Cole McGinnis 05 - Down and Dirty (6 page)

“Don’t.” Jae leaned in close and whispered.

“You don’t know what I’m—”

“I know that look. I
had
that look when I thought about getting together with Cole-ah in the beginning. Don’t tell me I don’t know.”

“You and Cole didn’t do too badly.” He smirked at Jae, nodding toward the house. “Can’t say the same for your bathroom accessories, but you two? Seem to be fine.”

“Cole’s… he goes into things with his full heart—full soul. I knew even then it wasn’t—he wasn’t looking for a few months of fun and games. Your brother doesn’t chase after things—or people—he doesn’t intend to catch.” Jae looked away, his gaze finding his lover amid the small crowd of people behind the Craftsman he now called home. “I didn’t want to get caught. It would change things—change my life. And it did.”

“Do you regret any of it?” Ichi probed. “Okay, maybe not the gunshot, but the rest of it? Wasn’t it worth the risk? You and Cole?”

“Me and Cole? Yes, he was worth the risk, but I was right. Your brother pursued me to the end until my entire world was empty without him. He made it worth even the loss of my family, but Bobby? He’s not going to give you anything other than complications. You’re too much like your brother, Ichiro. You’re not someone who’s happy with an empty bed in the morning.”

“I don’t mind casual. Hell, you’re one of the few friends I have that I’ve
not
done casual with.” He pushed at Jae’s arm, lightly shoving the man away. “And I like my head, so while I’d do you, don’t get offended if I don’t chase after you. I don’t want to test my brother’s love for me.”

“The difference between your past and now is that Bobby is not your friend.”

“You’re telling me you’ve never wanted to take a chance on something? Just to know what it was like?” Ichiro cocked his head at Jae. “Not once?”

“More than once,” Jae replied softly. “That’s how I got kicked out of my aunt’s house and dancing at Dorthi Ki Seu. So yeah, Ichi-ah, maybe this isn’t a chance you should take.”

“A
H
, I
can breathe.” Ichiro sank down into a soft couch in Cole and Jae’s living room. “How can there be too many people
outside
?”

The small function grew while he wasn’t watching, until suddenly he was drowning in chatter and warm bodies. Between the smell of cooking meat and a sudden cloud of floral perfumes, Ichi needed a break—and since his car was blocked in by stacks of vehicles, the house seemed like a good place to go hide until his head stopped spinning.

Staring at Bobby Dawson hadn’t helped his aching head one bit either.

His phone burbled a tune, something American and thumping. Not what he’d had programmed in. Sliding it out of his pocket, he answered it, thinking it was Cole to brag about changing the ringtone.

Instead of his brother’s velvety baritone, he got a choppy bass iced over with disapproval.

And in Japanese.

“Hello, Father.” It was petty, but Ichiro kept to English, digging yet another centipede bite into his father’s conservative outrage. The older Tokugawa’s sniff frosted the speaker, and a low-simmering grumble crackled across the phone, building an ice bridge between the lines.

“Is that any way to greet me?” Unlike his sniff, Tokugawa’s spit of Japanese was hard, hot metal fragments meant to cut through Ichiro’s soul with a rapid-fire accuracy. Ichi shook it off. He’d been dodging his father’s shrapnel for years, and his reply was a short grunt, barely a sound to acknowledge the conversation.

“You’re up early.” He did the math quickly in his head, but the numbers jumbled together before he fixed on his father’s schedule. “Before lunch anyway.”

“I’m surprised you’re conscious. Or are the drugs keeping you awake?” His father’s rumbling censure echoed in Ichi’s ear.

“The only drug I’m on is sex these days,” Ichi responded quietly. “An occasional beer or whiskey. But then, I can still get it up, and I’m not that picky, no?”

“At least have the decency to die in a woman’s bed. There’s enough shame attached to you already. Have a care for the rest of the family if not for yourself.”

It was an old dig, certainly not original, and Ichiro refused to let his father hear even a shred of exasperation in his voice. He wasn’t going to deny anything. Engaging the old man in a give and take was best kept to a minimum, with each volley of spite kept shallow and on changing subjects.

