All Kinds of Tied Down (17 page)

“Watch Netflix,” he advised.

I nodded.

He strode out, and in the hall, he fell into step beside his boss before they disappeared. Glancing around, I located my phone on the rolling table beside my bed, plugged into an outlet. It listed six missed messages from Ian’s father and one from Ian himself, which I wished I had been awake to take.

“Jesus Christ, Mary, and motherfucking Joseph!” I jolted as Catherine Benton stormed into my room, both her volume and perfume bracing.

Following her in, Janet Powell shouted even louder. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

“I told you he was really hurt,” Aruna Duffy shrieked, rushing by both women to reach me, grabbing my hand, and dropping gracelessly down on the bed beside me. She had never been a sweet delicate flower, even though at five six and 110 pounds she used to resemble one. Now, at seven months pregnant, eating everything in sight, bigger than she’d ever been, she was no longer certain of her own strength.

“I thought you wore body armor?” Min Kwon, rounding out the four, asked as she rushed around to my other side. “How did you get shot, chagiya?”

“It’s like a condom, Min, holes happen,” I said, lifting my chin so she’d lean down so I could kiss her. From the use of the endearment, I knew she was really worried.

She snorted as I kissed her cheek before she turned her head and kissed mine. Aruna was next, and then Janet. Catherine had the binder that had been sitting on a shelf beside my bed open. I’d had no idea what it was until I saw her perusing it, but understood as I watched her flip pages that it was my chart.

“Put that down.”

Her shushing noise was sharp.

“You shouldn’t be snooping,” I scolded.

“Uh-huh,” she said, still reading, kissing me absently before straightening up. When her head snapped up and she nailed me with her dark brown gaze, I almost flinched. “Your wrist is broken too?”

“That was before,” I defended. “It’s all healed up now.”

She grunted and kept skimming, the enormous five-carat diamond in the platinum setting on her left hand catching the light as she flipped pages. “Hit the call button,” she directed Min. “I need to talk to the nurse.”

“What are you guys doing here?” I asked the women who had been my family since my freshman year at the University of Chicago.

“Aruna’s your emergency contact,” Min explained gently, as was her way. She was kind and logical and the heart of our little group. She was also a cutthroat litigator who you really didn’t want sitting across from you in a courtroom. I watched her in court the last time I visited her, and she was damn scary. “And so after they let her know what was going on, she called us.”

I rolled my head to look at Aruna.

“What? I’m not supposed to call them?”

“You scared everyone for no reason.”

“No reason, my ass,” Catherine flared, showing off the weight of the three-inch binder with both hands. “This is serious, Miroslav.”

Good Lord, she used my given name.

“We got here as quick as we could,” Janet explained.

Aruna was the only one who’d stayed in Chicago, the only one I saw on a regular basis. Catherine was in Manhattan, Janet in Washington DC, and Min in Los Angeles. But I still talked to all of them once a week. We all knew exactly what was going on with each other. So even though I hadn’t physically seen Catherine in six months, Janet in eight, and Min in four, it didn’t feel like that because they were all still such a big part of my life.

“I was here yesterday,” Aruna explained, patting my hand, her green-gold eyes warm as she stared at me. “That’s why you’re in this room.”

I squinted at her. “What room was I in?”

“A small one,” she enlightened me, flipping her long straight brown hair over her shoulder.

“And what did you do?”

“I asked them if they wanted to be on the news tomorrow.”

“You work for
20/20
,” I reminded her. “You don’t do the local news here in Chicago.”

“As if they wouldn’t die to have me do an exposé on how hospitals treat wounded heroes.”

“I’m not a hero.”

“You saved that woman, your witness,” she said quickly. “Your boss told me.”

“Oh for crissakes,” I groused.

“Shut up. They moved you, didn’t they?”

“Because you threatened them.”

“Damn right I did,” she huffed, and I saw her eyes glint with anger. “Give me a hard time—fuck them!”

“Aruna—”

“As if dealing with her isn’t preferable to dealing with me,” Catherine scoffed. “Please.”

I shook my head. “You guys can’t come in here and push—”

“Do they want to be audited?” Janet asked pointedly. “I think not.”

My nice and unassuming friend, one of the chief auditors in the Tax Exempt & Government Entities (TE/GE) division of the IRS, was actually the scariest person in the room. People thought she was cute and fluffy with her short curly red bob, freckles, and big blue eyes—until she pounced on you and you realized she was terrifying.

