All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [46]
He grabbed his jacket, but paused when he realized that Adia wasn’t around anymore.
“She went out to follow up on a lead,” Jay said when Zachary hesitated.
“She didn’t say anything to me.”
Jay shrugged, not needing to respond out loud: Maybe she assumed you didn’t want to know.
She was going after Jerome. Had he really expected her to do anything else? The realization filled him with a kind of fatalistic resignation. It was out of his hands now.
“I’m going out,” he said. He took his keys from their hook beside the doorway. He let his mind be blank, empty, with nothing for the Marinitch to hear. “I have my cell phone if Adia needs to reach me.”
He didn’t think he had a destination, until he found himself in front of a familiar apartment. He climbed the gray brick stairs and put out a hand like a man who had been hypnotized. He felt like he didn’t knock but rather watched as his knuckles struck the turquoise door of their own volition.
The woman who opened the door greeted him with a soft smile.
“Zimmy,” she said as she reached forward and ushered him inside. She pulled her hand back at the last moment with a rueful chuckle and held it up apologetically. “Let me just wash my hands and toss a towel over my project.”
Her hands were coated in red-brown clay. Her shirt, arms and face had been spattered with it, as well, from the work she had been throwing on a potter’s wheel in the corner of the fairly small kitchen.
She put a damp towel over the work in progress, washed her hands and arms, pulled the clip out of her strawberry blond hair to allow it to fall loose to her shoulders in a riot of waves, and put on a kettle full of water before she asked, “Tea?”
“Please,” he replied, feeling his whole body relax in her presence. He no longer needed to focus and struggle to keep his breath from speeding and his heart from pounding.
“Hard day?” she asked.
He nodded.
“You look terrible,” she said, “like you’ve been trying to run a marathon in the rain with the flu.”
The words made him laugh, the kind of sound that could find its way from his throat only around her, because she was the only one with whom he could accept how utterly empty and absurd his life was.
“My cousin tried to kill me today,” he said. He realized that his voice held an edge of hysteria. “She nearly succeeded. But I guess that’s fair, since I was trying to kill her at the time.”
“Do you need help with her?” she asked.
He shook his head. He didn’t know what kind of help she might offer, and he was pretty sure he didn’t want to. Michael wasn’t the only one whose friends did not live entirely by Vida code. Zachary maintained his relationship with Olivia by never allowing himself to consider the people she was willing to work with.
The kettle whistled, and Olivia poured two cups of tea. She made his sweet, with just a little cream, the way she knew he liked it, and handed it to him in a mug she had made with her own hands and always kept aside for him. She had “given” it to him as a gift, but kept it in her cupboard because she knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it anywhere he lived. A beautiful handmade piece of pottery sitting alongside the generic bargain-store white mugs would lead to too many awkward questions.
By the time he had taken the first sip, his anxiety was gone, leaving only bone-deep exhaustion behind. Olivia sat behind him, on the back of the couch, so she could massage his shoulders.
“So,” she said as he shut his eyes and leaned back against her. “Do you want to talk about this horrid hunt you’re on?”
“I can’t,” he answered. Some of Olivia’s contacts could probably connect him to his targets, which meant that according to the Rights of Kin, he should be demanding answers from her. But he couldn’t stand