“Nah, babe. He’s just got shit luck. Seems like half of the incidents the Family has dealt with lately have come from him and shit involving him.”
I had no business telling her any of this.
But, then again, she was the last person in the world I expected would run their mouth about it. And not just because we were paying her for her silence.
“Well, that explains him being grumbly,” she said, shrugging. “He’s probably the baby, too, right?” she asked.
“That he is. His ma and sisters were by fussing over him already.”
“It’s good to have that,” she said, and there was a hint of wistfulness, of longing, in her tone.
She’d been so used to being the caretaker for so long. When had anyone ever taken care of her?
And why was my first fucking instinct to be that for her? When I knew damn well I wasn’t exactly the caretaking sort. I wasn’t soft like that.
But, still, the urge was there.
I guess taking her back to my place was part of that too, however much I wanted to dress it up to look simply like protection.
“Do you not have a car, or do you just prefer to walk?” she asked a few blocks later.
She wasn’t complaining, obviously, since she generally chose to walk as well.
“I have one. But traffic and parking suck. And walking helps you clear your head. What?” I asked.
“Says a man who doesn’t really need to worry about someone jumping out of the shadows and assaulting him.”
“Fucking ridiculous world we live in,” I agreed. “We have our own worries, being in the business we are in, but we chose that. We volunteered to live with that potential for danger. All you did was be born the ‘wrong’ gender. Here, this is me,” I said, steering her toward the steps to my building.
“This is a step up from that office you work out of,” she said, giving me a smirk.
“Don’t get yourself too excited. I’m not much of a decorator.”
And I wasn’t.
The guys and Alessa Morelli, when they came over to play cards, all teased me relentlessly about how “bare bones” my place was.
It was hard to explain to people who hadn’t been inside how much that shit fucked with your head.
You became institutionalized after a while. Used to shit being sparse. So much so that just having a couch was a massive luxury to me. The other shit—curtains and art—just didn’t really matter. And I wouldn’t know what to pick anyway.
I didn’t give much thought to it beyond their ribbing, but found myself oddly concerned about what Whitney would think about it as we made our way to the elevator.
Her own apartment reflected her personality and the fact that she’d clearly lived there happily for a long time. It was in the little details. The art. The extra blankets. The collection of trinkets.
“It’s so quiet,” she said in a whisper as we made our way down the hall toward my apartment. “It doesn’t seem to matter what time of night it is, there is always a racket somewhere in my apartment building. That’s probably because the walls are made of plaster-covered newspaper. I swear you can’t even put a nail into it,” she added.
Babbling.
She was babbling.
Was she nervous?
Oddly, I understood.
Because that strange jumpy sensation in my chest and stomach? Yeah, I was pretty sure those were nerves as well.
I had to admit, I wasn’t exactly familiar with the sensation. When you lived your life constantly stepping over the line of the law, you kind of got used to those sensations until your body no longer even produced adrenaline when in a risky situation.