Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (3 page)

And that was great, except he’d also been a miserable bastard with stress-induced hypertension, insomnia, and a tendency to fly into unprovoked rages. He’d screamed at his kitchen staff and fought with his wife so much, they’d practically made an Olympic sport of it.

He didn’t blame Sandy for leaving him for greener pastures eighteen months ago. Hell, he would have left him, too, if he’d been able to figure out how. She’d done him a favor, delivering that wake-up call.
Hey, Ben? You’ve turned into an unbearable asshole
.

These days, he was learning how to keep a cool head. Even if it was hell on his dart game.

Ben inhaled, squinted, cocked, and let another dart fly. It hit the drywall to the left of the target.

Connor snorted. “When’s Alec back?”

“I’ve got a week.”

“You find another place to live yet?”

“No.”

“You even look?”

“Sure.”

Connor raised an eyebrow.

“Some.” If glancing at Craigslist for five minutes a week ago counted as looking.

Ben went through his whole routine—deep breath, focal point, directing his energy—and
threw the last dart. This time, he managed to hit the target.

“Two points,” Connor said. “You’re setting the world on fire.”

“I have to savor the small victories.”

“You know it’s supposed to be a big deal, right?”

“What, two points?”

“Finding an apartment in New York. You’re not supposed to be this casual about it.”

“Something will work out. Alec will let me sleep on the couch for a while if I have to.”

This was true, because Alec was a pushover. It was also a bad idea. Ben’s former pastry chef was bringing his new bride home from Spain. Ben crashing on the couch would put a real cramp in the honeymoon.

“You can always come stay with us,” Connor said. “Erin and Bridget can bunk together, and you can have Erin’s room.”

“Yeah, that’d be really cozy. Right up until your sisters killed me in my sleep.”

“They wouldn’t mind sharing if it was for you. They like you.”

“Thanks, but I have to stick close to the bees.” Connor lived way the hell out in Queens.

“You and those bees.”

Ben gathered all the darts and positioned himself for another shot. The dart died on the way to the wall and buried itself in a crack between the floorboards. Connor checked his watch. “Shoot.” He grabbed his jacket off the arm of the couch and stood. “I have to head out. I told Erin I’d take her for her driving test in an hour.”

“You’re going to be late.”

“Don’t say that. She’ll whine if I’m late.”

Connor came up behind him, clapped one hand on his shoulder, and raised Ben’s dart-clenching fingers with the other. He cocked Ben’s arm like a puppet limb, aimed, and shot.

Forty points.

“You should really stick to pinball.”

“Check back again in six months. Tiger Woods of darts.”

Connor chuckled. “See you next week for the game?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here.”

He and Connor usually got together on game days. In college at UW, they’d been roommates, first by luck of the draw, then by choice. The Badgers and the Packers became their
religion. The church had been forced to close its doors when Ben was in Europe, but after he came back and started working in New York he’d connected with Connor again. It didn’t take them long to figure out that Pulvermacher’s was a better venue than Connor’s place. His sisters didn’t treat the Packers with sufficient gravity, and Ben liked to say things to the refs that weren’t fit for the ears of teenage girls. At Pulvermacher’s, everybody took the Packers seriously, and bitching at the refs was a communal activity.

As Connor headed out, Ben threw again. Missed by a mile.

Son of a bitch
.

He gave up and stuck all the darts in the board. Flopping onto the back room’s couch, he pulled his book from his pocket, intending to finish his beer before he took off.

There was a lull in the music, and from the main room he heard the friendly murmur of Connor’s voice followed by a woman’s laugh—a deep, throaty, way-too-loud bray that echoed in his head after the jukebox started playing again.

Without thinking, Ben rose and walked to the pinball machine, curious to pinpoint the source of that sound.

There were a few other people in the front room now, but they were all engaged in conversation or fondling their cell phones. Connor was backing toward the exit, beaming his trademark ear-to-ear grin, and May was still at the bar, smiling back.

It had to be her who had laughed.

Some laugh.

