7. Joel

CHAPTER 7

JOEL

A nna is surprisingly gentle with her hands considering she nearly killed me ten minutes ago. Her nails are untidy, but I can overlook it because the way her fingers ghost over my cheek makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. Usually, the women who get this close to me are seventy percent plastic with calorie-restricted waistlines and legs so long they should be anatomically impossible.

It's safe to say I don't struggle for female attention. Money and looks get you far in this world.

So why am I flustered when this nobody girl glares at me and caresses my face?

Anna's a plain kind of beauty, lacking any of the trimmings that come with the kind of girls I usually associate with. Still, she's not unpleasant to look at. She has a round face with soft, olive skin and shining green eyes that shoot daggers at me with every misstep. The more I look at her, the more I can see Ben — they have the same thick brown hair and expression when they raise an eyebrow.

But Ben always looks so smart and stern. Anna is wearing a sweater that's three times too big for her, pale blue and worn almost threadbare at the elbows. It looks comfortable but I don't know why she wouldn't just get a new one, especially when the cuffs are starting to unravel like that. Her hair is messy too, not quite long enough for it all to get caught in her ponytail so strands keep falling loose into her face and she keeps having to push them back behind her ear.

Not the kind of woman I usually look twice at. Maybe I've finally drunk enough to lose it for real.

"Ouch!" I flinch, the antiseptic cream stinging in my wounds. "Be careful, woman."

"Grow up," she snaps, scowling darkly at me. I wish I hadn't said that. She presses a Band-Aid firmly against my face in revenge. I wince again but say nothing.

"How bad is it, nurse?" I try to lighten the mood again but it's clearly the wrong thing to say because she sighs at me like I'm a five-year-old and snatches my hand up in hers. A thrill dances down my arm and I can't help but crack a smile. Anna ignores it. I'm going to have to turn up the charm if I want her to like me.

She examines my sore, purple knuckles and scratched skin. "You'll live," she says, casting my hand away. As I cross my arms, a slight pang of disappointment aches inside my chest.

"Great," I say.

She snaps the first aid box shut and jumps to her feet. I rise more slowly and trail her through the house, seeing myself as a wolf, confidently stalking my prey. She seems to see me more as an annoying mosquito, though.

"What do you want?" she says sharply as we wander into the kitchen.

"Is a guy not allowed a conversation with a girl?" I lean against the refrigerator, watching as she stands up on her tiptoes to shove the box back into one of the tall cupboards. I'd offer to help because I'm six foot one and she can't be more than five three, but somehow I don't think that's going to go down well.

She grunts as she pushes the box into place and slams the cupboard shut. "Guys can do whatever they want," she says as she lowers herself back down and turns to me. "But I don't want a conversation with you."

"Come on, baby Romero—"

" Don't call me that," she blazes. She's cute when she's angry. Her face flushes and her fists clench and I'd comment on it if I didn't think she'd punch me. This is a girl who can look after herself and is clearly immune to my charms.

"Okay, okay, sorry," I say, throwing up my hands in a lazy surrender. " Anna . You never said what you were doing here."

"Neither did you," she throws back.

Rule one of client relations: you can't let them get hostile. You've got to make them feel like you're giving them something before they'll give themselves to you. This is a rule that works in pretty much any situation, and I've been getting away with the dumbest shit since I was a preteen. I've been primed to be a charmer since birth. "You saw the photos, right?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." She folds her arms to mirror me and bites her lip ever so slightly, like she's trying to ground herself.

I'm also great at poker, and to be great at the cards you've got to know when people are bluffing you. She's seen the photos. Of course she has — you'd have to literally be a hermit not to have, even if she hasn't gone out of her way to read any articles. "I had a kind of… misdemeanor at the casino last night. Women. Booze. Gambling. That kind of thing, you know?"

She purses her lips. "No. I can't say I do."

Time to change tactic. "Well, I do, and this time I went kind of too far. And the press jumped all over me. It was a media bloodbath, you know?"

She raises her eyebrow to tell me that no, she doesn't have that kind of experience either. Why are normal people so hard to get through to? Don't they ever do anything exciting?

"Trust me," I say, "it was nasty. It was my fault for taking my pants off in public, but it still wasn't fun."

There, a ghost of a smile. She's trying not to, but she's feeling sorry for me. I carry on. "So the cops took me home and fined me almost as much as I lost on the table, and let's just say, my father isn't a fan of losing money like that."

"You've been grounded?" she scoffs, biting her lip again so she doesn't laugh.

I shrug. "Is it grounded if you get told you can't stay at home or go to a hotel, but you have to hide and not come out under any circumstances?"

"I'll get back to you," she says, and for the first time since I've known her, smiles genuinely. It lifts her face into something mesmerizing, softening the harshness she's met me with so far. It makes me want to make her smile again.

"Well, whatever you call it, that's why I'm here. I'm not allowed to show my face until someone else makes a massive screwup of things." I'm trying to play this off as being cool and unaffected, but I feel jittery and I think it's making me look too sincere. My grin feels half-baked. The hangover's wearing off, so I guess I need a strong coffee.

She mutters something under her breath, and I'm about to ask her to repeat it when she says instead, "I won't tell if you don't."

Another piece of the puzzle. "Why're you here, then?"

Just as I'm starting to break through to her, she closes back up again, her spine going rigid and her eyes wide and suspicious. A deer in the headlights. "I'm just staying at my brother's for a few days. That's all. Does it matter?"

"No," I say, even though I'm desperate to know her secrets. To get to them, I've got to make her like me. And to do that, it looks like I'm going to have to make a real friend for the first time in years. This is a skill I haven't practiced in ages. "I just want to know if I'll get any more lamps thrown at me."

She flushes a light pink, staring down at the ground as she speaks. "No. No more lamps. I'm sorry about that."

"As long as it didn't damage anything permanently, we're all good."

"I think the lamp might not have survived," she says. I chuckle and she joins in, and for the first time I take a step towards her and she doesn't move away. Her cheeks are properly pink now, the blush spreading across her nose.

"The window was in bad shape too," I say, then add, "It lost a fight with me."

"Must have been weak, then," she says. She's full of these snappy comebacks. I'm going to have to clear my head to be able to think that fast. "Come on, there's some cardboard down the back of the fridge."

"Okay…?"

She throws up her hands in frustration. "Get it and follow me. Unless you want a permanent hole in the window?"

I open my mouth in a silent oh and grab an old box while she gathers some other tools. I'm feeling decorative as I follow her back to the window. She makes me wait until she's swept the floor, then slams the window shut and beckons me forward. Considering she's so sure she's not a housekeeper, she seems pretty determined to clean up. It's kind of amazing watching her, actually. It wouldn't have occurred to me to tape anything to the window.

Knowing me, I'd have just left the hole.

Anna is precise, though. She cuts the cardboard to a perfect shape and tapes it over the hole until it looks just like what they do in shops when someone smashed a window.

"Awesome!" I say, delighted at the teamwork. "Now what?"

"Now," she says, wheeling around to give me a hard glare. "You tidy all this up." She gestures to the floor, then marches away to the guest room and slams the door, leaving me with a sore arm, surrounded by crap that I have no idea what to do with.

I have to stop being a normal person soon. Being forcibly detoxed is bad enough, but having to do menial tasks? That might just kill me.