Cutting Loose Read online

  “I’m living with Sawyer,” I countered, nettled. “And yes, I do have money – you’re interrupting my job right now!”

  She looked around the museum in confusion. “What, here? I thought you were just hiding from me and Mother!”

  “I’m not. I’m planning a gala for the Institute. I’m doing fine, Lily,” I said. “Just let me be. Let Mother have to come find me on her own, if she wants to.”

  For one of the longest pauses of my life, Lily just stared at me, looking like she couldn’t quite figure me out. “She’s going to come find you herself, sooner or later,” she finally said. “I can’t make sure that she doesn’t ever come here, that she doesn’t get her investigator or someone else to do it for her.”

  “That’s fine. I can handle that. Just don’t tell her now.” Maybe, now that I knew she was looking for me, I could take better steps to stay hidden – or come up with some sort of strategy for when she finally showed up and attempted to drag me back.

  Lily sighed loudly. “I’m really only doing this because I can’t find my phone,” she complained, taking one last fruitless look into her little bag. “But fine. I won’t tell Mother.”

  I let out a long breath that I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in. “Thank you,” I breathed out.

  Lily, of course, didn’t care in the slightest about my thanks. She’d already turned her attention back to Sawyer, sizing him up a bit like how a hungry dog looks at a juicy steak. “So, you’re living with my sister?” she asked him, her tone dripping all kinds of innuendo. “Are you two an item?”

  “Just business partners,” he said, not looking at all bothered by her attention.

  “Well, if you need a partner who gives special benefits, you should let me know.” She winked at him and leaned so close that he could probably see down her shirt all the way to her crotch. I rolled my eyes and fought back a groan. After a second, she once again dug through her expensive little purse. “Seriously, where it my phone? I meet a hot guy and then I can’t get his number? Why does the universe hate me?”

  Sawyer shrugged and stepped away, and I seized the opportunity to disengage. “Sorry, Lily, but maybe you left it in your car,” I offered. “Look, I need to get back to work, but thank you again. Maybe we could find a time to talk later?”

  She made a big deal out of looking like she didn’t care, but I knew my sister well enough to see the little details that gave away her true feelings. Lily might be her usual snide, sarcastic self on the outside, but I felt like I’d gained standing in her eyes for this. Maybe, I considered, she’d someday also want to break free of the rest of our family. I hoped she knew she could come to me for support.

  “Whatever,” she sighed, turning on one high heel. “I’m gonna go try and find my phone. Later, sis.” She shot one last wink and bubblegum-lip-puckered kiss over her shoulder at Sawyer. “And bye to you, sexy!”

  Sawyer stood with me as we watched her leave the Institute, walking out through the entrance and flashing rude gestures to several tourists attempting to enter. “So,” I said, “that’s my sister.”

  “She found you.”

  “I figured it would happen sooner or later. I guess I’m lucky that she couldn’t find her phone, so I could convince her to keep my secret.”

  “Yeah,” said Sawyer, and his tone made me look at him. “Lucky.”

  He had something in his hands, something small and rectangular and glinting with dozens of little gemstones.

  Lily’s phone.

  “Oh my god,” I gasped, staring down at it, and then up at him. “What did you do?”

  He grinned, the self-satisfied smile of a cat who had just swallowed the canary. “Just bought you a little time for your persuasive personality to kick in.” He tossed the phone, underhand, into the nearest fountain. It sank quickly, sending a sad little burble of bubbles up to the surface. “Now get back to work, Pom.”

  He walked off, leaving me staring after him with my jaw open. He was something else, that much was certain.

  And if there’d been any doubt that he didn’t consider me a friend, this action sealed it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  * * *

  That evening, as he sipped some overly expensive wine and watched me sweat in the kitchen, Sawyer raised the question of just what happened earlier.

  Of course, being a man, and a conniving, thieving one at that, he raised the question in his own… special way.