Connor jogged up the steps. His torso disappeared from sight, then his legs, then his feet. May’s smile faded along with him.

She blew out a breath, her unfocused gaze falling on the liquor bottles.

I bet you couldn’t be nice if you tried
, Connor had said.

It wasn’t true. Probably.

Niceness wasn’t a prized commodity in restaurant kitchens, and the divorce had amplified Ben’s bad temper. In the first year after he and Sandy broke it off, he’d felt fucking scary. Pissed off and clenched, like he might strike out any second if he’d been able to find anything to strike out at. He’d started getting headaches in the season before she took the restaurant, Sardo, and in the months after his ears were ringing all the time. His doctor had doubled his blood-pressure medication and warned him to chill out before he had a stroke.

It had taken Ben another half a year to back away from that ledge. He’d tried everything anybody suggested—prescription drugs, yoga, meditation, even an anger therapy group. None of it had done any good, but the bees helped. So did all the hours he’d put in on the rooftop at Figs, getting his hands dirty pulling weeds, digging holes, and spreading cow shit. Making things grow.

He was getting better, but he had a long way to go before he’d be any good at polite chitchat with brown-eyed dairymaids.

He should go back to the couch. The woman radiated fragility. She was like that assignment in high school where you had to carry around an egg for a week and pretend it was your baby. If he was too much of an asshole, she’d crack open. Spill all over the place, and then he’d have to deal with the mess.

But it was strange. That laugh—so loud and unapologetic. It didn’t fit.

It didn’t fit that she’d tried to pick him up, either. She’d been far from oblivious to the signal he was putting out.
Busy here. Fuck off
.

Ben had already burned through the obligatory post-divorce phase of sleeping with any passably attractive woman who was into it. He’d landed in the ashes on the other side—tired, bleary-eyed, flat-out not interested.

He wasn’t interested now. This wasn’t
interest
. It was something else. An opportunity.

Because how was he supposed to learn how not to be a dick, except by talking to someone who actually seemed to notice when he was one?

The logic probably wouldn’t survive scrutiny. Ben didn’t stop to scrutinize it. He moved.

“You want to play darts?” he asked her.

She gave him a skeptical look. “No.”

“What, did Connor warn you off?”

“He said you were sorrier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”

That explained the laughter. They’d been mocking him.

“What, you’re some kind of master?”

“I’m all right.”

“Play me either way. I’ll buy you a drink.”

After a moment, she nodded. “Okay to the drink.”

“Not the darts?”

“Not the darts.”

He could live with that. “What do you want?”

She scanned the selections behind the bar. “Glenlivet, if you’re buying. And a Red Hook.”

“That bad, huh?”

She did that thing with her mouth, that whip-frown, and his heart kicked his ribs again.

Those weren’t a milkmaid’s eyes. They were sharp and intelligent, full of a feeling he knew far too well.

“You have no idea,” she said.

But he did. He knew repressed fury when he saw it.

When Ben came through to the back room from the bar carrying four drinks, May wiped her hand over her mouth. It had settled into a sort of battle rigor. She forced herself to smile.

Maybe he’s not so bad
.

He set the drinks down and sucked spilled beer off the flat space beside his thumb. His hands were big, his knuckles covered with dozens of tiny scars.

He took a seat on the opposite end of the couch. “So. May.”

Then silence. He seemed to have nothing more to say.

May took the initiative. “Ben. Are you from around here?”

Small talk. Bright and cheerful. Just what her mother would have prescribed for such a situation. Not that her mother would ever find herself in
this
situation, because who moved in with her boyfriend, attacked him, slunk out of his apartment, got purse-snatched by a paparazzo, and ended up drinking with a hostile stranger?

Only May.

“I live in Hell’s Kitchen,” Ben said. “Ninth and Fiftieth.”

“I’m staying in the Meatpacking District.”

Ben nodded but didn’t comment.

It was as if he didn’t know how small talk worked. Or he hated her.

So why had he bought her a drink? Pity?

“Have you always lived there?” He seemed like the sort of man Hell’s Kitchen might have spawned.

