Breaking the Rules (38 page)

“It was an accident,” Jenn said again.

Izzy looked from her to Eden and back as he nodded. “I know that,” he said. “But I think he’s going to have a little trouble believing it from you.”

J
enni, God, I’m so sorry,” Danny said as Izzy closed the bathroom door behind him. The other SEAL was on his knees, eyes tightly closed, bowing to the porcelain god, having just sacrificed his dinner into its murky shallows. Izzy helped them both out by reaching forward and flushing the monster.

“She knows that,” Izzy told this man who, despite trying as hard as he had, had never managed to become his friend.

Dan didn’t open his eyes. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

“Yeah, well, small apartment, single bathroom,” Izzy pointed out. “I kind of need to go. Don’t move—I’ll just piss past your head.”

Danny did more than open his eyes at that—he actually hit the pause button on his current state of sheer misery as he turned to look at Izzy in disgust and disbelief.

Izzy smiled back at him as he hoisted himself up to sit on the counter of the sink. There wasn’t much counter, so he was half in, half out of the sink itself. Still it was the proper visual aid to reassure Dan that he was only kidding about that piss-past-your-head thing.

“I’m on Team Jenn for this one,” Izzy told Dan. “You’re not your father, Gillman. Never have been, never will be.”

Dan didn’t want to hear that—and he tried to slip back into his
post-vomit, beat-himself-up state. “Seriously, Zanella, I don’t need your bullshit right now.”

So Izzy reached over with his foot and gave the man a not very gentle push, making him lose his balance and bump his shoulder into the wall near the toilet-paper holder.

“Hey!”

“Fuck you for the way you treat your sister,” Izzy told him. “You’re an asshole and a total dick, and if you weren’t so pathetic with your
I’m so tired
and your
I’m so jet-lagged
and your
Poor me, I almost lost my leg and now I have an ouchy boo-boo
, and
Don’t let me tear open the stitches because I still might bleed out and die
, I’d kick your ass down to the street and pound you black and blue.”

And okay. Maybe that was too much, because now Dan was getting angry back at him and was about to issue a challenge for Izzy to just fucking try it.

So Izzy pushed himself off the sink and did exactly what he’d threatened. He unfastened his pants and took a leak right there in the empty bowl.

And instead of standing up, Dan pushed himself even farther back into the corner, against the wall, to stay out of the splash zone. “Jesus!”

“There are times,” Izzy said, raising his voice a little to be heard over the pleasantly tinkling waterfall, “when I fucking hate the things you say and do. But I
do
know that you would rather die than hurt Jennilyn. I know how much you love her—hell, I probably know that better than she does. And I also know, as flipping crazy as you drive me most of the time? You would never intentionally hit your woman. What happened was an accident. And I believe what you said—that it will
never
happen again.” He shook himself off, zipped up, flushed the toilet, and went to the sink to wash his hands. “In fact, I’d bet my life on it.”

Dan was silent, just sitting there, staring down at the floor as Izzy dried his hands on one of Eden’s mismatched towels. Given her tendency to be thrifty, she’d probably picked them up at some second-hand
store. If she was still around by Hanukkah or Christmas or whatever she celebrated—Festivus?—he was going to buy her a really nice, really thick and fluffy matching set. And sheets that were criminally soft, and shit, maybe a whole new apartment’s worth of furniture.

“You’re an asshole, Gillman,” Izzy repeated now, “but you’re an intelligent asshole, and deep down you’re a good guy with a heart of fucking gold. So if you’re really worried about it—maybe about what Eden said about the name-calling, which is definitely uncool, bro—then you should go in. You know, for counseling. It can’t hurt. That Al-Anon stuff, too, you know, for adult children of alcoholics? It’s a good idea. I read a lot about it back when …”

Back when Eden had first left, and Izzy had been certain it would only be a matter of time before she’d return. He’d wanted to be ready to help her, however he could.

“I read about it,” Izzy finished.

But Danny knew exactly what he hadn’t said. “You’re the one who needs counseling. What you’re doing? With Eden? It’s fucked up.”

Izzy nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Dan said, shaking his head. “Even just the
thought
of Jenn with other men … I mean, I don’t own her, either, but … I just don’t know how that could be even remotely okay.”

