

“Gabriel, are you okay?”

He pressed his eyes closed, blowing a hard breath out his nose. “No.”

Then he dragged her into his arms and took her over to the old wrought-iron bed. They made love with a kind of ferocity that made the bed slam against the wall. But even that wasn’t enough, and five minutes after, they started over, sweaty bodies turning over each other, the only sounds ragged gasps and moans. At some point, he flipped her on her back and pinned her down, his face wild as they gave in to sensation without words, he never taking his eyes off her.

Finally, later, when they were lying next to each other, gasping, it was Gabriel who broke the silence, the edge in him eased, if only slightly. Lying in the semidarkness, he came up on one elbow, demanding to know everything about her, pinning her down when she was elusive.

So she told him about her parents, her grandmother, the stories all whitewashed and pretty. Evie and the town house, the way it had looked in its prime, the way she had loved it. The way she and her sisters used to play dress-up with their aunts’ old costumes.

He listened intently, his fingers running along her arm and shoulders, circling slowly across her collarbone, as if drawing her words along her skin.

But at some point he captured her hands with his and rolled over on top of her, breaking off her sentence. “Portia,” he groaned against her mouth, his free hand sliding down her body, no longer lazy, rather intent.

She lost herself to his touch. But at the back of her mind she worried. What they shared was sweaty and complicated. Despite all her talk of uncommitted sex, he refused to let her keep her boundaries. With the exception of that one earlier kiss, he maintained control of her, her body, of his. But she also knew that he let down his guard with her. Gabriel was a man who was used to control. What would he do if he lost what he no doubt felt defined him?

The bang of the kitchen cabinet yanked her out of her thoughts.

“Dinner still isn’t ready?” Miranda demanded. “Hello, I’m starving.”

Portia blushed as if the teenager could possibly know what she had been thinking. Miranda made a strangled scoffing sound. “Dinner. In this century.”

By the time Ariel and Miranda were seated at the table and Portia was neatening up from preparing the meal of juicy pork chops, green beans with almonds, and creamy cheese-filled grits before she left, she heard the front door open, and her knees went weak.

She glanced up and saw Gabriel coming down the hallway. He stopped in the doorway and just looked at her.

“Jeez, what’s up with you, Dad?” Miranda sneered.

Portia jerked her head down and focused on the stove. Instead of snapping at his daughter’s tone, Gabriel walked over and kissed the top of Miranda’s head. “Sorry, honey. It’s been a good day.”

For a second, Portia was certain Miranda was about to cry. But then she jerked up from her chair.

“A good day?” she bit out. “Have you looked outside? It’s, like, totally cloudy.”

She slammed her chair back and stomped off, leaving her nearly full dinner plate behind.

“Miranda!” Gabriel snapped, all that ease disappearing from his eyes as he started after her.

Ariel dropped her head and concentrated on the food Portia had set in front of her.