Color of Love (34 page)

That was asking a lot.

The fact was, Jason didn’t know what he was doing and was miserable doing it. After he’d last seen Leah he had been all put out, although he wasn’t really sure why. He’d wanted to soothe his wounded ego in the arms of the redheaded dancer, but she, like Carol, was too smart to be used that way. And they proved to be good enough friends to send him home to deal with his problems himself.

Jason realized that he should just call Leah and try to find out what had gone wrong between them. To his great irritation Gail had answered when he’d finally called, and run interference.

Jason played with the coins. The voices and laughter around him were mostly male. He was in a smoke-fogged bar two blocks from the precinct. Only cops hung out here. Even the groupies knew better than to come into this sanctified territory. This was a different kind of clubhouse. It was where many of his colleagues dropped in randomly, whenever one of them needed to be reassured that they were not alone and that their doubts about their job were legitimate. Here they could all complain, could feel safe, could hide.

Jason had been considering getting drunk when he decided to make the call. His eyes were already red and watery from the cigarette smoke. The room was noisy and smelled of cops and beer. Jason looked at Joe, who’d been pushing him to make the call for the last hour and who’d even given him the coins to do so.

“Go on and call the woman. ’Cause you’re making me crazy with your bad mood,” Joe ordered, although he didn’t believe a phone call was going to solve anything.

Jason dropped the coins into the box and dialed.

“Hello?”

“Um, is Leah there?”

“’Fraid not,” Gail answered indifferently.

“I have to talk to her. This is Jason.”

Gail sighed, bored. “She’s away. As in out-of-the-city away.”

The possibility of Leah being completely unreachable had not entered his mind. “Are you sure?” Jason persisted.

Gail hung up on him.

Jason did what he was supposed to do, but he did it by rote, and without the enthusiasm and hopefulness that had always made his work a challenge. He bowed out at the last moment from coaching a game at Riker’s. He got stabbed in the arm breaking up a domestic fight while in family court. And he knew the kid who’d died over a warehouse shipment of VCRs.

It had rained that day, which made it seem worse. At the scene Jason lifted the tarp covering Razor’s body and watched the boy’s blood being diluted by the rain and washing away along the street. In death Razor looked a lot younger than sixteen. They always did.

Jason dropped the cloth and turned to Slack standing, indifferent and without expression, with several plainclothes cops and two other boys who’d been apprehended. Jason walked over to Slack, angry to find him at the scene.

“What happened?” Jason asked.

“He fell,” Slack shrugged.

Beyond where the body lay covered was a warehouse. A rope ladder extended halfway down the side of the building from the roof. There was a broken window through which two additional officers were viewing the scene below. A rotted fire escape hung at a skewered angle, broken away from the building, and several VCR boxes with contents were smashed on the sidewalk near Razor. Jason turned back to Slack.

“Were you in on this?”

“I wasn’t inside.”

Jason stared at the boy. He was smart. Wily. He’d probably taken the easy job of lookout, Jason guessed. He pointed at the body. “That could have been you.”

Slack looked away and shook his head. “I told ’em VCRs ain’t worth it.”

Jason sighed wearily. “They’re going to take you in with the others. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said in annoyance, turning away. He wondered what else it was going to take to finally reach him, to make Slack, and all the others, realize that there were other choices.

But tonight Jason didn’t berate himself for maybe falling somewhere short of the mark himself. His thinking cleared up just long enough to realize what he was responsible for and what he wasn’t. Sometimes there were no answers, and things weren’t always fair. But his gut instincts would rarely lead him wrong, and he only had to trust them. Whether it was with his job … or Leah.

Jason got four days off between tours and put all his pent-up energy into driving to Pennsylvania and spending time with his sister and her family. He went fishing with his nephews and helped his brother-in-law repair part of the roof on his house. And he mostly didn’t have much to say. Jason’s withdrawn state was not lost on his sister.

Nancy Collins never asked, but she did wonder who the woman was who had captured Jason’s attention enough to make him thoughtful, restless, and perhaps a bit scared. Nancy watched him work hard, his concentration on tarring and shingling, the power behind each hammered nail a testimony to emotions he still kept inside.

