Game (Gentry Boys, #3)(16)

I closed my eyes when I felt the plane rising in the air and did not open them again until we began descending. The area surrounding Phoenix didn’t look much different than the area surrounding Vegas. Both cities were bright spots carved out of the rugged desert, although Phoenix had a more sprawling, sedate quality to it.

“It was nice chatting with you,” said the woman beside me just before we exited. I blinked, wondering if she was being sarcastic. I realized by not answering I was being rude, but I suddenly felt very tired. I watched her brassy highlights disappear into the airport crowd and a moment later got swallowed up myself.

As I waited out by the curb in front of the terminal, a guy in an ASU shirt asked me if I wanted to share a cab to Tempe. I shook my head and held my bags more tightly. He frowned, shrugging, and although I realized he was just probably trying to save a few dollars and didn’t intend to try anything funny, I just didn’t want to deal with anyone. I was a jerk. I knew it.

At least the cab driver was glad to take me wherever I wanted to go without trying to get me to perform a monologue. I leaned back into the seat and stared at the brown peaks of Papago Park as we grew closer to the university. The cab smelled like a men’s locker room.

The apartment I shared with Truly was only several blocks from campus. Arizona State was one of the largest universities in the country and it was surrounded by an extensive honeycomb of apartment buildings. Sometimes living there seemed like a surreal Twilight Zone universe where no one managed to age past twenty five.

With a sigh I opened up the apartment door and dropped my bags just inside. Truly’s cat, Dolly, stood in the center of the living room, tail twitching, as she watched me flop on the couch.

“Sorry,” I told her. “I’m all you’ve got for the next few hours.” Truly was taking the noon flight with Chase and Creed. It would just be the three of them flying back since the newlyweds were planning on staying in Vegas for a few days to enjoy a brief honeymoon.

I found myself thinking about Saylor and Cord, thinking about what it took to stand up with another person and utter a solemn vow that would bind you together. I’d never been in love. Not even close. Perhaps the nearest I’d come to love was during the fall of my junior year of high school, an intense three months with the local ‘it’ boy, Derek Goldman. During that heady spell of infatuation I’d nearly lost my virginity and definitely lost a piece of my trusting nature when he’d blown me off me for something easier. It was okay though. Being smacked down like that made me tougher in a way I would soon need when everything in my world went to hell.

The first seventeen years of my life were fairly idyllic. I was an only daughter growing up in a privileged environment, a quietly expensive neighborhood only a train ride away from Manhattan. I knew my father didn’t trudge off to the city in a tie every morning like other men and that I wasn’t supposed to talk about the bookie business, but that was how it had always been. Of my two brothers I was only close to Robert, the eldest. Michael had always been something of an intense riddle. He still was.

Then my mother went from spry, healthy middle age to bedridden and dying virtually overnight. It seemed the afternoon I came home and found my parents crying in the living room after a visit to the doctor was the catalyst for everything that came later. It was the first domino to drop, the first fallen card that sent the whole shaky house crashing to earth. I knew that wasn’t completely true. My father would still have gone to prison. My brother Robbie would still have been gunned down in front of a bar in Queens. And I might have still have run to the other side of the country to get away from the scandal, and the memories. The only things of value I’d been able to bring with me were my mother’s gold Star of David necklace, her maroon Buick that still smelled like Coach perfume, and an ugly coffee table that had been in her family since the nineteen twenties.

It was a little ironic that the business which had ended badly for my father and brother was the one I turned to first. But when I arrived in Arizona I didn’t see many alternatives other than the only work I knew something about. I started out small, using a few leftover family contacts. Alonzo, a friend of Robbie’s, introduced me to Xavier Monroe. Alonzo had been spooked enough by Robbie’s murder to run pell-mell out of New York and Phoenix must have seemed like a good place to be anonymous. He was eager to help his dead buddy’s kid sister even as he warned me about booking under Xavier.

“You’re not just f*cking college kids out of their beer money anymore, Steph. This can be bad news if you make a wrong turn.”

I forged ahead anyway and ignored the toll it was taking on me. The girl I used to be, the one who had been elected to her high school’s homecoming court, would not have recognized herself. Gone were all the sweet pretensions I’d once clung to and sometimes I missed them. Sometimes I missed fussing over an outfit and being dreamy over the day’s possibilities. But it all seemed so ancient now. I’d become too hard-edged to worry over anything human. I figured after I struggled through this handful of rough years I could allow myself those luxuries again. Right now I was just trying to make my own way somehow. And it was working. People knew who I was and even if they didn’t like me, they respected me. Plus, while everyone around me was buckling under the weight of student loans, I simply wrote out a check every semester.

That was another problem. I’d gone a little haywire when Xavier handed out penalties and I had yet to collect myself again. I was okay on money through the end of the year but after that I had three full semesters remaining before I could graduate. I’d applied for student loans but had yet to hear anything. And what of other expenses? Even with living cheaply and sharing an apartment, I still had to come up with funds for rent and food. Truly couldn’t help on her meager waitress salary and I would never have asked her anyway.