His fingers slip between my legs. I am sopping for him, my clit a hard knob under his touch, and I watch my own face in the window as I open my mouth the yell with pleasure as he whispers in my ear.
“You don’t know your own power.”
I put my head by his shoulder and fell asleep for a few hours.
CHAPTER 31.
MONICA
I went to the cafeteria aching from sleeping like a pretzel. I felt like the ghoul of Sequoia whenever I walked in there, until I saw Declan. He was the ghoul, of course. I was an amateur.
He sat with a young woman who was twisting her long dark hair in the fingertips, making a single, lacquered curl at the end. They spoke earnestly, emotionally, much as he and Jessica had spoken the other day. Or, to be more accurate, she was talking, and he was nodding in the way a therapist might nod. He understood. He heard every word. He had answers posed as questions, but nothing would stick. He’d go home and forget it.
I sat at my usual table. I could have gone up to Jonathan, but I had business in the cafeteria, and I was perfectly willing to sit and work on a song until that business came to me.
Take these rolling hills
Shorn grass and dewy mornings
Dump a street on them
Shove a house, then ten times ten
Take this starry night
Clean air and sparkling skies
Spray paint it with poison
Send up bleating sirens
I’m gonna rise through
My jawbone on your throat
Gonna get black tarred again
My heels dug in
Feasting under the surface
Death on life, me on you
Claws dig, teeth cut
Locked in a forever f**k
I was considering changing the last verse to a chorus when I felt someone above me, and knew who it was without looking up.
“Mister Drazen,” I said.
“Miss Faulkner, or should I call you by your new name?”
“How did you know my last name?” I leaned away from my notebook, closing it so he wouldn’t see my anger spit up on the page.
“I could start with you next to my son at the Eclipse show. The journalists had you figured out at publication. Or my daughter, Theresa still speaks to me, sometimes. She told me about you. May I sit?”
“Sure. Could have been the notice you pulled out of my notebook?”
“Shouldn’t leave it lying around if you don’t want people to see it.”
“You bought my mother’s house.”
“Both of them. I didn’t actually want property in Castaic but—“
“You almost sent Jonathan over the edge.”
He folded his lips between his teeth, a move so like my lover’s I had a quick vision of what Jonathan would look like if he was ever allowed to age. “That wasn’t my intention.”
“Maybe.” I paused, dunking my tea repeatedly, this had no effect at all, but it gave me something to do with my hands. “What do you do down here all the time? You’re a fourth generation billionaire, for Chrissakes. Can’t you pay someone to wait around here for you?”
He laughed. I didn’t know what it was with the Drazen men. Every time I mentioned their money they thought it was hilarious. He twisted to the side and put his back to the wall, stretching his feet out, a gesture for a younger man. A man who wanted to take up a lot of room.
“It’s always amazing to me,” he said, “not what people do for money or revenge, but what they do for love. That woman I was just talking to?”
“Yeah.”
“Her husband just got beaten near to death in a parking lot two blocks away. They wanted his car, but he worked for it, and he wouldn’t give it up. She said, the only way they got the keys away from him, was when they threatened to rape her.”
“That’s awful.”
“It wasn’t even that nice a car,” he mumbled, flicking a crumb off the table.
“But why’s she down here talking to you?”
“That’s the interesting thing. See, he was in surgery, getting his internal bleeding sewn up, but it was so bad, and it was taking too long. Two doctors came out to talk to her every hour.” He held up two fingers to make his point. “They said, we’re working on it. He’s stable. Then after four hours, three doctors come out.” He held up three fingers that time, as if this illustrated more strongly. “And she knows from when her father had cancer, three doctors coming out after surgery? Bad news. If one doctor is attacked by a violent family member, the other is there to hold him down, and the third is to call security. So she saw three and ran down here before they spoke to her.”
“And like a shepherd with a lost lamb, you found her.”
“If my son won’t see me, at least I can do some good down here.”
“Like buying my mother’s house.”
“You’re getting the idea.”
I didn’t trust him, not one bit. I didn’t believe he stayed in the cafeteria to be in the sphere of his estranged child. I didn’t believe Jonathan had misconstrued a lifetime of manipulation and bad deeds. It wasn’t the facts before me that drove my mistrust, it was simply that I had to pick someone to believe, and I chose my husband.
Yet, if I was going to do what needed to be done, I was going to have to trust him just enough to keep his word.
“He’s dying, Declan. That suture tears a little more each day. He bleeds into himself. A couple of days is all he’s got. Tell me you’re down here to do some good, and we can talk about something.”
He shifted in his seat until he faced me, elbows on the table.
“Go on.”
“I’m a distraught wife. I might just suggest things I shouldn’t.”
“Grain of salt taken. And congratulations, by the way.”
I ignored his glance at the borrowed ring and the spiral that could lead down. “There’s a heart with the right blood type in this hospital,” I said. “It’s connected to a dead f**king brain. I want it.”
“The Italian. Patalano, I believe? Paulie Patalano?”
“He filled out a donor card, but there’s no living will. His family’s keeping him alive with machines and prayer. It’s time for the machines to give the prayers a chance to work.”
“And?”
He wasn’t going to give me anything. If he intuited what I was asking, he wasn’t going to step up and verbalize it. I was going to have to do all the heavy lifting.
“And I think that if someone could arrange an opening in security, that heart could be available real soon.”