“No. That’s why I know you can find your peace.”
She slid out of his arms and sat hard on the floor. “God, Dimi. He can’t know. He can’t know. I don’t want him to know.”
He sat down on the floor next to her, facing her now. “He says he’s not going to say anything, and you don’t know him, so why does it matter?”
“I don’t know.” She took the breath that finally made her calm. “I don’t know.”
Dimi gave her an enigmatic little one-sided smirk. “Okay. You want some juice now?”
Their mother had always given her a glass of orange juice after an episode. Manny had no idea why, but it had come to mark the time when the badness was over and everybody started putting things back together. The palliative effect transcended her little breakdowns. Since she was eight, orange juice had made her feel calm. It was better than Xanax.
“Yeah. Okay. Thanks, Dimi.”
“I love you.” He got up and went to the fridge. She started picking up pill bottles and stood to put them away.
“Love you double.”
oOo
Manny spent Fridays in her car, driving to private clients who had their massages in their own homes. Her clients on this Friday were all in Providence, from before she’d moved to Quiet Cove, so now she had a long drive in morning traffic to start her day.
This morning, she had to get an extra-early start, because she had to make a couple-mile walk into the heart of Quiet Cove to collect her car from the lot on Gannet Street. Then she drove back and dragged Dmitri off her sofa.
He was with her part of the way, but they didn’t talk much. He was by no definition a morning person, and she’d needed to be up and out by eight o’clock. So he’d clutched one of her travel mugs of coffee and leaned his head against the window, his beanie pulled low over his face. When she’d dropped him off in front of his place, he’d rolled to her side, kissed her cheek, then rolled himself out of her car.
Once he closed the passenger door, Manny waved and pulled away, cranking up the stereo. She didn’t mind a long drive, not even in traffic. Nobody could touch her, and she had some time to do some thinking.
This morning, she definitely had some thinking to do. The episode she’d had last night wasn’t in itself all that unusual, though it had been a while—nearly a year—since she’d lost that kind of control. But still, going mental in a piece of shit bar—not her first rodeo. In fact, it had ended up being pretty low-key, despite the fact that the dude with the big nose who’d grabbed her had probably needed some stitches.
He deserved it.
Dmitri thought he’d grabbed her ass—she’d heard him say as much to Luca and the bartender—but actually, he’d grabbed her front, getting a handful of her pussy. She barely remembered anything after that, until they were in the back room.
The asshole and his buddies had stood around the tall two-top next to her and Dmitri, and he’d started being annoying right off the bat. At first he’d just been a typical bar flirt, leaning down to whisper that she was hot, or ask if she was with Dmitri (she’d said yes, just to try to get him to back off), or offer to buy her a drink. She’d told him, straight out, to fuck off, but he was one of those ‘no means try harder’ bastards. The bar was too crowded by then to find a different spot, and Dmitri wanted to finish his drink, so they’d switched places, putting some distance between her and her new stalker. Then, on his way back from the bathroom, he’d leaned in and grabbed his handful, and Manny had gone into overdrive.
Luca had sort of…rescued her, she guessed. But that was a problem, or it could be. He knew she was also Emma, the massage therapist, and the last thing she needed was for him to go around spouting off about the psycho bitch who’d totally overreacted to some ‘harmless flirting’ and almost started a brawl at Quinn’s.
But Dmitri said he wouldn’t. Because he knew her story. Or, at least, the bones of it. Because her brother had told him.
That bothered her. A lot. It wasn’t something she liked people to know—and Dmitri was wrong. It didn’t make her seem less psycho. It only gave a reason for it.
Still, she cared more this morning than she should. If Luca didn’t tell anyone, then it didn’t really matter if he knew. Did it? No—why would it? He was just a guy. Just some dude she’d met a couple of times. She didn’t see him becoming a regular client, because he was Heather’s. So she could probably live the rest of her life and not see him again. Or, if she did, it would be just in passing. So who the fuck cared what he knew about her?