All of this felt like a test, and I wasn’t sure if I passed.
Jack stood by patiently while the cashier rang up our items. I half-expected him to make a comment about being kidnapped, but instead he just raised a brow when I glanced at him.
Once we were back in the car, he settled in with the blanket on his lap and took a sip of coffee. Then he turned to me and asked, “Will you be chaining me up again like a common criminal?”
“You know you literallyarea criminal, right?”
“As are you.”
“I’m aware. And no, I’m not going to cuff you to the door unless you give me a reason to.”
He maintained a pretty successful poker face, but I saw a look of relief in his eyes. “Good, because that was absurd. What did you think I was going to do, leap from a car barreling down the interstate at eighty miles an hour? I’d wreck my suit. I’m already down one from when I landed in those murder bushes beneath your balcony.”
“Yeah, those hurt like hell when I went to chase you. Thank you for running away like that, by the way.”
“I had to. You were about to shoot me.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You pointed a gun at me!”
“It wasn’t loaded.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“Just FYI, when a normal person finds themselves in that situation, they put their hands up and surrender,” I told him. “Not you, though.”
“I was afraid of you, and my fight or flight response kicked in. Obviously, I went with flight.”
“How’d you manage to disappear like that?”
“I hopped over a few fences but stalled out when I twisted my ankle. I was in the back yard of a house that belonged to this amazing LGBT family, and they took me in and nurtured me for a week while my ankle healed.” After a pause, he said softly, “It was really nice, actually. I like to think I don’t need other people, but…I don’t know. Spending time there made me question some things.”
“You’re not alone though, right? You mentioned a mom and a best friend. Where are they?”
“Back home in Kansas.”
I glanced at him and asked, “So, you actually stayed in the Midwest after your mom’s trip to California was cut short?” Of everything he’d told me, that part really hadn’t felt like a lie.
“We didn’t have a choice. We had no money and no car, so we ended up in a homeless shelter for a while, until Ma found a job and got on her feet.”
“There wasn’t a friend or relative that could help?”
“She tried asking for help,” he said, “but people suck, and ultimately you can only rely on yourself.” I thought that belief summed up a lot about him. “It turned out we didn’t really need them anyway. Manhattan, Kansas was a perfectly fine place to grow up, and Ma and I took care of each other.”
“Did she know what you were doing to contribute to the household income?”
“Of course not. I told her I was earning money by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. I did get caught shoplifting once when I was ten, though. It made her cry, and I swore I’d never do it again. What I actually meant was that I’d never get caught again, and I learned to become a better thief.
“Now she thinks I work as an assistant to an interior designer, and that I move around a lot because he’s always getting jobs in different cities. I even went so far as to make a fake website for my fictitious employer. I feel bad lying to her, but I’d feel a thousand times worse if I broke her heart with the truth.”
I asked, “Why’d you tell her you’re an assistant, and not a successful interior designer?”
He grinned at me and shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe because it seemed more believable?” After he took another sip of coffee, he asked, “Does your mom know about your illegal gambling operation?”
“She does, but she’s willfully oblivious to the fact that I’m a criminal. She likes to think of it as an anti-establishment, stick it to the man type of thing—screw the big casinos and the government, power to the people.”
“Hey, whatever helps our mothers sleep at night.”