“It wasn’t just guys. A few of the worst were women.”
That surprised me. “They threatened physical harm?”
“No, but they sent me other stuff. Women know how to hurt other women so well.” She pauses. “Will it be very difficult if I don’t want to delve into the past? I mean . . . yes, God, I did not like getting the note, and yes, it set me off, but digging through all that shit is only going to make me more stressed out.”
“Why don’t you have someone forward it to me?” My leg is starting to ache. I probably shouldn’t have planned to walk this far with this prosthetic. I’d traded out the blade for my normal device with the vacuum-sealed socket and the carbon foot. It’s not made for strenuous activity, such as walking forty blocks. And while I’m fairly comfortable with the fact that I’m walking around with a fake limb on my leg and arm, I don’t enjoy the looks of pity when I have to turn on my vacuum pump to adjust the fit of my socket. It’s noisy as fuck and it makes it harder to convince people that they really don’t have to feel sorry for me when I’m grimacing in pain because the damn device isn’t fitting well as my stump swells or shrinks.
I face the street to hail a cab.
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Like what?”
She takes a deep breath. “How about a picture of what you’re wearing?”
I look down at my jeans, Windbreaker, and T-shirt. “It’s not flannel. I promise.”
“No picture?” She’s disappointed. Maybe she wants to see my prosthetics. Did Oliver tell her? She never said a word before. When I meet women, it’s the first thing they check out. I don’t hide it, because if they’re turned off by the fact that my left hand and foot are made of steel, plastic, and synthetics, I’d rather know that up front than later when I’m taking my clothes off. But for some reason I don’t want to acknowledge, I don’t want the focus on those things just yet.
“I’m six feet three. Weigh about two sixty.”
She’s silent. Am I too tall for her? Too short? A cab stops as I’m scratching the side of my shorn head. Why do I care?
“So not a runner’s body?”
“I’m not sure what a runner’s body is.” That’s not the comment I expected. “Because I do run.”
“How long?”
“Depends, but usually about six miles a day.”
“Six miles?” she yelps. “That’s like half a marathon.”
I cover the phone and give my address to the cabbie who stops. Returning to Natalie, I correct her. “It’s a quarter of a marathon.”
“It’s a marathon compared to what I run.”
As if the distance is what’s offensive. Of all the things about me I figured she wouldn’t like, the fact I work out isn’t one of them. Most women like my body, if they can get over the stumps. They coo over my muscles and wonder how I can even have any on my left side. I’ve had more than one run her tongue over the ridges of my abdomen. The last woman I slept with—a financial reporter, whom I stopped seeing because she was a little too snoopy for my taste—told me that my physique and big cock made up for a lot of deficits. Come to think of it, I probably dumped her for more than a few reasons.
“You have a treadmill so how much do you run?” I ask.
“Three miles with no resistance either. I run flat with no incline.”
“Three miles is a lot.”
“I could never keep up with you.”
“Did you plan on racing me?”
“No, but it’d be nice to run outside.”
I’ve never run with a woman, never wanted to. But I could picture Natalie running beside me along the Hudson River, telling me I’m going too fast or too slow in her sultry voice. My jeans start to get a little tight and I shake my head. Getting turned on by just a voice is a first for me.
“If you go early enough, the route along the Hudson is pretty empty.” I rub my chin. Am I asking her to run with me? Maybe the cell phone radiation is scrambling my brains. This is probably the longest conversation I’ve had with a woman not in my family.
The cabbie stops at my townhouse and I hand him two twenties and climb out. “Keep the change,” I mouth.
“Yeah, man, thanks,” he says and his voice is an intrusion on whatever weird intimacy that Natalie and I had developed over the phone.
She senses it too, because she clears her throat awkwardly. “Gosh, look at the time. I can’t believe I kept you on the phone this long. I’m so sorry. You must think I’m totally friendless and weird. Anyway, um, send me a bill for this and whatever else.”
“Natalie,” I say gently. “I enjoyed talking to you.”
“Um, right. Just, ah, send me the bill.”
Then she hangs up.
With a sigh, I tuck the phone into my pocket. We have a connection, a different sort of one, but I think we’re both caught off guard. I did enjoy talking to her, and generally speaking, I’m not a phone person. I text, I email, but spending thirty minutes on the phone isn’t something I’ve done in a long time. The lights to Tanner Security, which is housed on the ground floor and garden level of the townhouse that I bought with the inheritance I received when I was twenty-one, are off. I glance upward to see if my sister is home.
All the rooms are dark with the exception of the front bedroom on the fourth floor. She’s home, then, but doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.
My sister and I were close once. When I was shipped home after my unfortunate run-in with an IED in Afghanistan, she was still in high school. I hadn’t wanted to live at home and I hadn’t wanted to have a live-in nurse, so Sabrina volunteered to come and stay with me. It worked out great. By the time she began attending Columbia, I’d become self-sufficient again, learning how to redo simple things I’d once taken for granted—such as buttoning my shirts. I solved that by wearing pullovers. She’d since moved out, but still spent a lot of time with me.
Yet somewhere along the line, possibly the moment she met Tadashubu Kaga, she stopped appreciating having me as a big brother and started accusing me of interfering with her life.
While I admire Kaga and view him as a friend, I don’t want him anywhere near my innocent baby sister. He’s a powerful and wealthy man with very specific taste in women.
I finger the phone in my pocket, wondering what Natalie would say about this. She and Graham seem pretty close. I have the phone out and in my hand before I realize what I’m doing. I just met this woman. Hell, I hadn’t even met her. I talked to her on the phone for nearly thirty minutes and I’ve been inside her apartment, but we aren’t even friends and I’m thinking of calling an agoraphobe for fucking advice?
I need to go inside and take a long cold shower.
When the phone rings, my heart thumps like a fucking twelve-year-old’s until I see my mom’s face on the screen.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Are you still working? I can hear the noise on the street. You should be inside having dinner. It’s nearly eight o’clock at night.” She sighs, an exhale of frustration.
My mother has been nagging me about working too much and this moment of insanity is proof she’s right.
“I’m going in right now and eating a cow,” I reassure her.
“Save some for your sister,” she replies. “She’s looking tense and hungry these days.”
The last thing I want to think about is what might be causing Sabrina’s unhappiness. I shuffle that thought toward the back of my head and lean back against the stone railing of my stoop and enjoy the brisk night air as Mom catches me up on the news of her friends. She murmurs something about my ex looking me up but that’s another thing I don’t care to pay any attention to. After I promise to feed Sabrina, Mom lets me go.
I put the phone away and jog up the stairs. The front door has a lock and key, but it’s for show. Access to my townhouse is gained through a biometric hand scanner and voice recognition. I press my hand against the pane of glass in the door that serves as the scanner and give an audible command. The three locks disengage and a chirp of the alarm acknowledges my entrance.