8
“Well?” Jack said. “What do you think?”
He was walking Gia toward Columbus Avenue for a cab, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. Vicky ambled ahead, gyrating to whatever was playing on her iPod.
He’d thought it had gone well. It could have been a bonfire of the ovaries, but they’d got along.
Gia looked up at him, a faint smile playing about her lips. “I think she’s in love with you.”
The idea stunned him. Weezy? In love with him? Sure, she’d hopped into bed with him, but that had seemed more like a desperate kind of need than . . . love.
“No way. We’ve known each other for ages and haven’t seen each other since the eighties. She can’t be.”
“She might not know it herself, or be in denial. Maybe it’s just infatuation, but something’s there.”
“Swell. What do you think I should do?”
“Tell me again why she has to stay with you?”
“Long story.”
“Vicky took to her. I could put her up—”
“No.”
She paused, then, “You said that way too fast.”
He thought about what had happened to her house, to Harris, to Harris’s place. Lots of collateral damage around Weezy these days.
“Did I?”
“How much trouble is she in?”
“A bunch.”
“Do I want to know details?”
“Probably not. It’s complicated. She’s gotten herself into a situation. It’s better for you and Vicks not to be connected to her.”
“And a hotel or motel won’t do?”
“She needs to feel safe while she tries to make sense of the Compendium. It’s a temporary thing.”
Gia sighed and leaned against him as they walked. “Why isn’t anything ever simple anymore?”
“Because you’re involved with me, and I’m involved with . . . well, you know. Let’s face it: Life would be so much simpler and better for you if we’d never met.”
But awful for me.
He felt her stiffen. “Simpler maybe, but don’t you say ‘better.’ Don’t you ever say ‘better.’ ”
“You wouldn’t have lost Emma.”
“Emma wouldn’t have existed without you.”
“Exactly.”
”Let’s not go there, Jack.”
“Okay.”
Gladly not. He still hadn’t found a way to tell her that Emma had died, and she and Vicky had almost died, because Emma was his bloodline . . . a branch marring the symmetry and aerodynamics of a spear.
They reached Columbus just as a cab was disgorging a trio of sweet young things eager for the Upper West Side’s Saturday night bar scene. Jack grabbed the door and scooted Vicky into the back. He took Gia in his arms and she pressed against him.
“So . . . should I lock my bedroom door?”
She smiled. “I’ll leave that up to you, but you never know . . . it might avoid an awkward moment.”
“Think so?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know I like her. She’s got a sweetness about her. I don’t think she has a mean bone in her body. But her mind . . . she doesn’t flaunt it—in fact, I think she tries to hide it—but she reeks of intelligence. I think she’s scary smart.”
“She is. That’s why we need her to decipher the Compendium.”
“But as for her feelings for you . . . I feel kind of sorry for her if she does love you.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s so shit out of luck.”
Jack barked a laugh. “You said the s word! I thought four-letter words were unnecessary.”
She nodded. “A refuge for the inane, the insipid, and the inarticulate.”
“But—”
“But sometimes they say it all.”
He laughed again. “You’re that sure of me?”
“As sure as you are of me.”
“Well, then, that’s a lock.”
They kissed, long and hard. Then he guided her into the cab, closed the door, and watched his two ladies roar off toward the East Side.