Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 124971 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124971 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 625(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Charlie’s apartment.
“Th-third floor . . . ,” I stuttered.
“Thanks.” He started climbing the stairs.
“Wait!” I called. Guilt made its way quickly and efficiently up my body, its hold tightening around my neck. Poor Charlie had been all alone in his hospital room over the weekend while Riggs and I got drunk and had filthy apple sex. “How’s he doing? Charlie?”
The man hesitated, holding on to the banister with a wince. “I . . . uhm, I’m not supposed to tell.”
“You can tell us. We’re family.” I jerked my head slightly in Riggs’s direction, without him noticing.
The man took one look at Charlie’s clone, and his shoulders eased. “Oh. Okay. Yeah, he’s . . . struggling.”
“Elaborate,” Riggs quipped.
The man looked straight into my husband’s eyes. The same dazzling shade of blue as Charlie’s. “You should probably pay him a visit.”
He vanished upstairs. I turned back to Riggs, looking for any sort of understanding or recognition.
Riggs shook his head. “As I was saying—”
“You need to go talk to him,” I interrupted, resolute. I wanted to hear Riggs’s confession more than I wanted my next breath, because I had a small, pathetic hope that maybe he was going to say what I wanted to hear. That maybe in all of this fakeness, something real had grown.
Riggs clamped his mouth shut, giving me the stink eye.
I put my hand on his chest. “You know you’re Charlie’s favorite person.”
“If that’s true, then A, he needs to meet more people, and B, that’s creepy.”
I gave him my disappointed-parent look.
He grunted. “Fine. I’ll go. You’re lucky you give good head.”
“I give good hugs too. Would you like one of those?”
He hitched a shoulder up, downplaying it. “I guess.”
I squeezed him tight, trying to transfer to him every bit of my inner strength. He was going to need it. He was going to see Charlie today, and both their lives were going to change forever.
“Tell me how it goes when you see him.”
He glowered. “What do you mean, tell you? Your ass is coming with me. You’re the one who’s been preaching about visiting him.”
I can’t come with you because he is about to tell you he is your father, and there’s a good chance you’ll want to murder someone, and that someone could very well be me.
I’d considered that Riggs would be mad at me for keeping the information about Charlie from him. However, I’d tried to reason with myself, I’d only really known the truth about them for one weekend. And I’d been doing everything I could to rub his nose in the truth.
“I’ve got things to do . . . ,” I stuttered out. “Laura needs help with her kitty again.”
He nodded seriously. “Pussy first. Trust me, I get that more than anyone.” Then, before I had the chance to let loose another weak lie, he picked up his backpack and my suitcase like they weighed no more than a coffee mug and headed upstairs. “Fine. But we’re finishing that conversation when I get back.”
The next couple of hours seemed to stretch over a month and a half. Time dripped like honey, slow and thick. I kept glancing at the clock, annoyed with every leisured tick it made.
I tried to keep myself occupied. I cleaned the place—twice—did all our laundry, applied to a couple of jobs, answered all my starred emails, and even had the audacity to look for discounted, sexy lingerie on the internet for Riggs, even though I had no business spending money on anything, now that I was neck deep into unemployment, paying an expensive immigration lawyer (shouldn’t I have gotten my first invoice from her by now?), and fully committed to helping Riggs on his possible health journey.
An hour dragged by, and then another. Riggs hadn’t come back. Paranoia began creeping into me—what if he’d had a big blowup with Charlie and decided to up and leave? Riggs’s entire worldly possessions were in his backpack. It wouldn’t be terribly far fetched that he’d left it behind. But no. His camera equipment was still here, and that was expensive. Maybe he got hit by a train? A bus? A plane? Or maybe he got attacked. Crime was rampant in New York.
“If you’re that worried, you know what you need to do,” Laura said on the phone when I decided my Riggs problem was now our Riggs problem.
“I can’t call him.” I plastered my forehead to the wall, grunting.
“Call? Of course not. What are we, in the Middle Ages? But you could text. Ask where he is.”
I could. But I didn’t want to seem too needy and hysterical. Riggs already thought I was neurotic, and I could no longer pretend I didn’t want him to like me.
“No. I’ll wait.” I scrubbed the counter in my kitchenette for the twentieth time. “He should be here any minute, shouldn’t he?”