“Well, she’s not
with
them,” Izzy pointed out. “I have to admit that the look-but-don’t-touch rule plays heavily into it. You know, the making-it-bearable.”

And now Dan was looking at him as if he’d just spoken in Mandarin Chinese. “Look but don’t …” he repeated.

It was as if a cartoon lightbulb was switched on glaringly bright over Izzy’s head, at the exact same moment that a second one lit up over Dan’s noggin.

“Holy shit, bro,” Izzy said, “did you actually think—”

“Jesus,” Dan spoke at the same time, “I thought Eden was, you know, hooking, but—”

“Your sister’s an exotic dancer,” Izzy told him, getting the facts out there as quickly and efficiently as he could. “A stripper. On a stage. In
a club called D’Amato’s. No one touches her. The bouncers are solid, the rules are absolute. I’ve been there. There’s no back room, although the parking lot is sketchy. But inside? What you see is absolutely all that you get.”

“Jesus,” Dan said again. “I thought …”

Danny actually thought his sister was a prostitute—and holy crap, no wonder he’d been so amazed at the idea that Izzy was down with that.

For two men who were both smart enough to become Navy SEALs, they were pretty freaking stupid to have failed to notice that, for the entire past discussion, they’d been talking about two different things.

Like Izzy, Dan was now sitting there, rerunning everything that had been said since Eden and Izzy had come through the apartment door.

Danny had called his sister a whore because he’d actually thought she was. A whore. Professionally. Because it was legal to turn tricks in parts of Nevada. And in other parts, like Las Vegas’s Clark County? The cops tended to look the other way.

Not that any of that made it okay. At least not for Eden, and Jesus, not for Izzy, either.

Out in the living room, Eden and Jenn had no doubt had a similar revelation, because there came a quiet knock on the bathroom door, then Jenn’s voice: “Dan? Danny? I’m sorry to bother you, but we were wrong. Eden’s a
stripper
. But even that’s kind of secondary to the fact that while she and Izzy were at the mall asking about Neesha, someone shot at them. With a gun.”

Izzy reached over and opened the door as Danny looked up at him, in disbelief. “Jesus Christ, Zanella,” he said, “what the
hell
 …?”

“Neesha,” Eden called quietly as Izzy followed her through the door that accessed the stairs leading down to the basement, where the building’s laundry room was located, along with about a dozen storage
spaces with garagelike metal doors that slid up and down and were secured with padlocks.

She didn’t like coming down here in the daytime—at night it was even spookier. But having Izzy with her was a real game changer.

“It’s me, Eden,” she called. “Ben’s sister?”

But there was no answer, no sound of movement, and when she looked inside, the laundry room was empty.

Eden watched as Izzy went down the row of storage spaces, checking that each lock was secure—in between glances back at her. No doubt to make sure she wasn’t about to crumble.

It had been a day and evening filled with more than its share of unpleasant and frustrating surprises, that was for sure.

“I can’t believe Neesha was here,” Eden said, now, because she just knew Izzy was about to start talking about Danny’s incredible disrespect, and she didn’t want to go there. Not now.

“Yeah,” Izzy agreed as he came back down the hall toward her. “It’s a pretty cruel irony.”

Apparently, while she and Izzy and Danny and Jenn were at the hospital, Neesha had used the key Ben kept hidden outside of the apartment to come in, take a shower, eat a meal, and commit petty larceny by stealing several items from Eden’s stripper clothes drawers.

Not that Eden wouldn’t have lent her what she needed, should Neesha have just asked. After all, she had an excess.

On her second day of work, she’d inherited an entire costume trunk from a woman who was exactly her size, who was leaving D’Amato’s to have a baby. She wasn’t planning on coming back and had given it to Eden in a pay-it-forward way. So Eden had ended up with far more stripper clothes than she’d ever need—two dresser drawers full—which Neesha had apparently found while snooping through Eden’s things last time she was here with Ben.

“While you were in the bathroom with Danny,” Eden told Izzy now, “Jenn said that Neesha came over to snag one of my stripper outfits. She said that’s at least partly why she and Danny thought what they thought, because Neesha said something to them about borrowing
some clothes that didn’t make her look like a little girl, because she didn’t want to have to have sex with the freaks.”

“Really?” Izzy asked.

