Off Limit: Claimed by My Ex-Fiancé's Stepdad novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Fifty Thousand

I didn't go to the urn.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with my headset bag still on my shoulder and looked at Ward.

"I told you not to," I said.

"I know."

"I sat at this table on Monday night and told you why. She wins twice. She sells him, and she learns you'll pay."

"You did."

"And you said 'I hear you.'"

"I did hear you."

"You just didn't listen."

He didn't answer that. He didn't try.

I put my bag down on the floor very carefully, the way I had the first night I stood in this kitchen.

"The house," I said. "You mortgaged it and told me after. Three weeks of Jude and Lenore, and you told me after. Now my father. You bought my father, Ward. Like a prop."

"Cleo."

"Twice now you've decided my life for me. Three times. I've stopped counting."

He took his coat off, slowly, and hung it over a chair.

Then he looked at me.

"You're right," he said.

I'd been ready for a fight. I'd been ready for "I did it for you." I had a whole speech for that one.

"That's it?" I said.

"That's it. You're right. She called and said fifty thousand or he goes in the river off the Brooklyn Bridge tonight. I didn't call you. I should have called you. I wanted to hand you something finished."

"I'm a stage manager. Nothing's ever finished. You call me."

"I'll call you."

I finally walked to the table.

The urn was cold under my hand. The dent in the lid fit my thumb.

Three years.

My father was home on Bank Street, on a kitchen table in the West Village, because a man who couldn't boil an egg in February had paid a woman fifty thousand dollars for her own husband.

I didn't cry. I put my forehead down on the lid instead and stayed there.

Ward didn't touch me. He waited.

When I stood up, I took my wallet out.

"Here's my rule," I said. "Nothing about me without me. Not my father, not my job, not my life. Nothing. You don't fix it, you don't buy it, you don't protect me from it. You call me."

"Nothing about you without you," he said.

"And this isn't a gift. It's a loan."

"Cleo, I don't want..."

"You don't get a vote. You already voted. Fifty thousand dollars. A thousand a week, cash, on this table every Friday until it's paid. Fifty Fridays."

"That's a year."

"Then you'd better stay put for a year."

Something moved in his face, fast.

I pulled every bill out of my wallet. Sixty-three dollars.

I put it on the table next to the urn.

"Down payment," I said. "Write it down."

He took a pencil off the counter and wrote on the back of the seating chart in his block capitals. "PAID: $63. OWED: $49,937."

He turned it around to show me.

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Then I went around the table and took his face in my hands.

"I'm still angry," I said.

"I know."

"Stop saying you know."

I kissed him.

It wasn't sweet. It was the whole week in it. The pin, the hold, the gallery at four in the morning, the urn in the alley.

He made a sound low in his chest and backed into the counter.

I pushed him there. I kept him there.

I pulled his sweater up over his head and dropped it on the floor next to my bag.

"Upstairs," I said against his mouth. "I'm leading."

"Yes, ma'am."

I bit his lip for that.

Then I stopped with my hands on his chest and looked up at him.

"You know what they're all saying," I said. "Jude's stepfather. The whole internet."

"I don't read the internet."

"Joanie reads it to me." I hooked my finger in his belt. "They've got a name for you. You want to hear it?"

His eyes went dark.

"Say it," he said.

So I did. I said it like a dare, right into his ear, in his kitchen with my father on the table behind me.

He went very still.

Then his hands closed on my hips.

"Say it again," he said. "And mean it this time."

I didn't answer him.

I looked at him for one long second, then took his hand off my hip and walked out of the kitchen.

I heard his breath go out behind me.

Then his footsteps, following.

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