Page 82 of Bronx

“No, I realized what the answer was before I even finished the question. You’re sticking your middle finger up at your attackers.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“Is that what the knife looked like?”

“It all happened so fast, I didn’t really get a good look at the knife.”

“Your throat sounds terrible today, by the way. Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed out all night doing… whatever it is you were doing.”

This is basically Karma’s third reference to me staying out, and it makes me wonder. Was she scared in the apartment alone, or was she actually worried about me?

“What do you think I was doing?” I cock my head to the side and wait for her answer.

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, people like you do all night.”

People like me?

I’m not sure of the exact intentions behind her words, but it reeks of judgement.

Fuck this.

I reach for one of my blue label whiskey bottles sitting on the counter next to a case of bottled water.

“It’s too early to have a drink,” she reprimands me, then quickly hands me two white pills out of my pill jar. “Just wait for the pain meds to kick in.”

“Prescription meds aren’t any better than me having a drink, and I don’t need a lecture in my own house.”

“And I didn’t need one yesterday. I can handle Ray.”

I walk up to the edge of the kitchen island counter, which is the only thing separating us from each other. If she wasn’t pissing me off so much, I’d lift her ass up on it and fuck her until she starts saying something that makes sense.

“No. You. Can’t.”

We’re having what’s tantamount to a staring contest, but she’s playing with the king of “don’t blink”, a little game that Seven and I used to play with each other our whole lives, so I’ve had a lot of practice.

I win.

“Whatever, I’ve got to get ready for work,” she tells me. “Take the muffins out of the oven in fifteen minutes. Last time you let the cake burn.”

This woman.

“It was your fault the cake burned, and now I’m starting to think you can’t bake at all. You never finish anything. Where’s the commitment to your craft?”

She tries walking past me, ignoring my last comment, her shirt lightly swaying against her thighs right above the knee. I should probably let what happened yesterday go. After all, her eye is healing up. I’m going to find her brother, and then she will soon leave my apartment. Yeah, I definitely should just let her go get ready for work and keep this relationship one-hundred percent transactional.

But this is the thing.

I’ve had nothing but Karma on the brain since yesterday.

Really, since the moment she walked down Ruby’s living room stairs and stormed into my life. And my dick has plenty of interest in keeping this dysfunctional arrangement of ours totally… transactional.

I gently grab her wrist.

“You sure you want to go to work?”

28

Karma