  “Pretty sure I could get your sister into bed with nothing but a smile and a wiggle of my finger,” he commented idly over the top of his wine glass. “In fact,” he continued as I sputtered and tried to not cut off any of my own fingers in shock, “I probably don’t even need the smile.”

  I pointed the knife at him. “You better watch it. I’m a woman with very little to lose right now, and I know where you sleep.”

  He made his eyebrows twitch. “Kinky. I’m in for a little role play.”

  I waved the knife at him again in futile warning, and then resumed chopping vegetables. “Trust me, you don’t want to end up with Lily attached to you at any way. No matter how much you think you’ll enjoy it, she’ll find a way to make you suffer. It’s what she does to every guy she meets.”

  “Is that what she did to you?”

  I should have seen that one coming. I carefully set the knife down, to dissuade me from the temptation of using it on Sawyer.

  “It’s what I did to her,” I said, looking down at the cut vegetables. The water was boiling behind me – I was making soup tonight, how much more simple could I get? – but I ignored it. “It’s how I failed her.”

  “You failed her,” he echoed. “She didn’t look like a failure.”

  “She’s still with my mother. She’s her lapdog, hunting for me at our mother’s beck and call. She’s not her own woman.”

  “And how is that because of you?”

  I thought of lying, or maybe telling Sawyer to can it and drop the whole subject. He’d see through my lies, of course, but he’d probably respect my wishes if I didn’t want to talk about my past. But a part of me wanted to just throw it all out there, get it in the open so I didn’t have to keep dancing around it. Maybe, if I got it out, I’d never have to tell anyone else again, and he wouldn’t go prying at things that should be left undisturbed.

  “I was supposed to get married,” I said softly, still winning the staring contest against the vegetables on the counter in front of me.

  He let out a single bark of a laugh. “What? To whom?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Some guy that I didn’t love. A man who was nice, and pleasant, and boring, and dumb as rocks, and so politically connected that he probably never had to do anything for himself in his entire life. I’m the oldest daughter, and he’s the only son, and it would have been a strong political alliance. My mother was over the moon about managing to arrange it.” I took a deep breath, tried to let it out slowly. It caught several times in my throat from half-choked sobs.

  Sawyer wasn’t laughing any longer. “An arranged marriage?” he repeated in disbelief. “I didn’t think those happened.”

  “They’re not called it anymore, but they definitely still happen. Probably even more among the wealthy, who’ve carried that money clutched selfishly close for generations. The longer they hold on to it, the more I think they fear that they, or a future generation, might someday lose it. Or squander it. So they try to plan and control everything, to ensure that it never goes away.”

  “You obviously didn’t get married,” he noted.

  I looked up at him. “How do you know I didn’t run away afterwards?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I know when a woman’s been broken by a bad marriage. Hell, I’ve occasionally had a hand in ushering things along. That’s not you. You ran away.”

  “I turned him down,” I corrected. “I didn’t run away. Not at first. But I turned him down, or managed to somehow get the thought into his stupid thick head that he should turn me down – it�
��s all the same, in the end. Marriage didn’t happen, everyone assumed that it hadn’t been supposed to work out.”

  I picked up a handful of vegetables. My fingers shook, nearly dropping some cut carrots and celery onto the stove and floor, but I managed to convey them into the bubbling water of the stockpot.

  “Except my mother,” I told the pot, facing the wall with my back to Sawyer.

  I waited for a chuckle, a light-hearted comment. It didn’t come. “What did she do?” he asked softly.

  I shrugged. “Nothing that I know for certain. She’s good at manipulation like that. I didn’t see any big drastic change – but suddenly, she knew where I was all the time, and none of my few friends called me. I still had my job, but everyone treated me differently at work, like I was a pariah. Every bit of joy in my life, everything I liked, just sort of slowly vanished, until I might as well have been in a prison. I knew it was her, that she was starving me. She needed to show me that she had that control, that she was the source of all the money in my life, all the happiness, all of my future. If she was going to use me, to marry me off, she needed to make sure that, this time, I wouldn’t disobey.”

