“Because I was busy,” he answered. “Back then, I was very concerned with proving to my father I was worthy of his name. He was already grooming my school-age stepbrothers to take over the company, but upon graduation, he placed me in the Risk Management department. I worked day and night to prove to him how wrong he was not trust me to one day inherit The Nakamura Group.”
“But now you own a strip club?” Lacey had resisted asking him questions about what must be his very interesting back story, since she hadn’t been willing to share her own. But she couldn’t keep the curiosity out of her voice.
He stroked Spidey’s hair, seeming to talk more to the baby than to her when he said, “After Kenji was diagnosed, my wife left us, and my father soon started pressuring me to find another one, so I could give him an heir worthy of the family name. That’s when I realized if I did as he asked, then my next son would spend his life trying to prove he was worthy, too. My father didn’t want progeny, he wanted devotees. After that, I quit and worked as a security consultant on my own until Dexter emailed me and asked if I was interested in going into business with him.”
“And you said yes?” she asked.
“I said yes. Again, the security work I do is very specialized. I suppose I had gotten tired of working alone.”
They grew quiet after that, watching Sparkle and Kenji record skating sounds. Lacey knew their group must have presented a strange picture to the rest of the skaters. Kenji and Sparkle, who despite their separate races acted like a set of fraternal twins with their matching obsessions. And then there was Suro holding Spidey like a father, as if he didn’t even notice their color differences.
“You know, if we did get married it could always be like this. You, me, Sparkle, Kenji. We could even look into adopting Spidey.”
Her heart jumped and recoiled at the same time at the thought of a future she couldn’t possibly hope for. “Don’t,” she said to him. She laid her hand on top of his. “We’re having a nice Thanksgiving. Don’t spoil it with talk about the future.”
Suro looked like he might argue, but at the last moment his eyes turned back to the ice.
“I’ll go get us some apple cider,” she said.
And then she rushed away before he could answer. She didn’t want him to see how much his near-proposal had affected her, how badly she wanted it to always be like this, too.
CHAPTER 17
BEFORE that Thursday, Suro wouldn’t have thought turkey gumbo chicken breasts, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed up peas for Spidey, and a party platter from the only sushi place in Chicago Suro had deemed “decent,” would have made for the best Thanksgiving feast he’d ever had. But by the time Kenji and Sparkle started clearing the dishes, Suro was stuffed and more satisfied than he’d ever been after a meal.
Despite Sparkle’s near miss at the ice skating rink, and Kenji’s complaints about everything, from sleeping on the floor, “We have several guestrooms at the house in Miami,” to the lack of a piano, “If we got on a plane right now we could be at our house in Miami by nighttime,” to not having his own bathroom, “We have four at our house in Miami,” no one had thrown a real fit, which seemed to Suro nothing short of a Thanksgiving miracle.
Much of the credit went to Rise Academy, where he could see both his son and Lacey’s daughter had been thriving and learning to deal with their Asperger’s in practical ways that would make life easier for them in the real world. But Suro also had to give credit to the circumstances.
Kenji valued having someone around who actually understood his obsession with music more than he valued the creature comforts of their Miami home. And both he and Sparkle seemed to understand Lacey had her arms full with Spidey and didn’t have the energy to attend to any extra demands.
They even tried to teach Spidey to play their electric keyboards after dinner, claiming it was never too late to indoctrinate a baby to music.
“Maybe if you’d had early training, you’d appreciate music more now,” Sparkle said to Lacey, in the way of a scientist forming a hypothesis.
“I do appreciate music,” Lacey said.
Then she put on a popular rap song Suro recognized from the nineties and started dancing around the living room. Suro, who had been half-reading a military memoir on the couch during this debate, found himself mesmerized by the sight of Lacey moving her body in the rhythmic way of a woman who used to be a girl who loved to dance.
Her locks soon began escaping from her messy bun, and he had to adjust himself on the couch to accommodate the response from down below. Spidey’s presence in the bedroom had put a cramp on their sexual activities, and the way Lacey’s body swayed under the jersey dress she was wearing reminded him of just how much he’d been missing her body since they’d last made love.
“No, not that kind of music!” Sparkle and Kenji yelled at her over the synthesized beats.
But Spidey squealed with delight when Lacey plucked him off the exposed pipe he’d been attempting to scale and began dancing with him around the living room.
“Spidey loves it.”
“Spidey’s a baby,” Sparkle said. “His brain hasn’t developed enough to know better yet.”
“Oh, snap, I know,” Lacey said. She went to her CD collection on the bookshelf, pulled out a disc and loaded it into the CD player.
Soon the catchy rhythm of a song he didn’t recognize came out.
“What is this song?” he asked her.
She shook her head at him, her crinkling with disbelief. “You’ve never heard of the ‘Cha-Cha Slide?’ Haven’t you ever been to a wedding?”
Only to guard them. And weddings that employed security firms like his didn’t usually have attendees who appreciated this kind of music.
“You can’t call yourself living in Chicago and never have done the Cha-Cha Slide.” She tossed his book aside and tugged at one of his arms. “Get up.”
“I don’t think so,” he answered.
But she kept pulling on his arm. “Set a good example,” she said, in the same tone of voice he’d heard her use with Kenji when he was whining.
Which was how he, Suro Nakamura of the Tokyo Nakamuras, one of the most elite hit men in the entire world, came to find himself attempting to follow the commands of the man rapping line dancing instructions from Lacey’s CD player.
At first his movements were stiff with reluctance, but then Lacey got Sparkle and Kenji to join in, and soon they all got the moves down, clapping in time and spinning together as a unit.