Chase (10 page)

“Come on!” Jake said, bending slightly at the knee. “My dad had the day off, which means early dinner, homemade sauce . . . freshly baked bread . . . mozzarella that melts in your mouth . . . .”

Gaia's stomach grumbled loudly enough to be heard over the rushing traffic. “Your dad cooks?” she asked, raising her eyebrows as the Walk sign lit up.

“My dad
creates,”
Jake corrected her, starting across the street. “Don't ever let him hear you reduce it to mere cooking.”

Gaia pondered this. She saw herself sitting down
for an actual meal at an actual table. Saw herself sitting across from Jake, talking, maybe even laughing.

You need to get a clue
, Gaia told herself, wanting to laugh over the datelike quality the scenario in her head had taken on.
He's offering you food, not some kind of dear-diary moment.

Which was good, considering she was not looking for a date and she would never keep a diary if her life depended on it.

“Say yes,” Jake said with a grin. “You won't regret it, I swear.”

“Okay, I'm in,” Gaia said, trying to ignore the little flip her heart did over his smile.

“Cool. My dad loves company,” Jake said, turning down Fifteenth Street.

Gaia followed, wondering why it was that Jake was only mentioning his father.
My dad had the day off . . . . My dad loves company . . . .
But she knew better than to pry. Jake's family life was none of her business. Besides, once you started asking a person about his life, he started asking you about yours,
and she definitely didn't want to go there.

Jake walked over to the glass doors of a swank-looking gray brick building, and the doorman jumped to welcome them.

“Evening, Mr. Montone,” the white-haired man said with a nod as he held open the door. “Miss,” he said, smiling kindly at Gaia.

“Evening, Rick,” Jake said.

They crossed a hushed, intricately tiled lobby to an elevator with mirrored doors. It opened the moment Jake pressed the button and ascended soundlessly to the seventeenth floor. Gaia was accosted by the vision of her ratty reflection in the foggy silver walls of the elevator. She made an attempt at smoothing down her hair and tried to straighten her clothes a bit. Jake's father might be
a company-lover
, but she didn't want him to think his son had picked her up off the street.

Unfortunately, there wasn't much she could do with herself before the elevator doors slid open again. She was just going to have to hope the man was blind or something.

As she and Jake got out of the elevator, Gaia's mouth started to water like Pavlov's dog at the heady scent that permeated the hallway. Nothing like the smell of
tomato, garlic, and basil
to get your appetite going.

“That's him,” Jake said referring to the aromatic extravaganza created by his father. Jake pulled a large clump of keys out of his pocket and opened the door to apartment 17A.

“Dad! We're home!” Jake called out.

The scents were even more intense inside, and Gaia suddenly felt weak with hunger. Jake led her into a large, comfortably decorated living room/dining room, where the table was already set for two. He
tossed his book bag and jacket onto the couch, and Gaia shrugged off her things. Jake took them from her and laid them out neatly across an armchair. Gaia stifled a smile. If he knew what her stuff had been through, he wouldn't have been so reverent about it.

“Who's ‘we'?” a cheery male voice called out. It was followed by the appearance of Jake's father himself, a tall, stocky man with a bit of a belly, who emerged from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a half apron. His hair was black but peppered with gray and receding at the temples. He looked at Gaia and grinned
the most welcoming grin
she'd ever been graced with.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hey,” Gaia replied, feeling suddenly shy. Why was it she could banter for days with evil thugs, but she went tongue-tied in the face of congeniality?

Allergic to nice . . .

“Dad, this is Gaia Moore. Gaia, Arturo Montone, M.D.,” Jake said.

“Nice to meet you, Gaia!” the man said, shaking her hand. “You're a friend of Jake's from school?”

“Yeah,” Jake replied. “She just joined the karate team.”

“Ah . . . a fighter!” Jake's father said, impressed. “I like a girl who can take of herself.”

“Uh . . . thanks,” Gaia said, feeling it was her turn to speak.