  I turned back around to face Sawyer. I knew my face was red from the heat in my cheeks, could already feel the tears starting. “And that’s when I knew I had to run away,” I got out, already sobbing. “But what about Lily? I wanted to show her that I could be strong, that I could stand up to our mother. But instead I ended up just running away and leaving her there all alone!”

  That was the last sentence I managed to get out before the tears became a flood that washed away any other words. My vision blurred into fuzzy, dim shapes and I raised my hand to wipe furiously at my eyes.

  I felt something wrap around me, felt myself pulled into something warm. I blinked furiously and found myself inhaling Sawyer’s scent, pulled against his chest. He still wore his fancy suit, and I feared, in a moment of absurd lucidity, that I’d leave a stain on his clothes.

  When I tried to pull back a little, however, he just squeezed me tightly. “Your mother,” he said above me, “is an absolute bitch.”

  No disagreement from me there.

  For a minute or two, he just held me. I tried to keep the tears from soaking into his suit for another second, but then gave up and just let them flow. He probably felt the spreading wetness, but it didn’t faze him; he held me tightly, let me get it all out.

  “She is a bitch,” he said again as he finally loosened his arms around me, “and she deserves to be punished for what she’s done.”

  Something in the way he said that last sentence made me look up at him. “Punished how?” I croaked out through a throat rough from crying.

  He shrugged, but I thought I saw options in his eyes. “Through karma. It sounds like she’s got a lot of negative karma, and someone needs to deal out a bit of balancing.”

  “Are you saying that it’s going to be you?” I asked. “Because Sawyer, I don’t need a white knight to come fight for me. I can handle my own battles. I don’t need you to step up and do things for me.”

  He looked down at me. “Trust me, Pom, I’m no white knight,” he said, and I believed him. “But I do want you to believe – because I believe it. Karma is a real thing, a real force in this universe. And sooner or later, your mother’s going to get a big, steaming pile of it, right in her face. I only hope you’re there to see it when it happens.”

  Maybe his words were supposed to make me feel better about that possibility. Instead, they just made me a little more hollow. I hated what my mother did to me, but I also hated when I felt consumed with vengeance. I didn’t want her to dictate my life, but I didn’t want my life to be driven by instinctively pushing back against her, either. I wanted freedom.

  After a minute, I patted him. “I think I can keep cooking the soup now,” I said. He released me, went back to his wine – but I felt his eyes lingering on me as I did the rest of the preparations.

  The soup actually turned out decently. I couldn’t imagine how I might screw up chicken noodle soup; I made sure to triple-check that the chicken breast was fully cooked, so at least I wouldn’t give Sawyer food poisoning. We ate largely in silence, however, the pall of my earlier story hanging over us like a rain cloud.

  After dinner, I went back to my room and laid on my bed. Sleep wasn’t coming, however, and I just stared up at the ceiling, replaying the events of the day. I’d told Sawyer about my past, but it still didn’t feel like enough. I needed to get more out, but I knew that the man wouldn’t care to hear about anything else in my tragic childhood, my rough adolescence and the hold that my family had exerted on me for so long.

  I dug through my purse. A couple days ago, at Eastman’s insistence, I finally purchased a phone again. This one was just a cheap cell phone with a prepaid plan and a different number, but it was enough to let me call vendors and browse the internet for specific gala-planning needs. Eastman, after I showed him that I had a phone, insisted that we exchange numbers. “So that you have a direct way to send me any clues you find, or alert me if you think that Sawyer’s about to pull a job,” he told me. “Minutes, or even seconds, can be vital.”

  Now, I opened up the phone book. Aside from some of the vendors we’d hired for the gala, Eastman’s number was the only entry in my contacts list. I looked at it for a couple minutes, weighing my options.

