Page 17 of Hold on Tight

It was a long, hilly walk from the bus stop on 15th Avenue to Mira’s house back in the residential grid. His leg ached and sweated. Maybe he shouldn’t have sent those emails after all. Maybe he should have stayed home and ticked the hours off in his mind.

Friday night, after he’d seen Mira, he’d stared into the empty lowball and thought about his rules. Another hour before he could pour another glass. A night of hours, one after the other, Gentleman Jack the only punctuation between sentences. All the hours of this night lined up next to all the empty hours of tomorrow and all the hours of tomorrow night, of all the days and nights into the foreseeable future.

Who was that guy?

Some jerk.

Effectively, he had three choices. He could choose not to live. He had thought about it many times—most often in the earliest days, before he’d seen that he would be able to walk again. But he still thought about it, occasionally, when the calendar day clicked over, 12:01, and nothing had changed—not time’s plodding pace; not his persistent, raging anxiety; not his deadly boredom.

He could choose to live like this, yield to the way the hours followed one from the next with no true distinction, no meaning. If he did that, it would also mean he accepted what she’d said about him. Whathe’dsaid about himself.Grumpy. Gimpy. Asshole.

Or he could believe that Sam and Mira had turned up in his path yesterday for some reason he couldn’t fathom yet. That he hadn’t merely stumbled across them; he had stumbled straight into their need, a need he was perfectly positioned to fill. Sam needed to be watched; Jake needed something to do.

Of all the unexpected emotions he’d felt yesterday in their presence—attraction to Mira, curiosity about Sam—the most unexpected of all had been the purewillhe’d felt to claim this new possibility that had presented itself. Jake was so distant from the notion of wanting something that he almost didn’t recognize it at first. The words had to come out of his mouth—“I’ll watch him Monday”—before he knew the impulse was there. But after he’d offered himself and she’d turned him down, he’d wanted to fight—for the right to be with Sam in a way that would beuseful. And he recognizedthat, that will to fight. He recognized it as the purest core of himself. A notion worth guarding. A goal he regarded so highly, he’d be willing to slough off his numbness to have it back in his life.

A goal that would reassemble the endless collection of hours into a life.

Purpose.

But maybe that was only whiskey’s special form of delusion. He was so tired now, so unsure that he could handle what he’d signed himself up for, that he wanted to turn around and go home.

Instead, he gathered his strength and made himself walk up to the dumpy little Roman brick single-story house that he assumed was a rental based on the unloved appearance of the yard. The grass was dull and dry, the gardens overgrown, the front steps broken concrete.

The cast-iron railing on one side of the too-high steps wiggled when he grasped it.Fine. He gave it a mental fuck-you and turned his body a quarter turn so he’d have to bend his robo-knee slightly less as he climbed.

It wasn’t a natural-looking way to climb stairs, but it was how things worked now.

The door opened a split second before he could raise his hand to ring the bell, and Sam stood there, looking at him suspiciously. He couldn’t blame the kid. Who wanted some guy—somejerk—as a babysitter? He suspected Sam’s former babysitters were young and female, with soft hair and soft hands and soft other stuff that would look like a hell of a lot better substitute for his mom.

“Hi,” Jake said.

“You’re notreallya babysitter, are you?”

“Not really,” he admitted.

“Whoareyou?”

He hadn’t expected to have to confront that question so quickly. He knew he might have to answer it eventually, but he’d hoped he’d have at least been admitted through the front door first. He should have asked Mira what she was planning to do about telling Sam the truth.

“Who did your mom tell you I was?” He hoped Sam wasn’t old enough yet to get pissed at Jake’s caginess.

“She said you were a friend. But I didn’t exactly believe her because she also said you were a jerk.”

“Sam,” Mira said from somewhere behind the front door. “I said I shouldn’t have said that and neither should you.”

“I was justtellinghim,” Sam protested.

“You don’t need to tell him that,” Mira said. “He already knows.”

But she was smiling as she held the door open for him. “Sam, do you want to help me give him a tour?”

She wore a pair of jeans and a tight tank top with skinny little straps that were loose on her shoulders. They looked in danger of slipping down. It wouldn’t take much—the brush of a hand, a finger hooked underneath. Teeth.

Jesus. If this continued, he was going to be wishing he were still sexually dead. Nothing like interviewing for a babysitting position with a boner.

“This is the living room,” Sam said unnecessarily.

In contrast to the shabby feel of the outside of the house, the interior felt neat and cozy. Light flooded in through a huge front window, illuminating a white room with a pastel, geometric rough-surfaced rug, a comfy gray couch, a matching armchair, and a glass coffee table. There was a game spread out on the rug, something with tons of teeny-tiny plastic pieces that looked complicated. Jake wasn’t sure how he felt about playing board games. He’d always avoided doing it with his niece and nephew, but that had beenbefore. When his soccer-ball-kicking foot had been made of flesh and blood and hitting a baseball wouldn’t require several dedicated physical therapy sessions to work out the logistics.

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