“You still owe me dinner. Call me.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

JAKE

“Are you going out?” Sabrina asks. “Because you’re kind of in a shitty mood for going out.”

I haven’t heard from Natalie, which is why I’m in this shitty mood, but I try to summon a smile for my sister. She’s back to talking to me . . . barely.

When she follows me into my bedroom, I put her to good use. “Yes. I’m meeting Ian and Victoria at Club 69. Pick out something suitably clubbish.”

I wait for her to beg to come with me. Club 69 is one of Kaga’s newest ventures. It seems like he is opening a new club every other month.

She avoids the subject and instead points to my closet. “What look are you going for? Trendy? Urban? Bridge and Tunnel?”

“What’s Bridge and Tunnel?” I ask, rubbing my chin. I’ve got quite the scruff going, but I’m too lazy to shave. In a couple more weeks, I’ll be headed into full hipster beard mode. I told Natalie that I preferred to shave and now I wonder what she likes. Clean shaven? A little scruff? A full beard?

Her skin felt petal-soft as I carried her into her bedroom. I tried not to stare at her legs or how the big shirt she wore clung to the curves of her ample chest and hugged her waist. Perving on a woman who had passed out from fear is probably one of the lower points in my life.

“Bridge and Tunnel is in from New Jersey to pick up chicks who don’t know better. Axe body spray or Drakkar, open collar, lots of chest hair showing.” Her head is stuck inside my closet, making the words sound like they are coming down some tunnel—although maybe not all the way from Jersey.

“I’ll pass on that. Isn’t there anything that looks like ‘I’m here because my friends think I’m a stick-in-the-mud’?”

“Only everything in your wardrobe.” She makes a face as she holds up a pair of camo pants from my army days. “Seriously, why do you still have these?”

“They’re clean. Sturdy.”

“Ugh.” She throws them back into the closet. Sabrina doesn’t like to remember the time I was in the army. Says it gives her nightmares. She pulls out a black suit and a plain gray shirt. “These things. No tie. Do you want to change your hand?”

I look down at the metal-and-plastic prosthetic on the left side, and flex. The design isn’t much to look at, but it is more functional than the other ones I have, like the more realistic flesh-looking one. That one is really nothing more than a mannequin piece. I choose function over form any day. “What? You don’t think the Terminator look is in? When your robot overlords are arrive, you’re going to be glad your brother is half man, half metal.”

She makes a face. “I just don’t want a bunch of stupid bitches at the club to say stupid shit to you.”

“Not everyone is like the old lady at Barneys.”

Sabrina is still hurting from the incident a month ago when we went shopping and an old socialite at Barneys nearly fainted when I reached down to tie my shoelace. My metal prosthetic, which looks more like a silver/black titanium glove, brushed the back of her tiny dog. She thought I was going to crush it. Most people ignore my hand or stare covertly, but she was elderly and had no problem shrieking and then apologizing all over, exclaiming how pitiful it was that a man like me had to have a prosthetic.

The pity gets to me more than the fear, but I don’t know if Sabrina understood that. I step into the bathroom to begin the semi-elaborate task of changing clothes. I usually keep my day-to-day limb in my boot. It’s easier to dress in the morning. My routine consists of pulling on my gel liner followed by the suction suspension sleeve. After that I stick my prosthetic in the bottom of whatever pants I’m wearing, pull the pants over my good leg, and then drop trou until my artificial limb is attached. That process takes less than a minute.

Getting undressed and into another set of clothes is a different story. I have to remove the prosthetic because the pants are a bitch to get over the artificial foot, and then while I have that off, I might as well change the liner and sleeve so I can last a few more hours without significant pain, which is why if I go out, I prefer to wear jeans. But Club 69 is not a place for jeans, and Ian and Kaga are good enough friends for me to make the extra effort.

“You never said why you broke it off with Deena?” she asks, rummaging in my sock drawer as I exit the bathroom having changed pants, reattached my limb, and shrugged on the button-down shirt.

“Why is it me doing the breaking? Maybe it was Deena who had a change of heart.”

Sabrina turns toward me with a give-me-a-break look on her face. “Has anyone broken up with you?”

“Sure.”

“Who? Name one girl.”

“Anna Madden.” I sit on the edge of the bed and motion for her to throw me the socks.

“Who’s she?” A belt lands beside me and I dodge a pair of black leather shoes, which land neatly, sole-down on the bedspread. I pull on the socks, one over my right foot and the other over my prosthetic foot. I don’t need a sock on my fake foot, of course, but it looks better.

“Nice throw. Anna Madden was my soulmate. She crushed me when she told me she wanted to see other people,” I say cheerfully.

Sabrina’s eyes narrow.

“Was this in like sixth grade or something?”

“Second. She was the cutest thing in elementary school. She wore pigtails and her brown hair curled around her face when she sweated. I liked to chase her around the playground until the hair started forming little ringlets.”

“That’s weird. And perverse. What’s Anna doing today?”

I shrug and stand. Sabrina comes over and buttons my shirt. Small buttons are a struggle for me. I swallow my resentment at needing help to dress. Reaching for the belt, I loop it through the pants. She makes a motion to ask if I need help with my buckle. I shake my head. The buckle I can do with my right hand. There’s never a moment that goes by that I’m not grateful I lost my left instead of my dominant right. “Hopefully breaking more hearts. Then I’m not the only sap she rejected.”

“The fact that no woman has broken up with you since second grade pretty much proves my point.”

I’m not sure where Sabrina is going with this, so I tell her what I told Deena. “We wanted different things in our lives at that point.”

She’d understood. She was—is—ambitious and wants to make a name for herself. While I want Tanner Securities to be successful, I didn’t need it to be big. I didn’t need to own half of Manhattan to feel good about myself. Deena wondered why I wasn’t expanding, hiring new people. Why I kept turning away business. She blamed it on my trust fund.

I’m not sure how she knew about that, because I’m pretty tight-lipped about my money, about everything in fact. That was another thing she didn’t like. In retrospect, the only thing Deena and I had going for us was our compatibility in bed. She liked to be fucked hard and often and I was happy to oblige.

After a while, though, having only sex in common became boring.

“Mom wants you to get married.”

Sabrina follows me out of the bedroom and down the two flights of stairs to the main level.

“She wants a lot of things, but she’s been a mother for over thirty-five years. She knows life is full of disappointment.”