  Aw, screw it. “Are you busy?” I texted him.

  I watched the text window, waiting. The phone wasn’t fancy enough to show dots when the other person might be replying or able to alert me when the recipient had read the message.

  Just as the screen dimmed and I was about to toss the phone onto the bed beside me, it beeped with a response. “Yes. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Can we meet somewhere and talk?”

  Another pause, but the response, when it finally arrived, was encouraging. “Yes. Where is convenient?”

  I switched to Maps, found a bar within walking distance from Sawyer’s apartment. I sent the address to Eastman.

  “Be there in 10,” he replied.

  I climbed off my bed, looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t at my most put-together and presentable, and a little part of me, for some reason, insisted that I ought to clean myself up. It’s only Eastman, I told myself. The man lived to work. He wouldn’t notice if I showed up wearing nothing but a black garbage bag.

  Still, I ran a brush through my hair and tried to fix my mascara a little before leaving. I crept through the apartment to the elevator, held my breath as it chimed when the doors opened.

  I heard nothing from Sawyer. No shouted question about where I might be headed. Breathing a sigh of relief that I’d managed to successfully slip away, I stepped into the elevator and headed down to the exit.

  I looked down at my phone as the elevator doors closed – so I didn’t see one eye look around the corner, watching me leave.

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  “You could file a restraining order,” Eastman said, twenty-five minutes later. “That would keep her from interfering.”

  I sighed, looked down into the quarter of a beer remaining in my glass. “No, that’s not going to work. Trust me, my mother has more than enough money and influence to ignore a restraining order – and it only works if I escape again to prove that she violated it.”

  He looked over at me. Most might have assumed his face was still blank, but I knew him well enough to read the concern. “You think that she might have you kidnapped or abducted?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. She’d find a way to make it sound reasonable, and pretty soon I’d be locked up somewhere, getting brainwashed until I believed that I’d done all of this from a petty urge to act out, and that her grabbing me and taking me back was the kindest thing she could have done.”

  I finished the rest of my beer, cast a side-eye to watch the FBI agent’s jaw work back and forth as he chewed over this revelation. I’d met him outside the bar, whic
h turned out to be a surprisingly popular dive bar. Not what I would have expected within a couple blocks of Sawyer’s expensive and luxurious penthouse, but it kind of fit my mood. Eastman looked a bit askance when he saw the other patrons, perhaps figuring that some of them might be intimately familiar with the law, but no one gave us a second glance. Eastman paid for two beers, and we’d squeezed into a small booth towards the back, sitting shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip.

  Now, I squirmed a little. “Is there something poking me?” I reached down, felt something hard bumping against my hip, tried to wrap my fingers around it.

  Eastman jumped. “Whoa! That’s, uh, me.”

  I looked down between us as he tugged his coat back a little. “Oh my god,” I gasped in shock. “Why do you have that out, here?”

  “An agent needs to be prepared!”

  “With a gun?” I looked down at the black plastic handle, back up at the man. “When you’re drinking?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not a gun. It’s a Taser. I wouldn’t bring my gun out if I’m consuming alcohol.”

  “Well, your Taser is poking me,” I complained.

  “It’s a small booth.” Eastman looked at me, then climbed out of the booth. “Scoot over. I’ll sit on the other side.”

  After some butt-wiggling from both of us, we managed to swap places. Eastman realized that his beer was now on the other side of me, and he reached his arm around my shoulders to grab it. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it felt a bit nice to have his arm around me.

  “I think I need another beer,” I declared, instead of voicing this errant thought.

  “Let me.” Before I could protest, he was up and heading over to the bar.

  I watched him shoulder his way through the crowd around the bar. He had nice shoulders, I noted. Broad shoulders, like what I would expect on a lumberjack. Not the shoulders of someone who chased after financial criminals. Between his height, those shoulders, his angular face, and those blue eyes, he looked more like a sheriff out of a Western movie than an FBI agent.