“I—”

“Mr. Jones?” a nurse said as she came into the room. “What do you—I’m sorry, but you’re not supposed to have this many vis—”

“He can have as many people in here as he likes,” Min instructed. “And if you call security, I’ll have your job.”

“Stop,” I begged. “This woman puts needles in me.”

“I need to speak to Mr. Jones’s physician,” Catherine snapped at the nurse before she even had a chance to respond to Min. “Please advise him that Dr. Catherine Benton is here.”

“I don’t—”

“Dr.… Catherine… Benton,” she said slowly, frostily. “Do it now.”

The nurse glanced around the room and left quickly.

“He won’t know who you are,” I said to my conceited friend. “You’re very full of yourself right now.”

She grunted, walked over to me, and flicked me in the middle of my forehead.

“Witch,” I grumbled, but I couldn’t help laughing.

“I have concerns,” she replied. “And I need to know what your doctor did, because it’s not in his notes and that’s troubling. If he didn’t do what I think, I’m going to have to wheel you into surgery in about an hour.”

Min gasped.

“I really don’t want you cutting me open,” I said emphatically.

“You should be so lucky,” said my doctor, Dr. Sean Cooper, who looked like he belonged on a magazine cover instead of walking the halls of a hospital, as he strolled into the room. “Dr. Benton is one of the top neurosurgeons in the country.”

“Yes,” she seconded, arching an eyebrow for me. “I saw that Miro suffered hypoxia associated with the gunshot wound to his clavicle, and my concern is—”

“Erb-Duchenne palsy,” he finished. “Yes.”

“And,” she snapped. “How long was he—”

“I haven’t updated the file, but walk with me and I’ll show you the MRI we performed.”

“Excellent,” she said crisply, turning to follow him. “Sit tight, I’ll be back,” she said over her shoulder.

When she was gone, Aruna waggled her eyebrows at me.

“You guys are all bullies.”

I was fairly certain the hospital staff would be really glad when I
left.

I
HAD
been, by all accounts, well on my way to a life of crime, growing up in Pacoima, California. There was shoplifting—always food because I was always hungry—truancy, and doing the courier thing. Guys said, hey kid, I’ll give you twenty bucks to take this there, and I did. I never asked what was inside; I didn’t care. But I got a reputation for being reliable, and that led to getting invited along to business transactions at cockfights, gambling in back rooms, and watching as guys drank, smoked, and did lines. Soon enough, I was the one being offered a bump of coke or a drag or a drink.

I was in and out of more than two dozen foster homes by the time I turned fifteen. Enough that, with the trouble I dabbled in, I’d been caught in situations when the police came charging through the front door. What inevitably happened was the biggest, strongest men in the room ended up taking me outside and staying with me until Child Protective Services showed up.

These were the only men in my life who ever really saw me, talked to me, or seemed to care whether I was alive or dead. The savior thing, the white hat thing, the hero thing: all that imprinted on my brain. So instead of hating law enforcement, I went the other way. In fact, I decided I never wanted to be the guy getting busted; I wanted to be the guy doing the busting.

Policemen were kind, solid, powerful, and—as I aged—damn hot. I was lucky. I had it better than a lot of foster kids I knew. I wasn’t raped, pimped out, or molested. My foster parents just didn’t give a shit at all. I had to scavenge my own meals and clothes. It was like I was invisible. The last time I was removed from a home—because the people I was living with had a meth lab in their basement—the detective who ushered me out of the house stopped in front of my guardian and punched him in the face. As the man stared up at him from the floor, the detective tugged at the clothes that hung off my too-lean frame. I was severely malnourished, and that time, I went to the hospital. It was then I was assigned a new caseworker—my angel, as it turned out—Mrs. Perez.

She was my sixth social worker. Mrs. Benita Perez changed my last name to Jones from Chukovskaya, which was what someone thought my last name was—they were never certain, it was simply on the one slip of paper I had, with Miroslav. She did it with her pen on a form and then punched it into the computer. And with that tiny change, she gave me a redo.

“I don’t like Smith, so we’re going with the other easy one, yeah?” she’d said, smiling at me. “Now that you’re Jones,
mijo
, let’s see what else you can do besides screw up.”

It shouldn’t have meant or done anything, but I went from focusing on being no one’s kid to being a man who was ready to grow up and do something with his life.