Jason came back to New York feeling no calmer for having decided that he needed to talk with Leah. He was still scared, but he knew that all those earlier feelings had been real, the ones he had had before running into that wall.

Leah was queasy about coming home. She had been gone almost two weeks, and she knew that nothing had changed. If anything, the time away had only pointed out that she couldn’t get far enough away from Jason to forget him.

She didn’t ask Gail if Jason had called while she was away. In a well-intended but misguided attempt to save her sister grief, Gail also didn’t offer up the information that Jason had called. Gail had always believed that an end to the relationship was inevitable, and her contribution was to help it at every turn.

It was Thursday night with a long weekend ahead before Leah had to return to work the following Monday. She’d spent a few hours cleaning dead leaves from the base of the trees in the backyard. She’d then gone to dinner with Gail and several girlfriends. When they returned to the house, Gail gathered some personal things and said she was going to stay with Allen until Saturday. Leah couldn’t help laughing as her sister shouldered her leather tote and called for a cab.

“What’s so funny?” Gail asked suspiciously. She didn’t like being laughed at.

“You can tell Allen all is forgiven. He can stop avoiding me now,” Leah said dryly.

“He hasn’t been avoiding you.”

“Gail, Allen hasn’t been in the same room with me for more than fifteen minutes since Christmas. He’s flattering himself if he thinks I’m still angry.”

Gail postured with a hand on her hip. “What have you got to be angry about?” She shot back testily. “You certainly didn’t let dust gather around you for very long. Maybe he feels about you dating Jason the same way I do.”

Leah stared at her sister, her eyes narrowing with annoyance. “I’m not dating Jason anymore. We had a fight. Do you want me to tell you that you were right after all?” she asked softly.

For just an instant Gail looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. Then a car horn beeped from outside, announcing the arrival of Gail’s cab, and she looked hard at her sister. “There wasn’t any other way for it to work out, hon. At least now you’ve come to your senses.” Gail opened the door.

“I’m not happy about it,” Leah confessed with a stubborn lift of her chin. Her sister hadn’t won yet.

Gail grimaced. “What was it about him, anyway?”

“Nothing complicated. I liked him, that’s all.”

Gail shrugged and swung out the door. “You’ll get over it.”

In a pair of faded jeans and an oversized shirt she’d confiscated from her father, Leah cleaned a closet. It was better than watching TV until time to go to bed. It was less nerve-racking than thinking. At least when she was finished she’d have something to show for it.

The doorbell ringing a little after nine o’clock made Leah think it was Sarah Chen or Biddy Rosen. But all words of greeting died in her throat when Leah opened the door and saw Jason standing there. There was a funny moment of him looking unfamiliar again, as when she’d returned to his precinct house and seen him in uniform. Then there was a surge of relief because she had believed she was never going to see him again—and here he was. To say hello seemed foolish. So Leah said nothing. Jason looked unsure of himself. And defensive. But he was here.

In that first moment Leah couldn’t think of why she’d been attracted to Jason in the first place. And then she looked into his eyes and it all fell into place. She was also aware that perhaps for the first time they were both assessing each other honestly.

Jason could see that he’d caught Leah completely by surprise. He hadn’t known what he expected to happen at first, but this was not it. He didn’t know that they would stand speechless, staring at each other in this way, as though they were strangers. What grabbed at him, however, was a sudden jolting sense of loss for what had been between them before.

“Hi, Leah. You’re back.”

Leah gripped the doorknob, using it for support. She stood very straight and stared right at him. “What are you doing here?”

Jason squeezed his hands into nervous fists. The knuckles cracked. “I was hoping you’d invite me in for some coffee.”

Leah’s mouth tightened. “Jason, this is not a halfway house for troubled cops.” She began to close the door, but Jason quickly grabbed the edge with his hand.

“All right. That was a stupid thing to say. I wanted to see you.”

“Let go of my door. I don’t want to see you,” she said evenly.

