Chapter 15

Thomas reaches for me as soon as the door to my apartment’s closed, but I step back, putting a hand on his chest. “Would you like a drink?” I ask, playing hostess. It’s a slight stall, and though I can feel my heartbeat in my pussy, I do feel like we should talk about what happened tonight.

Thomas nods and shrugs off his tuxedo jacket, looking around for somewhere to hang it up.

I take it from him, hanging it up before leading him into my living room.

Blushing a little, I tell him, “Make yourself comfortable. Let me get changed.” I slip off my heels and carry them down the hall to my bedroom.

I quickly slip into something more me. My dress is gorgeous, but stepping back out into the living room wearing cotton shorts and a Sailor Moon T-shirt, I feel more comfortable, more in control of myself and the situation.

This is perhaps the first time I feel like he’s in my world versus me being in his. I pause for a moment to relish it as I study him.

He’s sitting on my sofa, his back to me as he looks at the arrangement of game controllers and remotes on my coffee table. He picks up my newest acquisition, an aluminum-bodied, unbreakable wireless PS-style controller, turning it over in his hands and pursing his lips.

It’s adorable to see his mild confusion by something so routine to me, and yeah, my heart melts a little as he quietly whispers, “pew, pew” at my television. How can I not get all gushy over that?

“I’ve always been a bit of a tech nut,” I say, interrupting his study. Thomas sets my controller down, turning his head and looking me over appreciatively as I come around and sit down next to him. It’s a little strange, me in what you could call pajamas while he’s in three-quarters of a tuxedo, and it only highlights the differences between us.

But at least he’s undone his tie and slipped his shoes off, almost like a sign that I’m getting him to relax incrementally. It feels like a win to see the precise, tight grip he holds himself under loosen.

“Mostly around the house, it’s gaming, although the PC here is hooked to my TV too. You ever play?” I’m pretty sure I know the answer before I ask the question, but it seems the obvious next inquiry. What I don’t expect is the shadow that crosses his face.

“No, not since I was a child. I last played some game with blobs attacking my castle. After that, I never...” He pauses, and I can see that he’s somewhere else in his mind. It’s on the tip of my tongue to ask him what’s going on in that brilliant mind of his, but he shakes it off and says, “I like your setup. It’s... efficient.”

I can hear in his words that he means it. And considering being efficient is one of the most important things to him, I take it as a compliment. I do wonder what it is that drives a man who seemingly has it all to be so unrelenting in his drive for more. But that seems rather like a truth that is revealed slowly, not a question to be answered, so I let my curiosity sink and stay with the topic at hand.

“Thanks. It probably seems a bit too nerdy to you. But it’s... me. Papa would try to get me to get out and do things when I was younger.” I mimic his voice, “How about ballet, dochenka? Softball? Let’s go for a walk!” Returning to my own voice, I finish with, “But he realized quickly that wasn’t for me.”

“Papa? Doche... ?” He stumbles over the endearment.

“Dochenka. It’s Russian for daughter,” I explain.

“Oh, yeah, I remember from your file. Your dad is Russian?” Thomas asks, and I nod, chuckling.

“As Russian as vodka. He was still a young man, barely nineteen when he first came to New York, and the issues with the crackup of the Soviet Union caused him to leave. He struggled for a while.”

Thomas hums, nodding. “I could see that. It must’ve been quite the shock to his system. What did he do?”

“He put himself to work. He had enough savings to pay up his apartment for a few months, and it was above a tailor’s shop. He started off as a shop assistant, running errands and stuff, and worked his way up. Eventually, he worked his way up to doing his own work. He used to laugh, too, because my grandmother insisted that he learn how to sew when he was in the Soviet Union. He hated that, said it was so unmanly... yet it was what put a roof over his head.”

“So your Papa becomes a seamstress... but it was a while before you were born,” he points out. “What happened?”

“Don’t let him hear you call him that,” I say, laughing. “He says he repairs and adjusts clothing the Old Country way, and therefore, he’s a tailor.” I smile, having heard the phrase a number of times over my life. Continuing on with the story, I say, “The fact is that Papa’s very talented. He mostly does men’s clothing, suits and things, but he likes to dabble from time to time, and he made dresses for me and my friends that were better than anything in the stores. Anyway, Papa met Jennifer Appleman. She was Upper East Side, and he was... the opposite.

“He thought it was forever love, and I guess at first, they were happy. Papa was beneath her, he says, a tailor to her family money. I suspect she was playing at slumming it with the immigrant bad boy.”

Thomas lifts an eyebrow in silent question, and I clear my throat.

“Anyway, she left him. I think if I hadn’t come along, they would have split even earlier, but when Jennifer got pregnant, she faced a lot of pressure to get married. She may have been New York money, but there are those who flaunt it and live it up, and there are families whose asses are wound up tighter than a banker’s on tax refund day. Jennifer’s family was the latter.”

Thomas snickers, lifting an eyebrow at my terminology, but he keeps his composure mostly, sobering as my face tightens.

“So, she just left?”

“Two weeks after my second birthday,” I say quietly. “I don’t even remember them living together. All I remember is that they lived in separate places. I’d go from house to house, and when I was with Jennifer, it was... I felt like an annoyance and a game piece. Everyone made sure I was quiet and out of the way, but then Jennifer would buy me things to try and turn me against Papa. I spent more time with a babysitter than Jennifer or her parents, even though it was their house.”

Thomas growls lightly, reaching out and stroking my shoulder. “What was it like with Papa?”

