“Right away,” she says. “And if they don’t, they’ll stall. How long can they do that?”
“A few weeks at most, and that’s if everything works against me, and I won’t let that happen. But they’re in this deep. They will try to force you to crack under the pressure. In the meantime, we’ll prepare to hit back, and hard.”
“What about me paying down the debt? Why wouldn’t I do that?”
I steel myself for her reaction, and set down her mug that I’m still holding. “Because I paid the past-due amount and six months in advance.”
She blanches and holds her hands up. “I think I misheard you. I need to pay six months in advance? That’s double what I have in the bank.”
“I paid it, Faith.”
“No,” she says.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Get it back,” she says fiercely. “Tell them you want it back. I’m not taking your money.”
“They will and they did. It’s done, and by cashier’s check.”
“I’m not taking your money, Nick,” she says, her tone absolute. “Thank you. I mean that and those words feel too small for what you’ve done, but you don’t know me well enough to do this. And even if you did, I don’t want charity.”
“It’s not charity. It’s a gift that I want nothing in exchange for. And as I’ve asked before, when do I know enough, Faith? I can fuck you all I want, but I can’t give a damn? Because I give a damn. I get it. It’s early. It’s new. But it is what it is, and I can’t change that.”
She presses her hands to her face, and I can see them tremble, as they did last night when she found out that she’d earned sixty thousand dollars on her art. And I don’t know how it’s possible, but I know this woman in a way that defies the time we’ve been together. I reach for her hands and pull them between us. “I’m alone in this world too. You know that, right?”
“You don’t seem alone.”
“Why? Because I’m foul-mouthed, cocky as you say, and sexy as fuck?”
“Nick,” she whispers, no laugh this time.
“I know that we are new to each other. I know it feels like you could count on me and then I’ll be gone, but I’m not going to be. Even if you decide you don’t want to be us anymore, I’m your friend. I will remain your friend. And I don’t have a lot of friends, but the ones I have, I take care of. Okay?”
“The money—”
“Is not a big deal to me. I know that feels big to you, but it’s not a lot to me. I’ve done well for myself, but my bastard of a father was rich as fuck and now I have his money. And I’d like to do more than a few good things with it.”
“How much was the check you wrote?”
“A hundred and twenty thousand.”
“Nick,” she breathes out. “You can’t—”
“I already did.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I just told you. I have a lot of money.”
“It’s a lot of money,” she repeats.
I grab the notepad on the table, write down my bank balance, and show it to her. “That’s how much I have in the bank.”
Her lips part in shock. “That isn’t even comprehensible to real people. Did you—Are there too many zeroes on that number?”
“No, there are not.”
“Okay. I… Okay. But even if you took two or three zeroes off that, I’m not taking advantage of you.”
“No,” I say. “You’re not. Because it’s a gift.” I release her hands and settle mine back on her knees. “But let’s talk about why I did it and what it does for us. I have documents for you that state this is a gift. You do not owe me anything in return. But I have a plan to make this go away, and we need it to go away. But it means you’re going to have to trust me, and Faith, I mean really trust me.”
“I trust you, Nick,” she says. “Why do you think I slept so well in your bed?”
“You sure about that? Because you seem to have a calendar and a timeline for when we’re allowed to do certain things.”
“This is new to me, too,” she says. “It wasn’t like this with…I trust you.”
“Macom,” I supply. “It wasn’t like this with Macom. You lived with him, Faith.”
“I did.”
“You trusted him.”
“I’m actually not sure I did.”
I study her for several beats, wanting to unwrap that package she just handed me, but knowing now is not the time. I show her that bank balance again. “That kind of money is power that we can use to end this, and I’m not talking about me spending more money, though that is not off the table.”
“By disclosing your involvement,” she assumes. “And therefore giving yourself a vested interest in the case.”
“We have to go further than that. I drew up a separate set of dummy documents which give me an interest in the winery. But again, you’ll have documents that cover all of this and protect you.”
She doesn’t even blink. “I trust you. What else?”
“I have a number of tools in the chest, but among them, I’ll offer to move some of my money to your bank, which will have influence. But not until we have our day in court. I want to see their hand before I play ours.”
“Ours,” she repeats.
I reach up, and brush a strand of the pale blonde silk of her hair from her beautiful green eyes, the many shades of torment in their depths accented by flecks of yellow. “Ours,” I say. “I told you. I’m in this with you until the end.”
Her hands come down on my forearms and lifts the right to stare down at the black and orange tiger etched into my skin, but her gaze shifts to my left, her fingers tracing the words there. “An eye for an eye,” she says, reading them as she did once before. “I don’t believe in an eye for an eye.”
I believe her. She is a kinder, gentler soul than me, the moonlight on the water when I’m the sun bringing it to a boil. And I like that about her, about us. The contrast, the good and the bad. And I don’t mind being the bad. “Only one of us has to go for the throat,” I say. “I’ll be the killer. You be the artist. And maybe you’ll tame the beast along the way. But I wouldn’t count on it.”
“You’ll be the killer,” she whispers, letting out a choked laugh. “Right.” She reaches for the coffee and gulps it down like water, then sets down the cup. “I need air.” She scoots around me, stands up, and walks away.
I’m on my feet standing almost immediately, watching her track across the room to exit the open patio doors onto the terrace. Aware that I’ve thrown a lot at her, but also that she’s rattled when she doesn’t rattle easily, and I don’t like the word that had that impact: killer. Fuck. What is happening here? I pursue her and I find her at the railing, her back to me, her attention on the city, the ocean, and the Golden Gate Bridge before her. I close the space between us, stepping to her side, close, but not touching her, my hands also resting on the railing. And while there are times when I push people to talk, there are others when silence leads them to reveal what is there but not yet spoken. With Faith, I don’t speak. I wait, giving her the opportunity to speak when she’s ready. Confident that she needs to say whatever it is she hasn’t spoken yet.
“When I went to L.A.,” she says without looking at me, “it hurt my father. He didn’t want me to chase a hopeless dream.”