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"You sure?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow. I sighed.
"Yes," I shot back, a little sharper than I had intended. I didn’t want to be an asshole to her, but I didn’t like the thought of her seeing through me like that.
"Alright," she remarked, leaning back in her seat, clearly not believing me. "So, tell me about yourself, Solomon."
"What is this, a job interview?" I asked. She grinned.
"You already got the job," she pointed out. "My father hired you, didn’t he? So you must be pretty good at it."
I rolled my shoulders back, straightening up.
"Yeah, I am," I replied.
"Confident, I like that," she laughed. "Is this what you do, then? Work as a bodyguard?"
"Not usually," I admitted. "The two of us, we’re more..."
I trailed off. How to put this to her in a way that wasn’t going to freak her out? She would have had every right to stress if I told her the truth, that Alex and I were more likely causing trouble than keeping someone from it...
The door opened again, and I snapped my head around to see who was coming and going. I didn’t like having my back to the door, even though I doubted anyone would have tried anything in a place like this; it would have been too much in the way of trouble to actually go after her right here in public if anyone had any intentions against her at all.
"You’re really jumpy," she remarked. Shit, she’d clocked it. I had hoped I could keep that part of myself under wraps. Sometimes, when I felt as though I was being interrogated for one reason or another, the nerves that I could usually control got the better of me. This was one of those times.
"No, I’m not," I shot back. She raised her eyebrows at me.
"I just saw you," she pointed out. "You don’t think someone’s going to do something in here, do you?"
"No," I confessed. I doubted anyone would have been that stupid, stupid enough to put themselves in my line of fire right now. Not with the reputation I had.
"Then why are you so nervous?”
"Not nervous," I corrected her. "Observant."
"Okay, so why so observant?" she replied, shrugging. "You said it yourself, it’s not like anything is going to happen in here."
I fell silent. She had a point. There was really no good reason for me to be as on edge as I was right now, but I couldn’t help it. There had been enough experiences in the past where I’d had to keep my guard up, my hackles raised, and it was hard to come down from that kind of mindset, even when you knew you were doing okay.
"Just doing my job," I replied. I took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter, shot through with a line of sugary sweetness; she smiled at me over the top of her cup, her soft lips grazing the rim.
"You’ve done this kind of thing for a long time?" she asked.
"Since I was a teenager," I admitted. I figured there was no harm in telling her at least a little of what was going on inside my head. After all, she was right, we were going to be living together – it made sense for us to get to know each other a little, even just to make this whole experience a little easier. We’d rub along better if we knew where we were both coming from.
"A teenager?" she replied, shocked. "You’ve been doing stuff like this since then...?"
"Yeah," I replied, confused. Why was she acting like it was such a big deal...?
"That’s crazy," she breathed, her eyes widening. "I was just worried about what grades I was going to get and if the guy I liked was going to ask me out in high school, but you were out there in the streets, doing..."
She trailed off, letting the words hang in the air between us. I wasn’t going to fill them in for her.
"I just did what I had to do to get by," I explained bluntly.
"You had to do this?" she asked, gesturing around. "What about your parents? They didn’t have a problem with it?"
"They didn’t know," I replied. "They were both...they used. Drugs. Heavily. They didn’t notice when I was coming and going. I had to find some way to make money for myself, pay the rent in our apartment, and this was the quickest way I could find to make it happen."
For a moment, her eyes shined with what looked like tears. I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable. I didn’t want her to feel sorry for me. There was nothing for her to feel sorry about. Yeah, I had been through some shit growing up, but that was what it was – I was a grown man now, and I wasn’t going to sit around feeling sorry for myself when I knew there were more important things for me to be focused on.
