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“Can you?” I asked, finally.
“Me? No.” I was about three seconds from slamming his keyboard over his head. Motionless and cold I eyed him down and waited. “But if you let me poke around, I might be able to create a program that could.”
‘Poke around’ was Kasey’s way of saying ‘hacking’. The liability to the company had kept him from crossing every legal line, but I couldn’t find it in myself to deny him this chance. It was for Lake, and I’d let him blow up the damn internet if it kept her safe.
“Do it,” I said, giving in. My mind wandered to the woman upstairs, dancing around a kitchen while cleaning, completely unaware that someone had taken even more in her name. She’d blame herself as crazy as it was, because in her mind, her mere existence was the cause of everyone’s problems.
God, I wanted to kill Robert Harrington for the way he fucked with Lake’s head. She wouldn’t carry the need to blame herself constantly if that bastard had just showed the fuck up for his daughter. She liked to pretend that she’d killed off all emotion when it came to her father, but Lake was stuck in the same place she’d been when she’d lost her mother.
“How am I supposed to explain this to her?” I asked no one in particular.
“Do we have to tell her?” Cabot asked.
“After Bailey and Monica, I really don’t know.”
“How is she handling that?” Fitz had taken his eyes from the screen and fixed them on me.
“She’s not,” I said with a humorless laugh. “She keeps it locked down. Same with her loss of the Pasternaks.” She hadn’t said a word since her initial explosion over his trainwreck of a death notification. There were times when he knew she was thinking about those who had died around her, times when she would go quiet and seemingly turn inward for a moment because I watched helplessly as she buried it down.
“Sounds familiar,” Kasey attempted to speak under his breath, but in the silence of the room, he might as well have shouted.
“Fuck off,” I shot back at him. I didn’t need the lecture today about my issues with compartmentalizing the emotions I didn’t want to deal with. I’d nearly left the company behind the time they’d attempted to give me an intervention after the anniversary of Remy’s death. Apparently I wasn’t allowed to walk into work and start the meeting like it was just another Monday. But it had been a Monday, and we had work to do.
Shit. Okay, I could slightly see their point.Slightly. I wasn’t ready to admit that I’d been wrong to shut myself down all these years, but it made it easier to see the carefully packed and stored boxes of emotions when I’d just spend days not even worrying about them. Sure they were still there, feelings and memories I didn’t want to deal with, but since I’d opened up about that day that changed my life to Lake, I’d felt more at ease about the loss. I hadn’t identified and packed down every emotion until I was moving through the world like a robot. I’d just lived.
“Fitz, can you talk to her about all of this?”
“Nope,” he said, not even missing a beat.
“Why not?” It sounded like a whine, even to my own ears. I never whined.
“Because, she’s a friend now, not a client. Also, I’m not a fucking therapist, no matter how much you all like to pretend I am!” At his sudden outburst, we were all watching him with raised eyebrows. Fitz was the most level headed of us all, even me and my need to keep everything in its specific box and show nothing.
“You okay, buddy?” Kasey asked in a placating tone, patting his hand on the other man’s shoulder.
“I’m fine!” he snapped before taking a long slow breath. “Really, I’m okay. I just didn’t know when we started this company, it would go from escorting celebrities around town to knees deep in an international kidnapping conspiracy.”
“Don’t forget the side of stalking and just a pinch of explosives,” Kasey finished off before shoveling a fork full of Spanish rice into his mouth.
I was about to wrestle the container away from him before I stopped and just shook my head. This was Jack Kasey. This was what he did for our fucked up family. Who could possibly stay in a dark headspace when he was around to make sure nothing got too heavy? Hell, he could keep the rice. It wasn’t like I’d promised not to sharethatwith him. If anything, he’d earned it, keeping his spirits up when the rest of us were struggling.
CHAPTER 26
LAKE
The second Decker left it was as if he’d taken all the contentment with him. I suppose it was a sign that I hadn’t been dealing with the upheaval in my life, that I’d used my time with him to block out everything else. One therapist had called it avoidance, but I called it a survival skill. If I didn’t think too hard about the flaming pile of shit that had become my life, I wouldn’t have a breakdown. Wishful thinking but, then again, the past few days with Deck had made the bullshit seem bearable.
I lost my desire to dance around when he’d walked out the door, so I shuffled around cleaning up, packing up leftovers without bothering to try it myself. My appetite was gone now too. Left in my own head, I had no idea how to keep it together. So I grabbed my laptop and sat down in the middle of the couch with some reality tv in the background and stared at the screen doing absolutely nothing.
I couldn’t focus enough to work, couldn’t pretend well enough to reach out to any number of the charities I donated to. The messaging app in the corner flashed and I clicked, startled to see it was connecting a video. This thing didn’t have video. I was covering the small camera with my hand and getting ready to force a shut down of the entire computer when Scout’s face popped up on the video screen.
“Lake? Ah shit, did the update not work right? It’s all black.” She was in the middle of a rant about one comma in the wrong place and I lowered my hand to smile at her.
“Next time you force an update through, please let me know you’ve added video. I nearly had a heart attack thinking someone was hacking into my system.”
Scout clapped excitedly and grinned wide at me. “Someone did. Me! I just missed you too much, and since you’re locked away still, and I didn’t trust that someone could have been sending messages as you and I wouldn’t know, then I remembered this movie from forever ago about proof of life, so I was like ‘real time video, duh!’, and honestly you never open this damn laptop anymore and I was getting worried.”
Somewhere in her rant, I lost track of what she was saying and just focused on her. Damn, I missed her so much. Auburn hair that was always in some form of messy knot on top of her head, unless she was at work, then it was a professional and simple chignon. Today, her lopsided messy bun and “Namaste In Bed” tank told me she wasn’t working. Her pale skin seemed to glow due to her computer screen and those bright blue eyes were filled with tears.
