LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Four

      THIS WAS NOT the way he operated when it came to women, Jaiven had to acknowledge as he stood in the kitchen of his brownstone in the Bronx and wiped at the already-clean counters. His mother was coming over for her monthly dinner and criticism-fest, and Jaiven was making the pointless effort of cleaning up. His mother refused to be impressed by anything he did or had—not his global shipping empire, or his renovated brownstone, or even a clean countertop. Nothing he did would make a difference to his mother, Jaiven knew, because he’d broken her heart fifteen years ago and she would never forgive him for it.

      He wouldn’t forgive himself, either. He couldn’t.

      At least, he told himself tiredly, she was coming for dinner. These monthly meetings had been happening for less than a year, after over a decade of estrangement. He’d been trying to reconcile with her since he’d been released from prison, but for years his mother wouldn’t take his calls. Slammed the door in his face. Said he was dead to her, just as his father was dead. Just as an innocent woman was dead.

      Jaiven closed his eyes, willed such thoughts away. He couldn’t keep his gut from churning with an all too familiar mixture of grief and regret. Mindless sex and a lot of antacids were the only things he’d found to help.

      And mindless sex made him think of Louise. Four frigging days since he’d had her on her own desk and she still hadn’t been in touch.

      He’d really thought she’d take him up on his offer. Fantasy sex, a no-strings fling. How much better did it get? He didn’t need to be Freud to know what was going on with his own little fantasy. Dressing up as a delivery boy and showing up at her office, making her want him? Talk about trying to rewrite history.

      Still, he wasn’t going to go to her first. This time the ball was in her court, and he just hoped to hell that she hit it back.

       Game on, Louise. Come on.

      He’d told himself a dozen times that he didn’t need her. He could have just about any woman he wanted, anytime, and yet he hadn’t taken up any other offers since he’d been with Louise. Maybe she was just a challenge, he told himself, even though he knew she was more than that. So, fine. He actually liked her. That didn’t have to be a game changer. He’d just get her out of his system. She’d get him out of hers. They’d both move on, happy and definitely satisfied.

      The doorbell rang, and he went to open it, dutifully kissed his mother hello even as she angled her head away from him, and then watched as she bustled into the living room of the boarded-up brownstone he’d bought five years ago. It had once been a crack house, and now it was a top-of-the-line residence, although admittedly in a less than savory neighborhood.

      He might have moved on up, but he wouldn’t abandon his roots in a Dominican neighborhood in the Bronx. He would never pretend he was something other than he was or had been, which was a boy with an eighth grade education and a criminal record and a truckload of guilt.

      Not that he advertised any of those facts. But he knew what he was, what he was capable of—and so did his mother.

      He wondered what Louise would do with that information. Would it just add to the bad boy fantasy, or would it be a little too real for her taste or comfort? Everything inside him shrank and cringed as he imagined her horrified reaction.

      In any case, he had absolutely no intention of telling her anything personal about himself. Their relationship was about sex and sex only, and he really hoped they had it again soon.

      “Look at this!” Triumphantly his mother lifted her finger from where she’d been running it along the top of his TV cabinet. Jaiven briefly closed his eyes. So he hadn’t dusted there, and neither had his housekeeper.

      “What can I say, Mama? I need you to keep me on track.”

      She just pursed her lips, which was as close to a smile as Jaiven had ever got, because he was the screwup and his brother Marco was the saint.

      “I brought empanadas,” she said, proffering a foil-wrapped casserole dish that Jaiven took with murmured thanks. His mother always brought dinner, because she refused to eat takeout and Jaiven’s cooking wasn’t up to scratch. He made a mean scrambled egg, but nothing his mother would be willing to eat.

      “So you got a girl in your life yet?” she demanded as he reheated the empanadas.

      “No.” But he thought of Louise. What, he wondered, would his mother make of Louise? She’d disapprove of her career, definitely. His mother believed a woman’s place was in her home, preferably in the kitchen. She’d probably turn her nose up at Louise’s clothes too, because his mother liked women who “dressed like women,” as she put it. For her, it meant a dress and heels, no matter what the occasion. But nothing too clingy or revealing. His mother had plenty to say about that, too.

      “When are you going to get married?” she demanded. “Be respectable, as much as you can?”

      Because his past, Jaiven knew, made respectability a joke. Nothing he did would make up for his past sins. He knew that—of course he knew it. He lived with the awful truth of it every day, and every sleepless night. But stupidly it still hurt coming from his mother.

      Sometimes he wondered why he endured these monthly rituals. His mother would bring dinner, heckle him to get married, complain about the state of his bathroom and clean while clucking about it all the while. He could handle all that, easily, if he didn’t feel her churning fury underneath all of it. His mother might come to dinner here at his brother Marco’s request, but she still didn’t like spending time with Jaiven. She refused to talk about the past because it was too painful, too terrible, but she muttered. Oh, how she muttered.

      Once, only once, when she’d been angry at him for employing ex-cons as delivery guys, she’d said two terrible words.

       Your father…

      She hadn’t finished the sentence, but then she hadn’t needed to. That had been enough to make Jaiven hang his head, tears he’d never once shed stinging his eyes.

      Usually she couldn’t bear to talk about his father, and neither could he. So he’d endure her visits and breathe a sigh of relief when she left, try to suppress the endless guilt his mother always called up in him.

      And that was why he did it, why he endured. Atonement.

      Too bad that wasn’t actually working out for him all that well.

      They were just sitting down to empanadas, with his mother going on about his cousin Luis’s fiancée, when the front doorbell rang.

      His mother’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. “Who comes calling at this hour?”

      “It’s seven-thirty, Mama,” Jaiven answered mildly, although he had no idea who it could be. He rose from the table and went to answer the door.

      And

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