Damage (Havoc #2) (7 page)

And with that, he was gone.

chapter nine

I was hell-bent on proving Jesse wrong – of getting him the hell out of my head for the rest of the night.  So as Abram and I waited for the elevator, I proposed an idea that lifted his brows with surprise.  Leaning against the wall, he grinned at me.  “A date?”

“Yes.  A real one.  Not in the hotel.  Just you and me outside somewhere.”  I smirked and held my poncho cardigan shut as his eyes wandered down my dress.  “We’re going to do this the old fashioned way.  An actual conversation, not about work, before you get to see me naked.”

He laughed.  “For those stakes, I’ll do pretty much anything.”

“Good.  Then let’s go.”

At my request, we took the car out of Chelsea.  Abram watched me, a charmed smile on his sculpted lips as I asked his driver to choose any direction and simply stop in exactly twelve minutes.  I was satisfied when at our time limit we landed in Nolita, on Prince Street.  When we got out of the car, I dropped back to let Abram walk in front of me, giving myself a minute to enjoy the reactions that he garnered on the street, since tonight was about soaking him in.  About continuing the momentum that had me falling for him before he had to leave to find Jesse.  So I basked in the obscene amount of attention he garnered on the street.  From teenaged girls to elderly women, there was whiplash.  It was incredible because not a single person felt the need to be subtle.  Abram’s brand of gorgeous was shocking and rare enough that you actually had to stare.  Ignoring him was like taking a stroll during a meteor shower and just deciding not to look.  When he turned around and waited for me, holding his hand out for mine, I melted straight to nothing.  One little gesture and he had me feeling like easily the luckiest girl on Earth.  I was so ready to have a completely perfect night with him.

Well, almost ready.

“Before we start our date I need to ask you something,” I said as we settled into our booth at my lounge of choice.  It was small, dark and cozy, lit mostly by the streetlights outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.  Once we finished ordering, Abram brought my legs onto his lap.  I reveled in the feeling.

“Go ahead.”

I chewed my lip.  “When we had sex, did you… leave the door open on purpose?” I looked him in the eye.  His instant smirk was my answer.  “Abram, don’t laugh.  Why did you do that?”

He winced.  “I’m sorry. I know it’s no excuse but I don’t know what the fuck came over me.  I saw Jesse look at you and it lit a fire in me.”

“Why?”

Abram ran his hand hard over his jaw.  “I don’t like him, Isla.  You know that.  If it were up to me, he’d never be in the same room as you let alone even looking at you.  But I can’t blame him and I know that.  Because there’s no such thing as not looking at you.  You’re impossible not to look at.”

“So you decided to punish him for looking at me by making me come loudly with the door open.”

He grimaced.  “I’m sorry, Isla.  I am.”  He groaned and laughed at himself.  “Christ, I usually pride myself on using my brain but around you sometimes I get… primal and instinctive.  Basically stupid.”

“Fine.  That’s fair enough, I accept that,” I smirked.  “Now one more question.”

“Shoot.”

“Aside from tonight, have you ever sent your men to watch me at work?”

“No.”  His quick reply eased my heart.  “I know the people who run Muse Room.  I trust that you’re safe in their hands.  But with Jesse back, I didn’t want to take chances tonight.  And turns out, my hunch was right.”

Again, fair enough
, I nodded before blinking hard, trying not to think about Jesse even once more for the remainder of the night.  “Alright then.  I think that works for me,” I murmured, flexing my toes as Abram stroked my bare calf.

“Is this the official start of our date now?”

“Yes.  And it’s my first one in more than a year so forgive me if I don’t remember how they go.”

“I’m not entirely sure myself.  I don’t do these a whole lot either.”

“Of course not.”  I recalled the articles I’d read about Abram’s “harem” of beautiful women.  “When was the last time you even had a girlfriend?”

“Guess.”

“College.”

“I didn’t go to college.”

I blinked.  “Really?” For some reason, that shocked me.  “Why not?”

“I went straight to the Air Force.” 
Oh,
I vaguely remembered this detail.  “And to be quite honest, that one girlfriend I had lasted from eighth grade to mid-freshman year, so I’m not even sure of that counts.”

