Minders

CHAPTER 27

Plum stepped past the officers and looked around the bathroom. She shook her head sadly and said to Ford, “Another one of your little fits, Benji?”

“He said his name was Mason,” the officer with the crew cut told her.

“That’s a new one. Usually uses deodorant names. Come on, dear.” Speaking loudly, as if to someone who was a bit slow, she presented Ford’s wrists to the bald officer, who reluctantly removed the cuffs.

Plum smiled. “He’s a cousin of mine. The more challenged side of the family.” She looked at the bathroom and said, “Get a cleaner in.”

“We should really make a report, ma’am.”

“Of course.” Plum nodded. “Silly of me. It’s only that it’s very embarrassing for the family. We try to keep it as quiet as possible. If you make a report, one of those gossip reporters will be on it instantly, and then Benji will never be able to get the help he needs.”

The woman with the crew cut wasn’t fooled, but she was a good employee. “Of course, ma’am.”

Plum kept her arm tightly through Ford’s as they walked. She glanced at him sideways and with an affectionate smile said, “So much work just to get my attention.”

“That’s not—” Ford tried to pull away.

Plum had dialed her phone as she spoke and now said, “Maribelle, it’s me. Could you have someone drop my jacket and those folders by my place? I had to leave abruptly, and I don’t want to go all the way back to the office.”

She hung up and smiled at him. “Well, you wanted me, now you got me.”

“I didn’t come here for you,” Ford growled.

“When a woman saves you from jail, doesn’t insist you replace her thirty-thousand-dollar Venetian mirror, and is going to make you dinner, you could try a little flattery.”

“I came here by accident.” The interior of his mind was bleak, a landscape twisted by anger then denuded by despair. He wanted to be somewhere, anywhere other than this conversation. Anywhere other than inside himself.

Sadie ached for the part she’d played in making him feel that way.

“You can’t seriously expect me to believe that you marched in here and destroyed my club for no reason.”

Ford’s eyes focused past her on the run-down building across the alley from the club where Linc had threatened him weeks earlier. There was a thick braid of cables running to it now, Sadie saw, but Ford didn’t seem to notice. “There’s a reason, just not one involving you,” he snapped.

Plum gave him a look that was part amusement, part warning. “If you prick her she will bleed.”

“Yeah, I’m the same way.” Ford’s mind flipped from Linc to the guy with the shiny black boots telling him to stay away from Plum. “Which reminds me, goodbye.”

Plum was truly shocked. “You can’t just leave, puppy.”

A grenade of anger flashed through Ford. He grabbed her and turned her toward him, his eyes blazing. “I’m not your puppy, and I can do whatever I damn well please.”

Plum’s eyes blazed too, but with a different catalyst. Her gaze caressed his lips, her palm moved down his chest. “I like this. You’re much more fun to fight with than James.”

Sadie felt his pulse quicken, his jaw tense so the words were bitten out. “I am so tired of being compared with my brother.”

Plum wasn’t put off. “Okay, no talking about brothers tonight, how does that sound?” Her gaze followed her palm across his chest. “No talking about anything.”

“That suits me, because I’m leaving.” Ford stepped away from her. “I don’t want another visit from your thugs.”

“What are you talking about?”

Ford shed enough self-absorption to notice she was genuinely confused. “The guys with the shiny boots? Who beat me up on the Fourth of July and told me to stay away from you? I’ve been unconscious for the last week.”

Plum’s expression assumed a new seriousness. “Tell me what they said, exactly.”

“‘Stay away from Plum. Don’t go near Plum.’ Along those lines. There were two of them.”

Plum’s eyes narrowed, and Sadie thought she was truly angry, although she suspected it wasn’t entirely on Ford’s behalf. “Excuse me,” she said, turning away and pulling out her phone. After a moment she started talking in clipped staccato tones, clearly leaving a message. “It’s me, and I’m furious with you. This isn’t high school, you can’t just beat people up to get them to stay away from me. If you have a problem with my behavior, take it up with me, don’t be a pussy and pick on my friends. And don’t bother coming by tomorrow. I won’t see you.”