“Well, I'll grill you more over dinner,” Jake's father said with a wink.

Great
, Gaia thought sarcastically.

“He's kidding,” Jake said.

Dr. Montone smiled as Gaia let out a breath. She wasn't used to so much positive energy bombarding her like this.

“You sit,” Dr. Montone told her, unexpectedly reaching out to touch her arm. “Jake, get her a place setting! Dinner's almost ready.”

He bustled back into the kitchen, and Jake pulled out a chair at the gleaming redwood table. Gaia stood there as Jake walked over to a hutch and removed a plate, a set of silverware, and a place mat. When he turned around again, he stopped in his tracks.

“That chair's for you, you know,” he said, glancing at the seat he'd pulled out.

Gaia flushed, feeling like a moron, and sat down hard. How stupid was she? Did she think he'd pulled out the chair for fun? Because of some kind of weird OCD complex? Of course it was for her.

As Jake set the place in front of Gaia, she suddenly became hyperaware of her hands. She didn't know where to put them. They went from the table to her lap to the arms of her chair and finally back to the table, where she folded them together awkwardly.

Searching for something to focus on to help her stop obsessing about her total discomfort, Gaia's eyes fell on a framed photograph on the countertop of the hutch. The woman in the picture was gorgeous—
raven haired
with huge blue eyes and a flirtatious smile that was the mirror image of Jake's.
Gaia knew she was looking at Jake's mother and wondered again where she was. The woman's gaze was mesmerizing, and Gaia couldn't seem to take her eyes off her. But she suddenly felt Jake hovering behind her chair, ready to put down a drinking glass.

“Sorry,” Gaia muttered, reddening. Why had she agreed to this? She should be scarfing down a dirty-water dog right now on the train back to Brooklyn. Gaia wasn't accustomed to being waited on.

“That's my mom,” Jake said as he placed the glass down a little too hard.

“She's . . . really . . .”
Really what, Gaia? Is it really so difficult to think of something nice to say?

“I know,” Jake interrupted, walking around the table and sitting across from Gaia. “She was really beautiful.”

“Was?” Gaia asked before she could rethink it.

Jake cleared his throat and looked down at his empty plate as his father clanged around in the kitchen. “She died when I was ten years old,” he said. “Brain tumor.”

Gaia's heart went cold. He had said it so simply, but there was so much pain and emotion wrapped up in that statement. And Gaia knew all of it. She knew the anger he probably felt toward his mother for deserting him. She knew the guilt he probably felt over
that anger. She knew how he would probably give up his life for one more day with her.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to—”

“It's all right,” Jake said, an edge in his voice.

Gaia stared into his light eyes, which were suddenly filled with defiance. She knew that feeling. He was daring her to be sympathetic—daring her to pity him. Oh, how she hated it when people gave her
those sorry-ass looks
when they heard about her own mother.

“What about you?” Jake asked suddenly, crossing his arms over his chest. “What's your family like?”

There it was. Ask a person a question and it comes right back to bite you in the ass.

I don't think I can answer that one without a graph and a couple of pie charts
, Gaia thought, swallowing hard. But Jake was watching her expectantly. She had to say
something.

“My mom died when I was little, too,” Gaia offered, hoping that sharing this one piece of information might at least take that sorrowful-yet-hard look out of Jake's eyes.

“Really?” Jake asked. “How?”

“It was an accident,” Gaia replied quickly. Now it was her turn to become entranced by her plate.

“You know what sucks?” Jake said.

This conversation?
Gaia thought. “What?”

“The fact that everyone always says they understand
how you feel about it but they never can,” Jake said. “No one ever can.”

Gaia's heart pounded painfully in her chest, and she looked up into Jake's eyes. In that one moment there was a connection that even Gaia couldn't deny. She knew something about him that no one else could come close to knowing and he about her. And the really strange thing was, it didn't bother her. It was as if
Jake was looking right through her carefully woven exterior directly into her emotions, and she didn't even mind.
She actually felt kind of . . . free.

