Meant For Me (15 page)

After ten minutes of weaving, Chloe was gripping her dashboard and looking a little car sick, the smile gone.

The hotel was not the kind of place that had a doorman or valet parking. It looked like a hovel where only international students, hookers, and drug users would hang out. After parking the car for a price that made my eyes hurt, I carried Chloe’s bag and opened the door for her. Yeah. My first impression was correct. The lobby was dark and dingy. The desk clerk was unmotivated and unsmiling. There was no elevator and if there had been, I wouldn’t have used it. After hiking up three flights of stairs in a hallway that showed no hint of air conditioning, I was sweating and Chloe was looking worried. The bathroom was a shared one in the hallway and our room was filthy and the size of a rabbit cage. A yank back on the comforter showed dingy sheets and a stain of an origin I didn’t want to contemplate.

“This is disgusting,” I said. “There is no way we’re staying here.”

But Chloe just shook her head.

Doesn’t matter. Let’s go see Anya
.

I glanced around reluctantly. “I really think we should try to find a new hotel first. I don’t want you sleeping on this bed and I don’t think I trust your safety in the bathroom. There is definitely a reason for the price point on this hotel and I don’t think I can stomach a night here.” By myself, I would probably tolerate it. Especially if I were drinking. I’d have slept in anything when I was loaded, which was evidenced by some of the places I’d woken up. But Chloe deserved better. “Your father would kill me if he knew I brought you to a place like this.”

Her eyes flickered and she glanced away.

Wait a minute. “Chloe. You did tell your dad what we’re doing, right?”

She bit her lip then shook her head.

“Oh, my God, seriously? Did you even tell him you’re leaving?” Paul was going to have a heart attack. And hell, who could blame him?

She made like she was writing a note.

“You left him a note. Jesus. Does he know you’re with me?”

She shook her head.

“You need to text him.”

Chloe made a question mark in the air.

“Tell him that you’re okay! He must be shitting his pants thinking you’re in New York by yourself.”

She just shrugged and made some kind of hand gesture I didn’t understand before leaving the room. Okay. I had to assume she was going to the bathroom because I didn’t think she was going to ditch me and take the subway to her sister’s apartment solo. My head was starting to pound behind my eyes. I wanted to call Paul and talk to him but I didn’t have his number. When Chloe came back I’d ask her for it. There was no way I wanted the guy to be worried about her or thinking that I was some evil predator who had stolen his daughter away. I already suspected the desk clerk thought I was involved in the human trafficking of Chloe since she clearly didn’t speak and I’d brought her to the shadiest dive in the East Village. The last thing in the world I wanted was for Chloe’s father to think the same thing. Well, okay, he wasn’t going to think I was abducting her, but he wouldn’t think my motives pure of heart either.

I realized I planned to be around for awhile and I wanted Paul to like me. I wanted him to feel that he could entrust his daughter to me. That his threats and fears were unfounded. I wanted to be trustworthy again.

My skin was starting to crawl in the small room that had zero ventilation and I pulled up a subway map on my phone, figuring the sooner we found Anya the sooner I could convince Chloe we needed to find a different hotel. I wouldn’t let a pet goat stay in this hotel. When Chloe came back she looked at me expectantly.

“You ready to do this?” I asked. “I can get us to Anya’s apartment building.”

She nodded. She looked determined, stoic. A little scared.

I checked the lock on the door three times, wondering if we should even be leaving our overnight bags in there. Not that mine contained anything of value. I had Chloe’s money in my pocket. I doubted she had much in her backpack either, but the thought of someone picking through our stuff was unnerving. I realized I still had quite a bit of the suburban middle class kid in me. A dive bar in Orono wasn’t exactly the same as a dive bar in New York City. I was out of my element here, but once we were back on the street I felt better. It was still broad daylight and we weren’t in a bad neighborhood, just a bad hotel.

Anya’s apartment building had seen better days though, I had to say. When we pressed the buzzer for the apartment marked Strange I wondered about the bumps and bruises that had led Anya here to the city. And how she was possibly raising a kid here by herself, unless she had a boyfriend. Kyle had said according to public records she wasn’t married, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t living with the baby’s father. I figured we’d find out the answer to all those questions and more as soon as she opened the door.