She hung up and stared at her phone for the space of three of Ford’s heartbeats. “I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened,” she said, reaching for his arm again. “Let me make you dinner to apologize.” When he didn’t answer she said, “It won’t happen again, I promise.” There was a layer of steel beneath her words that gave Sadie goose bumps.

Ford, locked in his own echo chamber of anger, didn’t register it. He registered hunger, not wanting to go home looking like this, and wanting to get out of the damn parking lot. “Fine,” he agreed, possibly the least gracious acceptance of an invitation to dinner ever. It was the last thing he said until they had nearly reached Plum’s, when he announced abruptly, “I’m not saying my name is Romeo.”

Plum laughed. “That’s okay. We’re going in through the garage, so the doormen won’t even see you.”

That did nothing to diminish Ford’s self-loathing or his sense that he was just a plaything to her. Sadie watched its destructive force as they rode up in the elevator and entered Plum’s apartment, watched it crashing through Ford’s memories as he stood in the kitchen, half listening to Plum rattling on about her day, watched it sharpening phrases—“piece of crap,” “protect you,” “move on,” “guilty conscience,” “like your brother”—into blades that sliced his interior landscape to ribbons.

Sadie felt like her heart was breaking. Stop, please stop hurting yourself, she called without meaning to and instantly regretted it.

Ford’s mind stilled and became hypersensitive, like a security probe suddenly wheeling around in search of an intruder. It was the first time she’d actually spoken since the blowup in the bathroom, Sadie realized.

He was standing across the kitchen island from Plum and she stopped, a bottle of chilled white wine hovering over a glass, to look at him. “What just spooked you?”

“What are you talking about?” he barked.

“It happens to animals. They just freeze. You did that now. You’re spooked.”

“I’ve just had a long…” What? Sadie heard him wonder. A long day? Month? Life? “Week,” he settled on.

“Why don’t you take a shower?” Plum suggested. “You look like you broke six mirrors with your head. The towels in the bathroom are clean.”

“That’s a great idea,” Ford answered, his mind still prodding for foreign bodies. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, stripped off his clothes, and turned on the water. Then he looked in the mirror.

The bruises on his legs were shades of yellow with purple on them, but his ribs still looked painfully purple, blue, and green. Even with them, his body was magnificent. She’d never seen Ford completely naked before. At his house the bathroom mirror really only gave a shoulder-high view.

“Look at me,” he ordered, a low, primitive rumble that demanded obedience.

Her heart raced, and her mouth was dry. She felt vulnerable and naked and terrified of his contempt. His hate. She took a deep breath, poured as much love as she could into her gaze, and met his eyes.

The connection sparked, sending firecrackers of sensation through Sadie’s whole body. His reaction was as strong as hers, making his body rock backward and his hands grip the counter in front of him.

His knuckles were white, and he practically spit the words out. “I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to feel you. I don’t want anything that reminds me you are there at all. I hate the thought of it. I hate you for doing it. I hate what you did to my friends. The less I have to think about it, the better. Got that?”

Sadie was trembling. She swallowed hard and tasted tears.

“You’re pathetic,” he sneered. “Watching someone else live their life instead of living your own.”

It would have been easier to shrug off his withering contempt if there hadn’t been some truth to it.

“Enjoy your perverted little show,” he sneered over his shoulder as he got into the shower.

Sadie spent the rest of the evening curled up in a corner of Ford’s mind, watching and registering his thoughts and experiences but doing her best not to interfere. As long as she kept her thoughts to herself, he didn’t seem able to hear them.

This was better, she told herself. It would force her to be objective, behave like a regular Guest. Minder. Whatever she was. The phrase was “I think, therefore I am,” not “I feel,” she reminded herself. Some distance between his voice and hers, between his thoughts and hers, was healthy.

It felt anything but right.

While he was in the shower, Plum had set the table at the counter with blue and yellow and aquamarine majolica china that a really good friend had sent her from Sicily. Dinner was butternut squash tortellini with pesto and a salad with blue cheese, hazelnuts, and orange and ruby beets. Sadie heard Ford wishing that Lulu could try food like this. See this place. Her eyes would be huge.

He called and texted Mason before dinner, then in the middle, then as they finished. Nothing. He’s probably asleep, Sadie heard him tell himself. Or at a fund-raiser. Or dead.

