Shimmy Bang Sparkle(88)
As he opened the door for me, I let myself imagine for one second what it would feel like to get to see Stella. The joy. The relief. The happiness.
None of which I’d ever feel again.
Of course, it wasn’t Stella sitting there at the far corner table with her back to me. Instead it was a woman in all black, with short dark hair, and with her right foot in a walking boot.
Ruth.
She was intense. Sitting across from her made me feel like I was getting interrogated in the middle of a round of high-stakes poker while I held the world’s shittiest hand.
“How’d you even get here?” I asked as I slid onto the bench across from her.
She placed her phone upside down on the tabletop. It was covered in rhinestones, just like Stella’s. But these were black, with a contrasting red R in the middle. “I took the bus. I always take the bus.”
Christ. Eight hundred miles on a Greyhound with her foot in a boot. Seriously hard-core. I leaned back on the picnic bench and ground my quads into the edge of the table. “How are you healing up?”
She looked at her boot, which was slightly to the side of the table. She wiggled her toes in her athletic sock and said, “I’m here because I went to talk to your lawyer today. As your sister,” she said, adding a little extra weight to that word to make sure I hadn’t missed it, “I thought it was time for me to actually look her in the eye.”
I gripped the edge of the table, digging my thumbnails into the rubber coating. “And?”
She stared at me, a poker face to beat all the poker faces. “She told me that the sheikh is willing to drop all the charges if you give up the location of the diamond.”
There was no universe in which I was going to swap my freedom for Stella’s. Or her dreams. “No fucking way.”
Ruth sniffed, took a tube of yellow lip stuff with a bee on the label from her pocket, and rubbed it over her lips. Her expression was inscrutable, utterly neutral. “We could set up a dead drop. You’d be riding that bike of yours, slinging drinks, and kissing her before sundown tomorrow, I bet. Tempting, right?”
Tempting wasn’t even the start of it. The thought of kissing her again was mind-bending. But there was no way in hell I’d ask her give up her dreams—or the money she’d get for that godforsaken gem—for me. I wasn’t worth it. But she was. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
Ruth ran her fingertip over the diamond-shaped gaps in the table. “She’s a mess.”
The words clobbered me. What I wanted to hear was that she was happy, making plans to live her Big Wide Open American Dream, with her puzzle box full of rough diamonds.
“You need to let her go,” Ruth said, looking me right in the eye. “I want to go back to her and tell her you’ve forgotten about her. I want to go back to her and tell her she’s free.”
A wave of anger came up from deep inside me. It was the first thing I’d felt other than heartbreak in months, and it didn’t feel very fucking good either. There was a time when anger was my driving force, but since I’d met Stella, all that had changed. I had changed. She had changed me. The effect she’d had on me wasn’t lessening over time; it was only getting more profound. Ruth was still watching me, but I turned away. On the far wall was a flyer that announced movie night that week. The Pink Panther. Christ almighty, everything would always hurt forever. There was no way around it.
Forgetting about me was exactly what I’d asked her to do, because that would be the best thing for her. But the idea of me forgetting about her was brutal, impossible. To lose her was to lose hope. To lose her was to let go of the only life preserver I had. To let her go was to make the whole night sky go dark forever.
I shook my head. “You can tell her what you want. But she knows I’ll never forget her.”
Ruth scratched the corner of her eye with her fingertip. “You can’t stop me telling her you will.”
“She’ll never believe you.”
“You’ll never hear her voice. Her laugh. Any of it. Ever again.”
There were a lot of things I regretted in my life, but being in jail for her would never be one of them; even if I never heard that laugh again, having heard it at all made it worth it. Because of me, she would be happy—it would be the only good thing I’d ever done. The very best of things. “Tell her to keep laying low.”
“She might forget about you.”
She owed me nothing, but I owed her everything. Because through her, I’d seen a glimpse of a different life, one that I think I knew I’d never deserve to live, but one that for just an instant, I could see myself inside. And that, just that, was enough. “I’ll never forget her. And I’ll never let her go. Not here.” I tapped on my chest. “And not here either.” I pressed two fingers to my temple. “She’ll always be a part of me. And there’s nothing that you, or her, or anybody else can do about it.”
Ruth’s face was expressionless and stern. She picked up her phone and put it into her pocket, then used the table to brace herself as she stood. She watched me, carefully and closely. I held her stare and didn’t move a muscle. If she was expecting me to fold, she was gonna have a long-ass wait.
But then, very slowly, the hardness in her eyes softened, and I could have sworn I saw the smallest hint of a smile. As fast as it had appeared, it was gone. Disappearing ink.