“Really.”  I cocked my head at Abram, studying his thick, dark hair and light blue eyes.  His every perfectly symmetrical feature.  He probably looked like a model for Ralph Lauren as a teenager.  “I find it hard to believe that you didn’t have hordes of girls stalking your every move when you were younger.”

“I never said I didn’t,” Abram grinned.  “And college girls for that matter.  But I didn’t have the time for a normal social life.”

“Why not?”

Abram took in a deep breath.  He kept that good-natured smile on his lips but I could hear a distinct shift in his voice.  “I was busy taking care of my dad.”

My heart dipped with dread.  “I’m sorry.  Was he… sick?”

“Healthy as a horse.  Physically.”  Abram tugged at the stubble on his chin.  I somehow hadn’t noticed it till now.  It made him look all the more masculine, as if that were even necessary.  I stayed quiet as I watched him take a swig from his beer and set it down hard, suddenly glaring blankly at nothing.  “He had a gambling addiction,” he finally said.  “For as long as I can remember, he was in debt.  My mother left him when I was one, maybe two.”  Upon reading my wounded expression, he leapt to her defense.  “She was nineteen when she got pregnant with me.  Married him like a good Catholic girl.  But he was hard to love and she probably started to hate him after a year of being stuck at home alone with a crying baby and no groceries.”  He cracked a small smile and pressed his thumb between my furrowed brows.  “It’s okay.  Don’t frown,” he murmured, pressing a soft kiss to my lips.

“Your dad raised you then?”

He laughed.  “No, Mrs. Murphy next door raised me.  She was a six-foot-two Irish grandma and I rarely understood a word she was saying, but she loved me because I was the only boy in her unofficial nursery of neighborhood kids.”

“I see,” I grinned, charmed as I imagined a towering elderly woman who smiled as she herded a dozen kids in her modest home full of Jesus memorabilia.  “And what neighborhood was this?”

“Windsor Terrace.  In a brick house connected to a bunch of other brick houses.  It was a little two-bedroom that my dad inherited from my grandparents but he lost it by the time I reached middle school.  To a gambling debt.”

“Jesus,” I murmured.  “And that didn’t stop him? From gambling?”

“Definitely not,” Abram laughed bitterly.  “He just found new ways to pay off his debts.”  He kept his hand running gently along my thighs but I could see his mind floating off somewhere.

“Something tells me it involved you.”

“Bingo, kiddo.”  His voice was easy but I could see the darkness in his eyes.  I knew I shouldn’t press on if he wasn’t offering the information himself but I felt like I needed to know.  At this point, I knew more about Jesse’s background than I did Abram’s, and I kind of couldn’t stand that.

How did your father pay off his debt? What did he have you do?
I took a good minute mustering up the courage to ask one of those questions.  My lips fumbled with nerves and when the words finally came out, they were so soft I wasn’t sure if Abram had even heard.  Holding my legs in his lap, he stared forward, silent for a couple seconds. 

“I was always athletic,” he said finally.  I felt myself already hanging on his every word.  “By high school, I was six-two and all muscle from staying at the gym every day to avoid going home.  At this point, my dad and I shared this roach-infested apartment with two other families and there just wasn’t enough space for me.  I was angry.  Got into fights at school.  Got suspended.  Wound up living with the family that employed my dad as a driver.  Gavin’s family.  And it got better there but at that point, I’d already put two kids from school in the hospital and people were talking about it.  Which should’ve upset my dad but it didn’t because all he could think about was how to get out of his hole.  Every time I saw him there was a new cut or bruise or black eye on his face.  He came home one night with this massive hematoma on his forehead, like there was another head growing out of it.”

“Because of the money he owed?”

Abram nodded.   “Yeah, he was starting to get desperate.  So he was actually pretty pleased when he realized that I was a solid fighter.”

