Jack and Djinn (The Houri Legends, #1)(16)

Miriam tried to remember her father’s face but found it difficult. She was only eleven when he died of a heart attack. She tried to push that memory away as well, but it was stubborn. The day he died, she had been in the bathroom, curling her hair before school. She heard her father grunt, and then she heard the thud of a body hitting the floor. Khadeeja hadn’t screamed or cried. She had watched with a detached expression on her face as her husband had clutched his chest, gasping for breath, eyes wide and frightened. Miriam had been the one to dial 911, to hold her father’s hand as the tears formed in his fearful, wrinkled eyes. By the time the ambulance arrived, Aziz had gone still, and Miriam was alone in the apartment. Her mother sat on the front step of their Dearborn home, smoking a Virginia Ultra Slim, conversing desultorily on the phone in Arabic with her sister.

Later, Miriam had wept alone in her room; her mother had never cried, even at the funeral. She never talked to her daughter about death, or tried to console Miriam.

Six years passed, uncomfortably and slowly. Miriam stayed at school longer and longer each day, joining clubs and teams simply as an excuse not to go home. Then, a week before her seventeenth birthday, Miriam had come home to a silent house. This was not unusual; her mother spent much of her time at her sister’s house across town, or with the neighbors. This time, however, something had felt…off. Wrong. Miriam hadn’t been able to put her finger on what it was, but a tension in her belly told her something had changed.

She searched the house carefully, half-expecting to find her mother’s body in the bathroom. Instead she had found a stack of money on the kitchen table—two thousand dollars in twenties and fifties—along with a curled yellow Post-it note in her mother’s crabbed scrawl: You’re on your own. No signature, no “I love you.” Just two thousand bucks and four words. Six months later, the house had been foreclosed on and repossessed, leaving Miriam with no home, no family, and no income.

Her father’s family was still in Iraq, so there was no help from them. Her mother’s sister claimed that she couldn’t take in another mouth, not with four of her own children to feed. Miriam’s aunt had allowed her stay with them for one night, and then the next morning she’d given her a couple hundred dollars and sent her on her way, refusing to answer the door if Miriam came by after that.

Miriam’s only real friend from school, Yanira, had begged her father to let Miriam stay with them for a few weeks. Yanira’s father had agreed, and Miriam had found a job waiting tables at a Leo’s Coney Island. That had been the start of Miriam’s independence. She saved enough money while living in Yanira’s basement to buy a car, and that beat-up old Volvo had been her home until she could afford an apartment of her own.

The day she moved into her own place changed Miriam’s outlook on life. Up until then she had simply been trying to survive, one day at a time. She had spent nights lying awake, wondering what she had done to make her mother abandon her, and what she could have done differently. When Miriam laid her head on the pillow that first night in her new place, she realized that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and couldn’t have done anything different. The pain of that knowledge didn’t go away, and the hole in her heart hadn’t vanished, but it was a start.

Then she met Nick, and things had changed on her again….

Glancing at the time, Miriam shook herself, refusing to think about Nick. Down that road a world of bad memories waited…memories she did not want to relive. Besides, she was almost home and could hardly wait to get into bed.

“Miriam.” Jack’s voice startled her so much she yelped and put a hand to her chest to still her hammering heart. Jack just laughed. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He was outside her apartment, sitting on the bottom step, waiting for her.

“What are you doing here, Jack?” She wanted her voice to sound harder than it did, and wished it sounded less relieved.

She didn’t want to be so glad to see him. She didn’t trust herself around Jack. His eyes delved too deeply into her, and his hands on her body had excited her in a way she’d never felt before. She wanted him, but she couldn’t let herself have him. If she got too close, Ben would find out and hurt him. Or else Jack would change, as men always did. They would seem nice at first. And the nicer they were at the start, the nastier they became later. That was a truth Miriam had learned the hard way, through black eyes and broken ribs and excuses no one ever believed.

“I wanted to see you,” Jack said. He made it sound so natural, and the sound of his voice, the sincerity in his kind blue eyes, pushed all her concerns away, making a lie of her fears.

Damn it, Jack. He was making it hard on her. I don’t want to see you. The words wouldn’t come out. “Well, here I am,” she said. It was better than throwing herself into his arms, but not by much. She kept her eyes down. If she let him see her eyes, he’d ask what was wrong, and she’d tell him….

His fingers touched her chin, tilting her head up. Oh, lord, there they were, those bright blue eyes that seemed to see into her heart, past her defenses and into the soft core of her soul. “You’re upset,” he said.

“I’m fine.” She didn’t even believe herself as she said it.

Jack rolled his eyes. “If by ‘fine’ you mean upset, then yes, you’re fine,” he said.

How the hell could he know how she was feeling just by looking at her? She had always thought she had a pretty good poker face, but Jack saw straight through her to the real emotions she tried to keep hidden.