The officer stood his ground, his square jaw clenched and his lips tight. Irritation pulsed in his temple, but apart from how pissed he looked, he appeared unaffected by Jayne’s insistence. If he hadn’t been wearing his uniform, Everett would have pegged him for a bouncer—big, burly, and strictly no-nonsense. The man was easily three times Jayne’s size in muscle alone, made more intimidating still by the full sleeve of tattoos that ran up his bulging right arm and the weapons holstered at his hip. The name tag pinned to his shirt read WESTFORD.
It took balls to argue with someone like that, and Jayne did so without batting an eyelash. Everett was impressed.
“Due to extensive and continual fire damage,” Westford recited the words like they were being fed to him via teleprompter, “the unit is unsafe for civilians. I can’t let you inside.”
“But you could look the other way while I slip in through the side door,” Jayne argued. “There are about a million other people here that you can focus on. I mean, Mrs. Bunding over there is about to go supercritical. If you don’t do something soon, she might explode. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you? The splatterings of a sad sixty-year-old woman all over everything? You’d have to call in a HAZMAT team. You’d have to call in psychologists. You’d maybe have to call in a team of scientists to figure out how rage could make a grown woman literally explode. Can you even imagine all the paperwork?”
Mrs. Bunding, if Jayne was to be believed, was a rotund woman dressed in a threadbare floral nightgown and a dressing robe. Fuzzy pink slippers adorned her feet. There seemed to be a perpetually sour look on her face—not that Everett could blame her. If he’d been ushered out of Caleb’s condo in nothing but his boxers and a pair of slippers, he would have been pissed, too.
“You know who you can blame this on?” Mrs. Bunding squawked at the officer nearest her. “Moe Fulch, the owner of the apartment building. I can’t tell you how many goddamn times that man has hired shady contractors to put Band-Aids on problems that need proper fixing. Just last month he had some strange man stop in. Jonathon? Jacob? Jensen? Some J name from another one of those cash-only construction companies. Knowing Moe, he probably got them to redo the electrical for as cheaply as possible and now the whole building is burning down. Do you know that man even had the balls to tell me that he never hired anyone from that cheap-ass construction company? That he’d never heard the name of the business before? A load of bullshit, if you ask me. Jenkins, Jersey, Jeffrey, J-whoever,came to my door and spoke to me directly—showed me his paperwork and everything. Moe is such a snake. I swear, if I hadn’t been grandfathered into such low rent rates, I’d have left years ago. But look at Moe, going and forcing my hand. I swear, this is his pathetic attempt at committing insurance fraud. Not only does he get a whole crap-ton of cash to remodel his dingy apartment building, but he gets to kick out all the rent-controlled tenants who’ve been there for years and who benefit from market rates from before the economy went to shit.”
Bo adhered himself to Everett’s leg. To comfort him, Everett set a hand on his head and stroked his soft hair.
“With her to distract you, it wouldn’t be all that hard to lose track of me, would it?” Jayne pushed. “All you need to do is cast a blind eye for a second—a second—and you won’t have to listen to me ever again.”
“No one goes inside,” Westford replied.
Jayne clawed at his face and hissed a sigh of frustration through his teeth. “Okay, I get it. No one goes inside. The building is off limits. But you know what? People want what they can’t have. It’s a biological imperative. If you want me to leave you alone, you should tell me that the building is within limits.”
Westford didn’t budge. “Sir, please step back.”
“It’s my apartment,” Jayne stressed.
“It’s a hazard.”
“My whole life is a hazard. Trust me. Compared to some of the shit I go through, walking into a burning building isn’t going to be all that big of a deal.”
“Jayne?” Everett asked cautiously. It had occurred to him that Jayne likely had no idea he was standing a few feet behind him. He was right. Jayne jumped and twisted at the waist, looking back at Everett with wide eyes, like he’d never considered the possibility that someone might come after him, but his surprise was short-lived—the shock in his eyes mellowed, and a softness overcame his features that was so heartfelt and personal, Everett felt guilty to have seen it.
Westford did not share Jayne’s enthusiasm. The hand he held closest to his baton twitched and drew closer to the weapon. “Is this your husband, sir?”
“Husband?” Everett’s cheeks ignited. “No.”
“So what?” Jayne crowed. The vulnerability Everett had seen seconds before vanished in an instant. Jayne swiveled around to face Westford anew. “Because some guy knows my name, you assume that he’s my husband? Really? Are you even listening to me? I told you that I live in the apartment with my brother and my son. Did I mention a husband? No.”
“Sir,” Westford spoke to Everett now, denying Jayne any kind of acknowledgment. “You seem to know the individual in front of me. Either tell him to back down or take him away from here—no one is permitted entrance into the building. If he attempts to cross the police line, I’ll have no choice but to detain him.”
“Jayne, come on.” Everett parted his hand from Bo’s head and laid it on Jayne’s arm. Jayne flinched, but didn’t pull away like Everett expected he might. “You’re not going to be able to get inside. What’s so important in there that you’d go into a burning building to get it, anyway? Your birth certificate? Your ID? You can have those re-issued. You have your wallet, don’t you? You had it earlier this morning.”
Jayne shook his head emphatically, but made no move to face Everett. A tremble shot down his back, tightening the space between his shoulder blades. Jayne locked his arms across his chest and held himself like he was trying to hold onto what strength he had left, but it was no use—there was no fighting what had already begun. Weakness dissolved Jayne from the inside, collapsing his polished facade like a cake still raw in the middle.
It made Everett want to collapse, too.
It was crazy to feel this way—it wasn’t like he knew Jayne at all—but the torment in Jayne’s eyes and the dull, fading glimmer of hope reached Everett in a place so deep, he couldn’t hope to rationalize it. Everett’s heart clenched, and he squeezed Jayne’s arm. He would not leave.
Jayne had lost everything, and one day soon, Everett would lose his everything, too.
“I can’t go.” Jayne’s voice cracked. “Parker’s crib is in there. His toys, his food, his clothes… if I don’t have them, I don’t have anything. I can’t go until I have them. I can’t.”
The wind played with the short brown hairs on Jayne’s nape and sneaked under the collar of his shirt, causing it to billow. In defense against the cold, Jayne wrapped his arms around himself tighter, but as a consequence looked smaller and more fragile. Everett’s mind screamed at him to help, but there was nothing he could think to do. Jayne wasn’t worried for his personal belongings—all he cared about were the things that would keep his son happy, healthy, and warm. Everett could give him clothes, but a crib? A high chair? Diapers? Those weren’t the kinds of things he could whip out of his closet.
As much as it killed him to admit it, Jayne’s distress wasn’t something he could cure.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Bo whispered. He stepped away from Everett’s side and hugged Jayne’s leg. “I’ll share. I’ve got… got clothes and food and lotsa toys. You don’t needa be sad.”
A new kind of shiver ran through Jayne—the kind that could easily rip a man apart from the inside out. Everett recognized it as the death throes of a sob that would never make it to Jayne’s lips or leak from his eyes. The pain burst inside of him instead, as thunderous and drenching as a storm cloud. As long as Bo and Penelope were present, he’d never let it out, and its forces would grow under the pressure of containment.
“You are a very generous little boy, do you know that?” Jayne asked at last. He ran an affectionate hand through Bo’s hair. “It’s very kind of you to offer to share your belongings. Parker is lucky to have a friend like you.”