No
.
I was fairly certain that I knew where the story was headed and prayed that Abram would prove my wrong – that he’d say something else.  But he didn’t.  Watching his own fingertips draw invisible lines on my legs, Abram stoically told me the story – that at sixteen, his father arranged his first fight at an underground ring far less glamorous than the one at the Monarch.  He was there for laughs, expected to take a brutal loss against a nineteen-year-old MMA trainee from Queens.  But as a high school sophomore, he wound up breaking his opponent’s arm, nose and ribs before walking away the shocking victor.  And suddenly, he was fighting every weekend.

“I was always high on adrenaline.  I was in tenth grade and knocking out grown men. The harder I hit, the more blood I drew, the happier everyone was and it made me an animal.  I fed on the pain, the violence, all the shitty vices my dad turned me onto.  I was a sixteen-year-old kid with the body and responsibilities of a man so they gave me everything from alcohol to drugs to women.  As long as I kept performing, earning them money, I got anything I wanted.  So every time I got in there I just flipped a switch, blacked out and I didn’t stop till I had someone lying in their own teeth.”

My stomach suddenly hurt but I took Abram’s hand.  “You were young,” I murmured as his lip curled.  I was comforting him over words he had yet to say but I didn’t need to hear them – I could sense that he hated himself for the fighting. For the confusing enjoyment he probably took from it at some point.  “Abram, no teenage boy would’ve said no to that.  You had your dad’s permission to beat people up and make him money.  And save him from being hurt anymore.  It wasn’t your fault, Abram.  You were too young to control that kind of situation.  He should’ve just known not to put it on you.”  I tangled my fingers in his hair as he nodded, pulling his lips to mine.  His mind was far away but he still kissed me softly.

“There were things that were my fault,” he murmured.  “Things that I didn’t have to do.  But I did.”

“Like what?”

Abram pulled away from me.  He brushed the hair from my face, pain rolling like a lazy storm behind his blue eyes.  “We’re not going to talk about this tonight.”  I could tell it was a struggle but he cracked a smile.  “If this is our first date, we’re going to do it right.  We’re going to keep this conversation happy.” 

“Okay.” Warmth buzzed over me as he kissed my neck.  “Then tell me about something… you’re proud of.  Tell me why you joined the Air Force.”

Abram paused, his lips just grazing my skin.  I could feel them spreading into a smile.  “To use my powers for good, so to speak,” he laughed.  God, it was the deepest, most velvety sound in the world and it eased every ounce of tension from my body.  “Gavin gave me the idea.  He caught on to my fighting by the end of junior year, tried countless times to get me out of it, had his parents give my dad money that could pay off any debt he had a thousand times over.  But an addict’s an addict.”  Abram heaved a sigh and shook his head.  “I have a feeling we’re not going to find a happy place if we stay anywhere on the topic of me,” he laughed.

“Don’t say that,” I frowned.  “I’ll find one.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”  I chewed my lip, trying to think of something to ask Abram that could in no way trace back to the gambling and fighting.  But it was hard, especially as I realized that he eventually went on to recreate the exact world that turned him into a so-called animal.  I couldn’t understand it and I wanted to.  I wanted to know exactly what he’d done that was his fault.  My head spun with a million questions that I failed to suppress.  Luckily, I got outside help.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt,” our waitress swooped in with an apologetic smile.  We looked up just as she laid a long wooden chopping board across our table.  Arranged on top were strawberries, raspberries, whipped cream and what looked like three different ramekins of chocolate dipping sauce.  “This is our aphrodisiac’s board.  The table that bought this for you two wanted to remain anonymous but they
did
want me to tell the lady…” In the dim lighting, the waitress squinted at her notepad.  “’Congratulations on that hunk of man.  Since we can’t tap that, we’re going to make sure you get to do it in style.  Enjoy.’”  With a mortified smile, the waitress then bowed her head and hastily rushed away.  I stared after her in awe.  Then I burst into giggles.

“That’s amazing – did that just happen? Are strangers really looking out for my sex life?”

“Apparently.  And they might have the right idea because I’m suddenly very interested in watching you wrap your lips around this.”

I turned to see Abram dipping a strawberry into the darkest of the chocolates, rolling it around till it was absolutely bathed and dripping.  I shook my head slowly with a nervous smile.  “I can’t eat that knowing there might be a table watching us.”