“We had almost nothing some weeks. He worked hard, but New York is expensive and sometimes, he had to make difficult choices on which bills to pay. I remember one time we spent the whole week ‘camping’ around the stairwell in the living room. We did that so we could catch more of the heat drifting up from the shop downstairs, because Papa didn’t want his boss to know how tight things were. Honestly, it was one of my favorite weeks because he made it seem fun and like an adventure. Ironically, it was that week that led to his getting full custody of me.”

“How so?”

I lean back, sighing a little. “I was still cold, and Papa took off his jacket, laying it over me. He only had a short-sleeve T-shirt, but he wanted me to be warm. I noticed that Papa had a Band-Aid on the inside of his elbow. I asked him what it was, and he took it off, showing me a fresh hole on the inside of his arm. He’d started going to a couple of plasma centers, lying about how often he was donating to get enough money to support us. The day before he’d picked me up, he donated twice. He showed me the hole in his other elbow, and I told him it was like the holes in Jennifer’s arm. She had a whole line of them going up the inside of her left arm. I was too young and na?ve to know what that meant.”

“Drugs?” Thomas asks, and I nod. “So he told his lawyer?”

“And his lawyer had a cop on Manhattan Vice who owed him a favor. One tail of Jennifer Appleman while I was with Papa, one trip to the right nightclub, and boom... the family courts don’t look kindly when you’re picked up in the biggest drug bust of the year. I don’t know all the details on what happened to her. I just know Papa got temporary full custody that ended up permanent. We moved to Roseboro soon afterward so Papa could open his own shop, and I haven’t seen her since then. I even reached out to her and her parents. Papa helped me write the letters. The last two were unopened, just marked Return To Sender. That’s all I needed to know. It’s been me and Papa ever since.”

Thomas nods, giving me a sympathetic smile. “I was wondering why you didn’t call her Mama. I... I lost my mother when I was very young too. She died when I was six years old.”

He looks lost in his thoughts, and I wonder how many people know this about him. I certainly didn’t before now, and I’ve checked out his corporate profile and online presence like a tenth-degree clinger. There’s a lot about Thomas’s education, his rocketing up the business world, and the accomplishments he’s had as the head of his own corporation, but nothing about his family life. It’s as if he sprang forth as a fully-grown man in college, having never existed before age eighteen.

“What happened?”

“She...” he starts but then swallows thickly. “I can’t talk about that,” he admits, and while it’s not the same information dump I just shared, his confession feels like he’s giving me a vulnerability, trusting me with a weak spot and hoping I won’t pick at the scab. He clasps his hands together between his knees, head dropped low, and I want to reach out to him.

He clears his throat, blinking rapidly. “Suffice it to say that while both of our mothers might have left us with our fathers and the resulting baggage of that loss, my subsequent relationship with my dad was not full of fun adventures.” I can feel the pain it costs him to say those words, and I doubt he’s ever let them pass his lips before.

He sighs and plops back on the couch, shoulders hunched, back rounded, and I think it’s the most real I’ve ever seen him, like he’s too exhausted to maintain appearances. I like that he’s willing to do that with me, like he’s letting me in bit by bit, sometimes with big leaps and sometimes with small steps, but closer to the core of who he is all the same.

“Sorry. I think we’ve brought up enough bad memories for the night.”

I kiss his lips softly, rewarding the gift he’s given me tonight. Not the fancy outing with limo and expensive clothes, but his truth. “It’s okay. So... you want to play a video game?” I ask lightly, wanting to give him a chance to reset and re-center. “Nothing hard, just a little beat ‘em up?”

Thomas busts out a small laugh, and we slowly walk away from the abyss of his childhood. We swap little tidbits back and forth as we play, mostly me telling him about myself as I beat him at every turn. But when my clock beeps and I see that we’ve come up on midnight, I’ve seen more of Thomas than I think anyone else ever has.

“So, tell me,” I ask, setting the controller down and taking his hand, “you made some rather serious claims tonight. Are you sure you’re ready to handle a woman who’s kinda nerdy, likes to play video games while listening to death metal and techno, makes weird leaps of logic that you might find hard to follow, and has a father who’s taught her how to curse fluently in Russian?”

“I suppose,” he says with a smirk. “As long as you’re willing to deal with a man who has a deep streak of asshole in him for reasons he sometimes isn’t really sure about himself.”

He seems less sure that I’m going to accept him as he is.

I chuckle, rubbing his shoulders. “Will it come with the good side of you too?”

“Like what?” he asks. “Oh... I forgot. You like my car.”

I laugh, leaning over and kissing his cheek before climbing in his lap. “I can think of about two dozen things I like about you more than your car. It’s a sweet ride, but that’s not your good side.”

“What is?” Thomas asks, his hands naturally coming around my waist to rest on my hips as he looks up at me, his body reacting even as his eyes search me, like he’s trying to figure out what the answer is himself.

“You’ve got something to you, Thomas Goldstone. It’s hard to see sometimes because you keep it under layers of barbed wire and jagged glass to keep anyone from getting too close.” I trace a finger along his smooth jawline and then outline his lower lip.

He swallows. “I know. I want to be... a better man.”

“You’re already a good man. I’m just the lucky girl who gets to see it.”

He shudders, and I think something in my words might’ve healed a small crack inside him, but then his eyes light up with devilry. “I’ve got something else you can see too. If you want.”

I smirk back. “Let me see it all.”