Chapter 2
767 Words
On the day Leah first came to the office, a hard rain was falling outside, and she stood, soaked through, in the Atwell Group lobby.
A few of the younger men on staff whispered together a short distance off, and every one of them was working up the nerve to go talk to her.
She saw us step out of the elevator and hurried over.
Leonardo never broke his stride, but he eased back half a step so smoothly that no one else would have caught it, and he put more space between them.
"Leo..."
"What do you want." It wasn't a question. He kept his eyes on the file in his hand and looked straight past the color that had drained out of her face.
I caught his arm. "Don't be so hard on her. The lounge has spare clothes, and I'll take her back to change."
"Thank you, Nicole," Leah smiled.
On the way to the lounge, I couldn't keep the question from coming up. "Why does your brother treat you like that?"
Leah's eyebrows lifted a little. "He never told you?"
Something in the way she looked at me went in like a needle.
He would not tell me, and I would not ask.
'I still haven't made it all the way into his world,' I thought.
"No. He didn't."
"Leo would tell you if you wanted to know, so you should ask him yourself. He treats me this way because I hurt him, and I deserve it." Leah lowered her lashes, and even another woman would have wanted to shield her.
My parents only ever had me, so the first time I met Leah, I worried that the two of us would clash, and I worried in equal measure that Leonardo would dote on her past anything I could stomach.
But Leah turned out to be sweet and easy to be around, Leonardo barely gave her the time of day, and my nerves still would not settle.
Whatever ran between the two of them kept me standing outside of it, and the strangeness of that feeling never quite let me call it imagination.
"Nicole, I'm putting together my application for the grad program at Hiland University. Any chance I could borrow Leo to tutor me?" Leah asked, toweling her hair dry and grinning at me.
What pulled me out of my own head was the sound of her voice, and I laughed. "Of course you can."
That evening Leonardo heard that Leah was staying for dinner, and he answered with three words. "Send her home."
I said, "If you won't sit with her, then I will. You can't even buy your own sister a meal? How's that supposed to look?"
Leah pushed her food around her plate for most of the meal and kept telling me she was fine.
I couldn't sit there and watch it, so I tried to smooth it over. "Leonardo is..."
'There is nothing I can say for him,' I thought. Leonardo had been built that way for as long as I had known him, and once he decided not to deal with someone, he didn't.
"Don't worry about me. It's fine. Thanks, Nicole." Her voice broke partway through, and the tears came, and within a few seconds she was crying in small hiccuping gasps.
After I put her in a car and sent her off, I spotted Leonardo down in the parking garage under the office building. His headlights were off, and he was leaning back against the door, a cigarette between his fingers, the tip flaring and fading in the dark. He stood tall against the car's shadow, and something in the way he held himself looked worn down.
"Leah cried the whole way to the car." I walked over to him, hoping to patch up something between him and his family.
Leonardo went still for a beat, and something I couldn't read passed through his eyes. Then he crushed the cigarette out, reached over and pulled me in against his chest, and rested his chin on the top of my head, and he said nothing for a long time.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low. "I reek of smoke. Don't pick up the habit."
He said it, and then he bent down and kissed me anyway. The garage lights burned white overhead, and his palm was hot against my back through my coat.
'There is no heat in this. He simply likes me,' I thought.
What that kiss left me with was the sense that the distance between us had closed by an inch.
- Writer