“What?” a sleepy and irritated female voice said through the intercom.

“Hi, this is Ethan Walsh and Ekaterina Volkov here to see Anya.” It made the most sense to lead with Chloe’s birth name, otherwise Anya would never open the door. Chloe squeezed my hand, hard.

There was a pause. “I have no idea who you are. Go away.”

“Ekaterina is your sister, Anya.” It was my assumption I was talking to her since it was her apartment so I decided to go for it. “Your twin sister from the orphanage back in Russia.”

The intercom was silent. Silent so long that I pressed the buzzer again, painfully aware of how tense Chloe was next to me.

“Knock that shit off!” the woman snapped. “My kid is sleeping. And I don’t have a twin, or a sister, so go away.”

“But-

“Go away or I’m calling the cops.” Her voice was cold, emotionless. Serious. She would call the cops, I had no doubt.

I turned to Chloe. “I think we should go. Rethink this.”

She looked pale. Upset. But she nodded and turned.

Out on the sidewalk I looked at her, the heat rising up from the pavement in visible waves. It had been in the low seventies back in Maine, but here it was in the mid-eighties, no sign of fall any time soon. My shirt was sticking to my back and Chloe looked tired, wilted.

I couldn’t stand the way her shoulders slumped. Taking her hand, I narrowed my eyes as I glanced back at the apartment building. “You can’t blame her. She has every right to be suspicious. So we’ll just move on to Plan B.”

It was a murky plan, but I put all the confidence into my voice that I had during my years of college politics. If you believe, they believe.

The hope on her face momentarily rattled me. Then I was just more determined than ever. “Let’s be tourists for a couple of hours. Then we’re going to watch Anya sing in her band tonight.”

Plan B was simply this- if Anya saw her sister face-to-face she wouldn’t be able to turn her back on Chloe.

In the meantime, I was taking Chloe on a carriage ride because when I dug deep, hidden under a layer of dust thick enough to grow potatoes in, I was a romantic guy. Chloe deserved to see that side of me as much as I wanted to show her. “Let’s go to the park.”

But before I could take a step, Chloe put her arms around my neck. She gave me a quick kiss, then a hard, shaky hug. “Hey, it will be okay,” I murmured in her ear.

A glance behind Chloe showed that the curtain of the third floor apartment was pulled back. Anya was watching us.

I bought Chloe a snow cone from a gelato shop. We didn’t go all the way to Central Park but to the much closer Washington Square Park and sat in front of the fountain. They were people walking dogs, jogging by, kids sticking their hands in the water. Tourists with cameras snapping pictures in front of the giant white arch. Chloe sat with her ankles crossed, mostly shaving ice off her snow cone with her spoon in careful rivulets like it was very important not to drop a single nugget of colored ice. Wanting to make it better for her, I sat there, wondering what to say. There wasn’t any particular way I could fix anything for Chloe. It was coming up on dusk, the heat dissipating, and it had been a very long day. My shoulders were tense.

Watching her out of the corner of my eye, I marveled that I could read her so well. That I knew her so well. No one had so expressive a face as Chloe did. She told me everything with her eyes. Not specific word choices, obviously, but a general thought. I could anticipate her response just from looking at her and I understood her fairly obscure hand gestures.

“When do you graduate?” I asked her.

She glanced at me and held up one finger.

“The end of this year?”

She nodded.

“I can go back to law school next semester,” I said. “I am seriously considering it.”

Chloe squeezed my knee. I took that as encouragement.

“I’ll have to move back to Portland, but it’s no further from you than where I am now, just a different direction.” I was dancing around the subject. So I decided to stop being a pussy and just throw it out there. “I want to spend more time with you. I don’t want you online dating. I want you dating
me
.”

Her spoon paused. Her eyes looked huge, soft.

Chloe was in love with me. I could see it. It was right there in those dark, limpid eyes. She thought I was a good guy and she wanted to be with me. Knowing that I had fucked up and that I’d made serious mistakes, she still wanted me. Not because she wanted to be seen with me, or she wanted my dick, but because she liked me. So simple. So innocent.