“Exactly,” Gaia said quietly. “I know exactly what you mean.”

No Harm

“HEY, RED! LOOKIN' HOT!”

Tatiana tilted her head to the side so that the red curls fell between her face and the Neanderthal who was catcalling to her from the doorway to the twenty-four-hour Dunkin' Donuts around the corner from the Village School. This whole wig thing was turning out to be an interesting sociological experiment. That was the third guy who'd come on to her since she'd left the safe house twenty minutes ago.
Maybe blonds
had more fun, but redheads definitely attracted more moronic come-ons.

She rounded the corner, grabbed the red curls on either side of her head, and yanked down on the wig, fitting it more snugly against her skull. It was dark out now, and if anyone saw her approaching the school, there was no way they would recognize her with the mass of hair shielding her face. Still, she wanted to get this over and done with.

The front door was always unlocked, even this late, so that overachieving teachers could come and go. The janitors were also at work inside somewhere, but Tatiana was sure very few people were left. It was her only chance to get in and out undetected.

She opened and closed the heavy metal door as quietly as possible, producing only a tiny click as it shut. She crept up the stairs and peeked around the corner to the main hall, left, then right. Every other fluorescent light was illuminated, casting an eerie glow over the deserted hallway. Tatiana took a deep breath and walked quickly, silently to the stairwell.

When she opened the door to the second floor, she heard movement and hushed voices to her left and paused. Damn kiss-ass teachers. How much money could they possibly be getting paid? Certainly not enough to keep them here this late. She trained her ear on the sounds and relaxed. They were definitely coming from the front hall—the opposite direction of where
she had to go. She slipped out of the stairwell and slid along the wall this time, ready to duck into a classroom if anyone happened to decide on a bathroom run.

Jake's locker was at the end of a row, directly across from another stairwell. Tatiana pulled the folded note out of her jacket pocket and shoved it into one of the three chevron-shaped slats in the door, wondering if they'd been expressly designed to accept secret admirer cards and Dear John letters. She heard the paper flutter to the floor inside and turned to go,
mission accomplished.

But just as she was registering the fact that she was home free, she heard footsteps running up the stairs right in front of her. Suddenly Megan appeared beyond the cut-glass window in the wooden door, her face downturned as she dug in her backpack, looking for something. Tatiana had nowhere to hide. She had only seconds to think. She whipped off her wig and smiled. At that moment Megan opened the door and looked up.

“Omigod!” she blurted, jumping back against the door and bringing her hand over her heart. Her moment of surprise gave Tatiana a chance to stuff the wig into her pocket. “Tatiana! You scared me!”

“Sorry,” Tatiana said. “I guess this place
is
kind of deserted. What are you doing here?”
Besides completely screwing me over?
she added silently.

“Oh, the spirit club meeting went late,” Megan explained with a smile. She resumed the search of her
backpack. “We were making signs and stuff for the karate meet tomorrow.” Finally Megan pulled out a tube of lip balm and quickly applied it to her lips, then smacked them together. “You know, when Tara came up with this whole idea of equal opportunity pep, I was all for it, but keeping up with all these teams and their meets gets kind of exhausting.”

“I know,” Tatiana said sympathetically. “Well, I'd better get going . . . .”

“What are
you
doing here?” Megan asked, tossing her hair over her shoulder and completely ignoring Tatiana's attempt to bail. Two little lines appeared just above her nose, rendering her the picture of concern. “You haven't been in school for a couple of days.”

“Yeah . . . there's been some family stuff going on,” Tatiana said, knowing Megan would eat up the idea of being let in on a private drama. “I'd rather not talk about it.”

Megan raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I totally understand,” she said. “But . . . why are you here, then?”

There is nothing worse than a girl with a nose for gossip
, Tatiana thought.

“I came to get some stuff out of my locker,” Tatiana lied easily, tilting her head to indicate the locker just behind her. “I want to keep up with my homework.”