Page 38 of Fierce

“I don’t—” she said faintly, but I’d heard that enough today. Seemed it ran in the family. She didn’t have the strength to keep it up anyway. She relaxed against me with a sigh that got past every defense I possessed, and something twisted hard inside my chest.

I was a bit blown by the time we got up the shabby carpeted stairway and into the apartment, however hard I tried to conceal it, and Hope was casting me anxious looks as if I’d drop her sister. As if that were a possibility. At her direction, I carried Karen into a small bedroom and set her down on a double bed.

“Could you wait for me?” Hope asked me, her voice low. “It could be a little while, though.”

“Course.” I left the two of them there, went out into the living room, and sat down on a faded green fabric couch.

Hope had tried, I guessed. The beige walls were hung with framed prints of the type I might have expected. The Impressionists: Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh. Flowers, mostly. Of course. There was a shawl thrown across the back of the couch, and everything was tidy. But Karen had been right. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and the only view was of an air shaft and the building across it.

It was, in fact, nearly half an hour before Hope came out of the bedroom again, shutting the door gently behind her. She looked so weary, and my earlier anger had evaporated.

Don’t you get how close to the edge I am?she’d asked me at the restaurant. I hadn’t, but I got it now.

“You get her settled?” I asked her as she sank into a chair at right angles to me. “She feeling better?”

“Yeah. Asleep.” She ran a hand through her mass of fine blonde hair and sighed. “And now I need to settle with you. I’ll pay you back, of course. It just might take a while.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

“I will. And there’s something else I need to say, too. Thank you for helping today, for everything you did. It was kind of you.”

The doorbell rang, and she sat up straight with an obvious effort. She was knackered. “Huh.”

“Ah,” I said. “That’ll be lunch.” I went to the intercom and pressed the button. “Yes?”

“Delivery from King Tsin,” I heard.

“Buzzing you up.” I did it, pulled out my wallet, and, when the fella puffed his way up the stairs, took a couple white plastic bags off him in exchange for a fair number of bills.

“Forks and plates? Glasses?” I asked Hope, who’d been making some…noises behind me. Frustration, maybe. Maybe even anger again. I had to smile a bit. At least anger was better than worry and defeat. I’d always thought so, anyway.

She lifted her arms out from her sides and let them fall. “Well, sure.” She went to the kitchen for them, which really meant that she stepped across the room for them, and I set the bags on the coffee table and followed her.

“Wine glasses,” I said. “Corkscrew.”

“What? I’m sorry, I don’t have any wine. Let alone the kind you like.”

“But you see—I do.”

She pulled out a couple juice glasses and a corkscrew and handed them to me. “Sorry. I don’t buy enough wine to make the special glasses worth it.”

By the time she’d come back, I’d opened the bottle and poured. “Not as cold as it should be,” I said, “but we’ll pretend, eh. It’s a Riesling. Good with Chinese. See what you think.” When she hesitated, I added, “Don’t you think you’ve earned a bit of indulgence today?”

She smiled for the first time in hours. “You know what? I think I have. Our day out didn’t go so well, did it?”

“Oh, I dunno. It had its moments. The one where you almost slapped me again was pretty special.”

This time, she laughed. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

“Mm. Not quite right. But go on. Try the wine.”

I waited and watched as she sipped, tasted, enjoyed, and, finally, sighed. “Really good,” she said. “Really, really good. But how did you get the guy to pick up your wine?” She caught herself, then, and laughed. “Oh. Duh. Money.”

“It has its uses. Can’t buy you, of course, but could be it can buy something I can watch you enjoy. That works for me.”

She looked a little flustered at that, got busy searching out a bowl and dumping ice into it to chill the wine. Then she was opening cartons, exclaiming as if I’d done something special, something luxurious, instead of just calling for Chinese takeout. Taking not a bit of it for granted.

She went back to the topic, though, once we were eating, when she had her pretty legs tucked up under her in the big chair and her plate in her lap. She couldn’t resist closing her eyes at every sip of wine, though, and I couldn’t resist watching her.

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