Jason let go of the door, but stood in the frame so it was impossible for Leah to shut it. “Maybe that’s true. But let’s talk first and then you can decide.”

Leah looked at him. “I don’t think there’s anything more to talk about. I think it was all said the last time we saw each other.”

Jason slowly moved into the entrance, forcing Leah to take steps backward to avoid contact with him. “We didn’t talk last time. As I recall, we were both pretty hot under the collar and did a lot of screaming. You weren’t really listening to what I was saying, and I wasn’t listening to you. I think we both deserve a second chance.”

“It won’t make any difference.”

“On the other hand, it might make all the difference.”

“What’s the point?” Leah asked impatiently.

Jason shifted from one foot to the other. He stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “The point is, maybe this time we can be honest with each other. About how we feel. About everything.”

Leah didn’t pretend not to understand. It would seem that all the pretending was over. She shook her head slowly. “I thought that everything ended that night of your birthday party, Jason. Maybe that was a better idea. The truth is, we never should have started.”

“Not started what? Not begin to like each other? What was so wrong with that?”

“It went beyond that. What we did was have an affair against all the rules. And whether or not you were paying attention, we got clobbered for doing so.”

“I’m paying attention now. I mean, it came a little bit late. That’s what I want to talk about.”

Leah’s gaze roamed over Jason’s face, trying to gauge his sincerity. He met her gaze steadily, and she knew she wanted to believe him. She turned and slowly walked into the kitchen. With a great deal of irony and resignation she began to make coffee. Jason leaned in the doorway watching her.

“So,” Leah began somewhat dryly, “what great insights have you come to?” She could hear him settling against the entrance to the kitchen, using the frame for support.

“Just that you and I becoming friends and then lovers wasn’t a mistake. It was just harder than I thought it would be. I thought it was no big deal, the black and white thing. Then the real shit started to hit the fan—”

“And all over you. Don’t worry, it washes off,” she offered tightly.

“It leaves a smell. It was like some sort of signal that there were people who couldn’t accept the two of us together.”

Leah laughed lightly and, flipping on the brew switch of the coffee maker, turned to look at him. “You didn’t really accept the two of us together, either.”

“Neither had you,” he reminded her softly. “So what if you warned me? You stood and waited for the bombs to drop because you knew they would. You waited to see if I would stumble and fall, and I did. You know why? Because I really didn’t believe that you being black was supposed to matter. I just didn’t expect to get blown away because of it.”

“Well, you weren’t the only one being attacked, Jason. Everyone was telling me you couldn’t be serious, that you were just using me.”

Jason slowly straightened from the door frame, and his jaw tensed in annoyance. “Who’s everyone? What did you say to them?” he asked softly.

They stared at each other, uncertainty and a possible finality of purpose hanging ominously between them. “Family. Friends. I told them all they were wrong. And then I prayed that they weren’t right. I fought with my sister and defended you—”

“I didn’t need defending.”

Leah sighed and searched for two coffee mugs from a cabinet. She poured coffee for them both. “They were right about one thing. Our worlds are too different.”

“We’re not so different, and that’s not the point anyway. The problem wasn’t you and me, it was everybody else. I never expected so much …”

“Hate. The word you’re searching for is hate.”

Jason shook his head. “No. The word is ignorance.”

Leah put the mugs down on the kitchen table and faced Jason squarely. “But it began to make sense, didn’t it?”

“No,” he said shortly, stepping up to the table close to her. “It began to scare me. It made me angry because I didn’t know what to do. People I really cared about, who I thought were friends and cared about me, were suddenly …” He shook his head in bewilderment. “I didn’t know how to handle it,” he confessed.

Leah sat down heavily in her chair. Jason cautiously sat opposite her. “There was no reason why you should have,” she offered sadly. “I’ve never been able to deal with it. I’ve had more practice.”

Jason shook his head, looking carefully at her. “You did better than I did. I think about it now, and maybe you had more at risk than I did. If I walked away, Leah, everyone might have considered the whole episode a joke. But for you … you might have been condemned forever. By your sister, your community … other black men …”