“I grew up in Ashland.”

“Ashland where?”

“Wisconsin.”

“All the way up north?”

He nodded.

“I’m from Manitowoc.”

Another nod, and now he looked bored, probably because this conversation was lame even for small talk. Whereas May was kind of stunned. She’d never in a million years have
guessed he was from back home. He was so armored.

He passed her one of the short glasses of whiskey.

“How long have you lived here?” she asked.

“Six years.”

“I’ve been here six weeks.”

And then more nothing.

She wished he would say something. Anything.

Part of her wondered if this was some kind of elaborate setup, like this morning. That guy who’d stolen her purse must have planned it. He must have wanted access to her phone, hoping for juicy details to feed the media’s fascination with Dan. Or not with Dan, really, but with Dan’s celebrity. Fans called him “Thor” for his longish blond hair, his build, his Scandinavian roots. In his uniform, she could see it. He looked like a Viking quarterback god.

But he wasn’t what he looked like. People often weren’t. If the thief had looked like a thief, rather than a runty guy in a uniform with a baseball hat shading his eyes, May might have told him not to bother. There were no juicy details on her phone, because there were no juicy details, period. Her personal life was ordinary. Drama-free.

Or it had been until yesterday.

The funny thing was, Ben looked more like a thief than the runty guy had. She could easily imagine him being sent to snatch purses. But to coax the truth out of a troubled woman? Not his style.

There was something intense about him, something really physical and active that made her think he didn’t sit much, normally. He didn’t
chat
much. He was looking toward the dartboard, leaning forward, rolling the whiskey glass between his palms.

“Do you like New York?” she asked.

He gave her a sharp, startled look, as though he’d forgotten she was there. “Sure.”

The silence settled again, but this time he kept his eyes on her. Those strange, dark-rimmed eyes. He watched her over the top of his glass as he took a sip of warmed whiskey, and his steady, quiet focus created all this pressure in her lungs. She wanted to blurt out the whole story and get it over with. To cut herself open and spread every messy detail on the ground in front of him, then watch his face to see if he felt anything but annoyance.

Maybe it was the leftover adrenaline in her system, tango-dancing with this latest
infusion of alcohol. Her purse had been taken hours ago, but her hands still felt shaky, her armpits damp.

Ben watched her, waiting for something.

The pressure built.

Phantom pressure. Ghost biology. There was no reason for her to open her mouth.

No reason, except that he didn’t open his, and somebody had to.

“What brings you to New York, May?” she asked.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Oh, how kind of you to ask,” she told herself. “I moved here to be with my boyfriend, Dan.”

Ben turned toward her and settled one shoulder against the couch cushion. Making himself comfortable. After he’d gotten settled, he lifted his free hand off his lap and made a rolling circular motion.
Go on
, the gesture said.
I want to hear this
.

“So why aren’t you at home with Dan,” she continued, “instead of bothering a strange man at a Packers bar?”

He didn’t smile exactly, but his mouth did something that was less of a scowl than it had been. Something soft that made her notice he had lips, and they were capable of looking ways other than foreboding.

“Well, Ben, the thing is, Dan’s not just some ordinary schmo. He used to play for the Packers.” She plucked at the number on her jersey.

The brackets at the corners of his mouth deepened.

“Thor,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Thor.”

He lifted his drink to his lips, then took it away without drinking. “I think I know how this story goes. I heard about it from Connor. That was you?”

“That was me.”

“Stabbed Thor Einarsson in the hand with a shrimp fork. I’d have paid good money to see that.”

“You can see it now for free. It’s on YouTube.” Thankfully, it was a grainy, shaky video taken from afar, and May was little more than a tall blond blob in a black dress. Unrecognizable unless you knew who you were looking at.

“Nah. I don’t watch that kind of stuff.”

“Viral forkings?”

“People’s private lives turned into public entertainment.”

“Ah. Classy of you.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” He considered her for a moment. The corners of his mouth hitched up a notch. He leaned in and clinked his glass against hers. “Cheers, then. I can’t fucking stand Einarsson.”