Eden nodded as they went back up the stairs. “Why do guys find that hot?” she asked. “The little-girl thing?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “because I don’t.”

She glanced back at him. “So, like, if I dressed up in, you know, a Catholic schoolgirl uniform, you wouldn’t like that?”

“Hmm,” he said. “That’s kind of a touchy question, considering a lot of people think you’re kind of permanently wearing a schoolgirl uniform, because you’re too young for me. People including your brother.”

“He’s an idiot.”

“He certainly is opinionated,” Izzy said evenly. “And some of his opinions
are
idiotic. But the math is the math. I’m eleven years older than you.”

“Ten and a half,” she countered. “And it’s not a problem for me. Your being so elderly.”

He smiled at that, as she’d hoped he would. “Good to know. And as long as we’re being honest here, your being nubile has never been a problem for me. And if you really got into the whole wearing-a-school-uniform thing, I’d muscle through. Although I’d prefer you waiting to don it until you’re fifty and I’m sixty-one.”

“So you
do
think it’s hot.”

Izzy laughed. “Sweetheart, if you wore a giant Hefty trash bag and asked me to wear bubble wrap around my head while we got it on, I’d find
that
molten-lava hot. You want to role-play and pretend we’re historical figures—I’ll be George, you be Martha? I’m there. I’m still reeling from the missed opportunity at the mall. I was totally ready to be Billy Bob to your Irma Lou.”

“I think Billy Bob was Irma Lou’s brother,” she told him, dancing out of his grasp.

“Oh, that’s so wrong,” he said, stopping there on the stairs.

“Yeah,” Eden said, turning to look down at him. She rarely saw
him from this vantage point, and it was nice. He was extremely attractive from every angle, and the amusement in his eyes made her smile back at him, even though the information she was about to give him was nothing to smile about. “About as wrong as Neesha, who looks like she’s around twelve telling Danny that she’d stay only if he paid—and then giving him a crotch grab.”

“Whoa, did Jenn tell you that?” Izzy’d started up the stairs, toward her, but that stopped him short again. He laughed his disbelief as she nodded. “It’s been one hell of a night for Danbo, too, huh? Did his head explode?”

“Probably.” Eden smiled again despite her deep and growing concern for the girl. “Am I a bad person if I admit that I really wish I’d been there to see that?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a bad person, too.”

“Jenn said it really freaked him out.”

“Yeah, I bet.” He laughed again.

Getting grabbed like that had been Dan’s big surprise of the night—that and accidentally clobbering Jenn.

Of course,
that
had been Jenn’s big surprise. Getting knocked on her butt by her supposedly perfect boyfriend.

While Eden had been horrified, she hadn’t exactly been surprised when it had happened. And yes, Izzy’d since convinced her that Dan wasn’t the domestic violence train wreck Eden had instantly imagined, just waiting to explode off the tracks. Still, she knew for a fact that her brother had to learn to slow down and be more careful. Because even though accidentally decking your girlfriend wasn’t even half as awful as intentionally punching her in the face, it was still a
very
bad thing. And although Dan wasn’t quite as tall and as broad as Izzy, he was still a big and very solid man.

Eden knew, because she’d gotten in Dan’s way and been knocked over by him a time or two in the past few years. Never intentionally—that was true. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

As far as the evening’s other surprises went, Greg showing up at the
hospital fell under the category of bad, while Dan’s continuing inability to reach Ivette was no surprise at all.

Getting shot at while at the mall—a big surprise for everyone, including Dan and Jenn when they’d found out.

After the complete story had been told, Eden had overheard Izzy and Dan talking about being better prepared—as in making sure the next time someone fired on them, if there was a next time, their only option wasn’t to duck and cover. She hadn’t pushed it, but she knew that they were cooking up a plan to get armed.

And then, of course, there was Eden’s surprise at finding out that her brother and his new girlfriend believed she earned her living on her back. It had been devastating, realizing just how little Danny thought of her.

Of course, he’d made it clear, after emerging from his bathroom conference with Izzy, that he didn’t think very highly of her choice to become a stripper, either. Yeah, she wasn’t selling her body for cash, but to him, it was damn close. Eden may not have been a whore, but in his eyes—it was so obvious—she was a whore-lite.