I’d been feeling about a thousand years old and Chloe made me want to remember what it was to be optimistic.

And hell, she did want my dick too, so that was a good thing. I was looking forward to that moment eventually. This trip wasn’t the time but soon. After I convinced her to move to Portland with me and finish school there. She was doing it online, what difference did it make?

“Come to Portland with me in January,” I said. “Between now and then I can come up and see you in Vinalhaven on my days off. But move to Portland so I can be with you.”

What the hell, right? She’d say yes. I knew she would. She would be afraid to leave her family but she was in love with me and she would want to be with me as much as I wanted to be with her.

She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. I reached out and touched the soft pad of her bottom lip. It was cool from the snow cone. “Yes or no?” I asked, voice low and rough. I was being impulsive, I knew that, but I didn’t give a shit. I’d basically lived on impulse the last eighteen months and while those might have been stupid choices, this wasn’t. This was me righting the chair I’d knocked over. Finding my way back to a life I was happy in.

Chloe nodded. Her lips formed the word ‘yes.’

Triumph and satisfaction flooded me. “Good. It will be good. We’ll be good. I promise you that.”

I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything. But I would have promised her the fucking Empire State Building in her backyard if I had thought that it would take that look off her face- that melancholy, longing ache for the sister who didn’t or wouldn’t remember her. She wanted to be wanted and I wanted to be needed. Relationships had started on less.

When I went to kiss her she lowered her snow cone so I could get in closer. I meant to kiss her gently but the minute my mouth touched her sweet, cold lips, I couldn’t resist plunging my tongue in, taking her hard, forcefully. Mine. My Chloe. She was the first thing in forever I had cared about. Not just the first person, but the first anything. I wanted to be better for her sake. I wanted to be better because she was better and I wouldn’t deserve her if I didn’t get my shit together.

She even tasted sweet, and the tongue she couldn’t use to speak did delicious and dirty things to mine. She was a fast learner and the initial awkwardness in our kissing was gone. I couldn’t wait to see what else she could learn to do with that tongue.

The bench bounced beneath us and I glanced over to see some random guy had sat down on the end of the bench. Chloe gave me an amused smile. I guess in New York it really was impossible to get any sort of privacy. Our making out didn’t stop us from having company.

“Later,” I told her. “We can revisit that.”

She nodded and her eyes promised me everything I could ever want.

Chloe didn’t want dinner so I ate street meat off a cart. It was a decent burrito actually and even though I wished I could brush my teeth after I had a bit of a second wind when we headed to the club to watch Anya play. It was a nondescript bar/club that had graffiti on the bricks outside and a careless doorman. He eyed Chloe with naked curiosity.

“Do I know you?” he asked her.

She shook her head.

“You look really familiar.”

Probably because she looked like the good twin to Anya’s bad twin. Light and dark. But even though I’d only seen pictures of Anya, the family resemblance was obvious. Chloe stepped closer to me like the bouncer made her nervous. He was big and tattooed as a doorman should be but he wasn’t particularly threatening.

“She’s never been to New York,” I told him mildly. “So I doubt you’ve ever seen her before.”

For a second he just looked at me, then he nodded. “Have fun.”

“Thanks.” We went inside, me leading Chloe by the hand. It was the typical dingy club vibe. Dark, the smell of liquor and sweat in the air. There were black lights strobing over the band on a small raised platform. The music was overwhelming, a crashing rage of sound that surrounded us. Not my kind of music at all. The crowd was eclectic but despite the fact that it was still warm outside, there was lots of leather. Or fake leather, anyway. But where there wasn’t leather, there was usually bare skin.

Chloe stood out in sharp contrast, wearing a yellow sundress. No one there looked like they knew what the color of the sun was. It was black on gray on black. I felt comfortable there. I could pick out the individual scents of deodorant, men’s cologne, women’s perfume, rum, whiskey, vodka. People thought vodka didn’t have a smell but I could pick it out of a drink at five feet. It was a cranberry juice heavy crowd. That and Sprite seemed to be the mixer of choice. The smells, the laughter, the drunken cacophony were all so familiar that I felt relaxed, at ease walking through the crowd. I found a spot at the edge of the bar and one lone free stool for Chloe to sit on.