“Where’s Lily? I’ve been trying to call her.” The voice is calm, smooth, familiar and so veryveryunthreatening.
“I’m right here!” I crawl out from under the booth and dust the cobwebs off my kneecaps. Connor raises his eyebrows, as if he knows exactly what I was doing under there.
Garth must be confused because he (truly) says, “What were you doing under there?”
“I thought I saw a…rat,” I say quickly, “so I was inspecting the area to lay some traps later.” Before they can foil my lie, I turn to Connor. “What brings you to S&S?” I really should not try to shorten the name because every time Isay it, I immediately think of S&M. My mind has dangerous side roads.
“Lo wants me to look over a contract. He said he left it in his office.” He gazes at me with a little more concern than I appreciate from Connor Cobalt. I like his self-satisfaction much better.
“Okay, I’ll bring you back there.” I add to Garth, “Can you stay here? Watch the door?” I try to smother the worry in my voice, but I fear I’m not doing a good job.
“Of course.”
In Lo’s office, I flick on the lights, and Connor targets the file folder on the desk. I find my dinky flip phone and scroll through all the missed calls from Connor.
“So who did you think I was?” Connor asks as he opens the file and sinks into the leather chair.
“What?”
“This is a new building. I don’t think rats have moved in yet. So obviously you were hiding from whoever you thought was at the door.” He’s too astute for his own good, and I’m sure he already knows the answer to his own question.
I pick up a Black Widow action figure on Lo’s bookshelf. “I wish I was Rose,” I say softly.
“Why is that?”She wouldn’t be so scared.
“She’d handle this better than me. She doesn’t even have a bodyguard.” I want that kind of confidence, but I just don’t think it’s something a twenty-year-old can learn. I’m too late.
“There’s a difference between courage and pride. Believe me, I’d sleep better at night knowing she had a bodyguard.”
“She is alone a lot,” I say. How can she not be brave? She’s willing to face the swarming paparazzi and media-hungry press by herself every day.
“Yes, but that girl would rather carry her own Taser than let someone else defend her, all to prove a point. So when she meets an adversary twice her size and in a much larger quantity, she’s going to realize that some battles are best fought with a sidekick.”
“Oh,” I say, finally understanding, thanks to his superhero analogy. My sister is not a team player. She’d rather do things on her own.
“While my talents are immeasurable, I don’t have the power to save her from halfway across the city,” Connor says. “And our relationship is a bit different from yours.”
“That’s an understatement, I think.”
He smiles. “Yes, it is.” He closes the folder. “What I mean to say is that I’m trying not to be afraid for her. Since we were teenagers, she has always looked to me for reassurance, even if she won’t admit it. I’m her…rock.” He stares off as he finds the right words. “The unwavering thing. Confident, poised, unrelenting and annoyingly persuasive. If she sees that I’m frightened, she’ll gloat on the outside, as though I lost a round of chess, but internally she’ll begin to question herself. And I don’t particularly like when Rose loses her confidence and becomes less self-assured. She’s more vulnerable, and it breaks my heart.”
This is brand new honesty for Connor Cobalt, no insults hidden beneath the words. It’s just…the truth, from the soul. I kind of like it.
“Do you love her?” I ask, returning the action figure and taking a seat on the couch.
He flips the folder back open and reads the contract in his brisk, super-human manner, turning the page faster than I can read a magazine on a toilet. “Love is irrelative to some.” He dodges my question with a strange answer. As he concentrates on the contract, he begins closing the door on his brief openness.
I squint at him as I realize something else. “How come you don’t saywickedanymore?”
He briefly tears his eyes from the papers. “What are you talking about?”
“You used to say ‘wicked smart’ and ‘wicked cool.’ It was my favorite thing about you.” His lingo has changed since I first met him. Not completely though. I mean, whenwe run into someone he knows, he’ll sometimes throw out a “hey, bro.”
His lips rise. “I usually dumb down around the intellectually deficient so I don’t come off like a complete prick.” I think he just called me stupid. “But I see you as a true friend, so I’ve backed off some of the pretenses. Most people wouldn’t be able to stand all of me.”
“Can Rose?” I ask, still trying to process everything he’s saying.
His lips just lift higher. I suddenly come to the conclusion that I won’t ever know what Connor Cobalt really sounds like in his head—what words he finds abhorrent, what he thinks of certain situations, hisrealhonest reactions that aren’t half-insults and half-something a little nicer. Maybe Rose already knows him. Or maybe she’s just as clueless as the rest of us.
