Blackbird (A Stepbrother Romance #1)
by Abigail Graham
Chapter One
Victor
I live in a studio apartment over a massage parlor in the Old City. It’s a six block walk to the liberty bell. It’s two flights of wrought iron stairs down to the parlor on the first floor. The scents of Korean cooking waft up to my apartment, a two hundred square foot studio with one tall narrow window that looks out over the alleyway. If I stand there I can watch a steady stream of men walk in and out of the parlor. Young and old, plump and thin, chubby boys and stooped graybeards, they all have one thing in common. Slumped shoulders and a faraway look. They know what they’re about to do and when they come out they know what they’ve done. I drink whiskey from a chipped coffee mug and watch. I don’t know how the mug came to be in my box of personal effects, the one they gave back when I was paroled. It was my father’s, though. It’s all that I have of him. For now.
I have a business meeting this afternoon in New York. I’ll be catching a private jet in a few hours. I’m not sure if I’ll be violating my parole or not. I’m allowed to travel for business.
First, I need to steal my car back.
This ‘apartment’ is about the size of my closet in the suite of rooms where I grew up.
Suits hanging on a rack, a cart like the use at a dry cleaner’s, socks and underwear in a rubber tub, and a mattress covered in a plain white sheet. A refrigerator rattling away as it cools a block of Velveeta, a pack of imported ham, eight beers and a jar of peanut butter.
I don’t even know why I keep the peanut butter in the fridge.
This is my life.
For now.
As I descend the rickety cast iron staircase I check my watch. It’s a Timex I picked up at K-Mart after I stepped off the bus. I have to be on the flight in eight hours. It’s now two thirty-three in the morning. The parlor closes at three, I think. That’s when the in-and-out stream stops, or maybe the patrons are too scared to brave the mean streets at four in the morning. I don’t know or care.
A stoop-shouldered man emerges and doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. I check my watch again and walk in the rain. It’s a light drizzle that covers everything, makes the world glow. Water slides down my face and clings to my eyebrows. I glance at a shop window. The lights are shut off inside, and I see myself in a glass darkly. For a startling moment I’m walking side by side with my father’s ghost, but I see the tattoos running down both arms to stop just above the wrist and it’s just me. Dad never wore his hair this long and he never visited a tattoo parlor.
He had one tattoo, a crudely incised PETER in blue ink on his right shoulder. When he was a kid he and some boys he knew gave themselves tattoos with pins and a ballpoint pen. His was buried so deep in the flesh that all his attempts to remove it failed, and so he had his own name tattooed on his meaty shoulder until he died.
I should probably be wearing a jacket. November, and rain, but it’s unseasonably warm, almost fifty. I’ve had enough of being confined. I want to swing my arms.
The car is parked in a lot. I stop to pay a bleary-eyed attendant and walk over. It’s an unremarkable Toyota. I’ve been ordered to keep a low profile.
I hate driving this thing. The old city is dead at night. Last call was over an hour ago and the tourists get scared of the dark. It’s one of the safer areas but all cities are the same. I f*cking hate cities. Too much chain link and concrete and neon, not enough trees. I don’t belong here.
Turn on 3rd onto Market, catch I-95. It’s a straight run now. I obey all posted limits and traffic signals.
Have to. I’m on parole, after all. I wouldn’t want to get pulled over on my way to steal a car.
Driving gives me a lot of time to think. My knuckles go white. The wheel creaks in protest.
I’ve had plenty of time to think.
That’s what prison is. The punishment isn’t confinement. They put a roof over your head. It’s not isolation, either, unless you get sent to solitary. I never did. It’s not following orders, it’s not the shitty therapy groups, either. (Evidently, I have an anger management problem.) No, the punishment is time. Time to think, time to brood, time to plan. When you’re out in the world all you want is time. People say “there aren’t enough hours in the day” and try to stretch them out.
In prison, the bars just keep you in. It’s the time that punishes you.
Time has come today.
The drive takes almost an hour, out to Lancaster County, the very eastern edge. This is an old place. Everything around here is old. Old for the United States, anyway. I went to Europe once, went on a tour. Saw lots of history. Thousand year old buildings that just go about their business like buildings do. They’re just there. Around here anything older than a century or two always goes behind velvet ropes. We think it’s so special.
Europe. I was sixteen. There was good coffee and better company, but I can’t think about that. If I try to hard I can’t remember half the girls’ names. I was never good at that to begin with. There was a time in my life when there were so many girls I’d have to take notes to remember who I f*cked when. Then one day there were two girls. The one, and all the rest just kind of lumped together.
The windshield wipers tick away the seconds, minutes, an hour and a half or so. Take it easy in the rain.