Not dead, his mind shouted. I am not letting go again.

“Are you done texting your girlfriend?” Plum asked, coming around the island. She reached for his phone like she was going to read what he’d written, and he snatched it away.

“It’s not my girlfriend,” he snapped. “It’s—”

She stood in front of him, running her pointer finger down the side of his neck. “I don’t really care.” Her eyes met his. “Take your shirt off.”

I don’t really care hung in the air in Ford’s mind. For a few seconds Sadie saw his pure desire warring with his loneliness, aware that satisfying one side of that thirst meant leaving the other parched.

But his greatest desire right then, Sadie could tell, was not to think. And for that, Plum was ideal. Even if Sadie didn’t like the hungry way Plum ran her eyes over him when he’d pulled his shirt off and breathed, “My god, Ford, you’re a treasure,” Ford did.

“I’m glad you approve.” Ford’s tone was smug, yet beneath the words Sadie felt the stickiness of humiliation.

You don’t have to do this, she wanted to say. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, just leave. But she knew that would just make it worse.

Plum exhaled, then took his hand and led him through the apartment to her bedroom. It had tall windows, but she pushed a button on the wall and dark blackout blinds slid down over them.

Cupping the back of Plum’s neck, Ford pulled her mouth to his and brushed her lips softly. Plum’s mouth opened beneath his and she caught his lower lip between her teeth and nibbled it, setting off an explosion of sparks in his body.

Stop! That’s not fair! a voice whispered from a far corner of Sadie’s mind.

She hushed it, to keep him from hearing, and because it was a voice she was embarrassed about. The voice of a little girl in a flannel nightgown with tiny blue flowers and lace smocking being left alone in a house on Christmas Eve, scared out of her mind but instead of admitting that, saying, “It’s not fair. How come you get to go out and have fun and I have to be here alone?”

Her mother holding a big pearl earring in one hand and a big square-cut diamond in the other, trying to decide which went better with her mustard-yellow gown. “Because Alma has the night off. It’s Christmas Eve, Sadie. Don’t be spoiled.”

“Not the housekeeper. You. Why can’t you stay?”

Her mother gave her a pitying look. “Now you’re being silly. You know we have supper with the senator and her husband.”

“Other people’s parents stay home on Christmas Eve.”

“Other people’s parents don’t get invited to the parties we do, darling,” her mother explained.

“Why can’t I come too?”

“Because it’s for grown-ups. Now stop acting like a child or Santa won’t deliver your presents.”

“You can’t accuse me of being a child and then talk to me about Santa as though he exists. Either I’m a child and can believe in Santa, or I’m an adult and can go to the party.”

Her father said, “God, kid, you’re giving me a headache.” He looked over at her mother. “No wonder we have to go out.”

No wonder.

“One day it will be your turn to have fun,” her mother said on their way out the door, her cheek soft, just the faintest hint of perfume.

“When?” Sadie had asked, and the front door had closed on the sound of their laughter.

When will it be my turn? Sadie wanted to know now, suddenly afraid that she may have missed it.

You signed up for this, she told herself. You agreed to the terms. You knew you could never have him.

I didn’t know what it was going to be like! she wanted to yell. What he was going to be like. How could I have guessed—

“Oh, yes,” Plum moaned.

—that I would fall in love with him?

Or that he would hate me so completely.

Sadie closed her eyes and wept.

A little while later Plum stroked his head and whispered, “Sleepy time for my big boy” into his ear as though he were a baby or a dog, which seemed demeaning to Sadie.

Ford didn’t mind anything now. He relaxed and repeated “Sleepy time,” like a macaw. “Can you set an alarm for an hour?”

“Sure,” Plum said, unnecessarily giving him a kiss on the lips.

Ford’s arms came around her. He held her to him and kissed her back, deeply and passionately. Sadie ached with envy and desire.

“Sleep,” Plum whispered in a soothing voice.

He turned onto his side and she lay in the curve of his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and Sadie had to bite her lip from crying out. Ford kissed her hair and said drowsily, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Because it amuses me,” Plum told him.

Ford chuckled as he dozed off, but Sadie didn’t think Plum was joking.