Page 24 of Fierce

The phone went silent, and then I heard another voice, rich and firm. “Hello? Who’s this?”

This was mad. I should ring off now. Except that I needed to know, and who else was I going to ask? “Hemi Te Mana.”

“Oh, my Lord.” I could almost see her head shaking. I’d only met her once or twice, when she’d called in at the gym. A woman comfortable in her considerable skin. Bigger than Eugene in stature and girth, and a match for him in personality, too. If he reminded me of one of the uncles, she was a Maori auntie through and through. “Now I’m gettin’ the picture.”

“More than I am,” I muttered. Charles had pulled to the curb in front of the historic apartment block on Central Park West, but I sat still. I didn’t want to have this conversation in the lobby. I didn’t want to have this conversation at all.

“So let me see if I got this straight from hearing one end of it,” she was saying. “You got a girl there who feels like she ain’t up to your weight. Maybe not too rich, maybe a little young. How old is she?”

“Twenty-four. And you’re right about the not too rich.” All right, I may have looked over her application. Gathering information was critical to any campaign.

“And how many dates we talkin’ about?”

“One. Well, a half.”

“A half, and she’s already run out on you? Sometimes, you just got to let it go. Some things ain’t meant to be.”

“This is meant to be,” I said impatiently. “I just need to figure out how to fix it.”

“Well, if you was my son? I’d be telling you, whatever you’ve done so far, do the opposite.”

That was helpful. Not.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You give her shoes? Expensive ones?”

“She needed better shoes,” I argued.

“Why? She barefoot? Guess she didn’t think they was worth the price. Why do I think you gave her expensive shoes, took her someplace fancy, and then let her know what her part of the deal was? And that she slapped your face?”

“No,” I said glumly. “She’d already done that. This time, she just took off the shoes and ran home.”

“Ran home barefoot across Manhattan?”

“Yeh. Well, to the subway, I reckon.” I ran a weary hand through my hair.

“You must’ve laid it on real thick. So what you do now is—you do things that let her know you’re not thinking about you and what you want, you’re thinking about what she wants, trying to make her happy. But only if you really are, ’cause a woman can tell.”

“Only if I’m what?”

“Only if you do want to make her happy. If you just want to get her in bed, if you’re faking it—she’ll know, she’ll tell you, ‘Hell, no,’ and you’ll be right back where you started. Might as well save yourself the time and find somebody else. Somebody you can buy with a pair of shoes.”

“Suppose I want to do that?” I asked, ignoring the contempt in that remark. “The making her happy bit. You still haven’t told me what to do.” I couldn’t believe I was asking, but I was.

“What I’m telling you is what to do,” she said. “Think about her. What she’s thinking right now. What she’s feeling. Do something that costs you time, not money. She don’t want your money, sounds like. Could be she wants your attention. That’s what a good woman generally wants. So give her your attention.”

I could tell you that I didn’t cry that night after I ran out on Hemi, but it would be a lie. I could tell you that I didn’t rage inside at him, and at myself for being naïve enough to believe that he’d wanted anything more from me than sex. That I didn’t rage at life for dangling the prospect of something better in front of me, for making me hope as I hadn’t dared to for so long, only to snatch the hope away.

This was why I didn’t dream anymore. It hurt too much when your dreams died.

Was I more upset about the job, or about Hemi? It should’ve been the job. The job mattered, or I’d thought it had. It had been my future, whereas Hemi—Hemi was nothing more than another bad date.

But all the same, when I was standing on one leg in the rust-stained bathtub in the corner of the kitchen, scrubbing at my dirtied, bruised foot with the washcloth, the tears I cried weren’t for my career.

But tears and regret weren’t something people like me could afford to wallow in, and my job was what was keeping a roof over Karen’s and my head. So I got out of bed on Monday morning with my eyes and my stomach like lead, dressed in a twist-front blue sheath, white jacket, and sandals because they were easy, swallowed some breakfast, and got straight back on the subway again.

Nathan’s hiss roused me from my struggle with the guest list for the Paris press conference.

“Witch on a broom!”

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