A week later, she’d changed my school and placed me in a home in Redondo Beach. Ten of us lived there, and it was run more like a barracks than a house, but that was fine with me. Hearing Mr. Hutchins yell “Jones” when it was time for me to come to the dinner table was music to my ears. The retired Army chaplain was like the others in that he didn’t care whether I was there, but at least he actually used the money he got for taking care of me to put food on the table and clothes on my back. I chalked it up as a win.

When I turned sixteen, I got two jobs, one after school at a grocery store stocking shelves and the other at a twenty-four-hour gas station. I had the overnight shift and a lot of time to sleep and study, locked in the plexiglass bulletproof cage. No one checked how old I was, no one cared. Everyone but Mrs. Perez was surprised when I was accepted to the University of Chicago, and what financial aid didn’t take care of, the scholarships she helped me apply for did. The year I graduated was the year she retired. I still sent her Christmas cards in Portland.

Until I moved to Chicago, I had never had a home, nothing permanent. The dorms were a revelation—the freedom—and the job I got at the diner two blocks from campus was nice. For once I was the same as everyone else, as every other college freshman. No one looked down on me, judged me, or treated me differently. I could recreate myself, and I did.

Having figured out a long time ago that I was gay, I went to work sleeping with any guy who looked my way. It was how I met Janet Woollard, later Powell. She came charging into her boyfriend’s dorm room at six in the morning and found me naked in his bed.

She screamed.

I groaned.

Her boyfriend, Todd something, ran to the bathroom and locked himself in.

“Get your ass out here!” she roared at him through the door.

I was hopping up and down on one foot, pulling on my pants.

“Oh Jan,” Monica Byers clucked from the doorway, two other girls with her, all in skimpy sleepwear I would have expected if they were Victoria’s Secret models. “I guess Todd got so sick of you, he went gay.”

Janet’s face, the look of absolute agony on it, I couldn’t take.

“Dude, I’m not gay,” I said disdainfully, sneering at Monica, conceited bitch that she was. She had the total Queen Bee thing going. If you didn’t kiss her ass, she was a total nightmare. “And Todd’s only upset because he walked in here and Janet and I were in his bed. Guy’s gonna be traumatized for life.”

She was stunned.

The coven with her was stunned.

And with my lie, I kept Todd’s secret and turned Janet into the bad girl she’d always wanted to be. I grabbed her hand and yanked her after me out the door and down the back stairs. On the ground floor, in the common area, I let her go. She ran around in front of me and barred my exit.

“What?”

“Todd’s gay?”

“Todd was curious.”

“Did you top?”

I grinned. “Baby, I always top.” Which was the first truth of that day.

She put her hands on her hips and stared up into my face. “How come you lied for me?”

“Because Monica Byers is the
c
word,” I explained, “and I only don’t use the word in deference to you. Girls hate it, right?”

“We do, yes.”

“And also, you don’t deserve whatever she was about to dish out.”

Her eyes softened as she extended her hand. “I’m Janet Woollard.”

“Miro Jones.”

“You wanna come to my room? I just got back from home and my mom loaded me up with frozen food.”

“You got Hot Pockets?”

“I do, plus Bagel Bites and pizza rolls.”

“How ’bout waffles? It is only like six thirty.”

“I even have syrup and a crapton of soda.”

“Sold.”

We feasted in her room, on her bed, making trips back and forth to the microwave. Her roommate, Aruna Rao, who would meet a big Irish fireman named Liam Duffy and fall madly and completely in love with him—thus keeping her from ever returning to Dallas, Texas—breezed in two hours later.

“Hello,” she greeted me.

I patted the space beside me on Janet’s bed. “Join us.”

And while Janet and Aruna had been friendly, they were not friends until that day when we all got sloshed on way too many wine coolers. We were inseparable after that. When I borrowed notes from Catherine Mindel in my second hour Biology class and invited her to eat at the diner I worked at, putting her at a table with Janet and Aruna, they hated her at first, and then loved her a month later when we all drove to Detroit for her cousin’s wedding. We bonded, and when we got back and Min Song was Catherine’s new roommate because her first one had moved out—apparently Catherine had a touch of OCD—we adopted her. Min was gentle until someone came after one of her friends. Then God help you. She had actually taken apart our Philosophy professor who belittled Janet in front of the class. He took three days off after the dressing down he suffered. Janet had hugged her so tight.