There would be no denying any accusation. It was useless to convince the old man of anything other than the reality the senior Tokugawa constructed for his family. Ichiro’d given up trying to escape the maze his father made of smoke, lies, and mirrors.

Switching tactics, Ichi went on the offensive. “Any reason you called? Other than to tell me I’m worthless.”

“I would think after all of this time you would not need me to tell you that.”

Ichiro took a long, shuddering breath through his open mouth. Laughter and conversation bled in from outside, sliding through an open living room window. Someone he didn’t know was teasing her girlfriend, talking about a disaster regarding cupcakes and salt. The taunt was gentle, as were the reproachful accusations of sabotage. A child squeed with glee while another counted down from ten, very loud young whispers calling dibs on hiding places.

The
normal
of his brother’s life dug its own sharp fangs into Ichiro’s psyche, leaving its bittersweet poison in his blood. Caught between the glittering stab of his father’s constant barbs and Cole’s very American life, Ichi wondered if he’d go mad before he was crushed between them. As much as he denied it, the loss of his father’s approval
hurt
, and every second he spent with his brothers held a lingering anguish as Cole silently wondered why their mother abandoned her sons.

He hadn’t had the heart to tell Cole their mother abandoned everything—everyone—including herself.

A tangle of ache erupted between his eyes, and Ichi rubbed at the spot, willing the headache away before it spread into his brain. The children’s laughter ached, skipping aural stones across his pain, the sound rippling over his jangled nerves. He couldn’t remember laughing like the kids outside were. The giggles were like water drops, washing away the dust he’d built up over the years to cloud his memories.

With his father’s voice ringing scorn through his calm, Ichiro blinked, and the world spun back—to a time when he stood barely thigh high to the man who ruled his life with a sharp word and disgust. Nothing he did or achieved reached Tokugawa’s exacting standards, and he’d spent his waking moments in misery, wondering why his father’d been given such a weak son.

His tattoos were less a rebellion and more of a birth, the wash of ink marking his break from his familial placenta, and he’d thrust himself gasping into a world where he’d wear who he was on his skin. Turning away from the family was like cutting off a cancerous chunk of his flesh, and although he keenly felt its absence—like a missing arm—he’d known living as Tokugawa Masahiro’s son would eventually have killed him.

He could live with the metaphorical missing arm.

Ichiro tried to shove back the long days of classes, stiff uniforms, and civilly greeting businessmen as they came to beg forgiveness or mercy from the unyielding man he called father and others called sir.

He should have hung up. He should have done a lot of things—changed his phone number, removed his name from the registry, never expected anything but the hard edge of his father’s words up against the soft skin of his belly.

“Why did you call, Father?” He fell into Japanese, taking comfort in the stilted formality of his mother tongue. Gods and
kami
—his mother. “What do you need from me?”

“I need nothing, but Megumi, she would like something,” his father replied softly. “Your stepmother—”

“Megumi is
not
my stepmother. She is your wife but not my mother. Do not call her that. She and I are the same age. She will never be a mother to me. Especially not after….” This time the centipede’s bite scored his skin, prickling through layers of thick denial. “She was my fiancée, and you married her, what… a month after I left for school? Even in your twisted mind, you have to know I will never think of her as anything
but
your wife.”

“She will also be the mother of your sister.”

If talking to his father was a minefield of heartache, discovering the woman he’d once loved—thought he’d loved—was carrying his sibling had to count as a nuclear storm. Ichiro closed his eyes as if the hot wind made of complicated emotions couldn’t burn him if he couldn’t see the world.

It was a foolish thing to do, like a child hiding under a blanket so the
oni
wouldn’t chew him up at night.

He did it anyway.

But the monster still found him, dragging Ichi out from under the blanket to devour him in a bitter soup of unshed tears and painful betrayal.

“Should I say congratulations? Or are you looking for condolences because she is carrying a girl?”

“A daughter is just as useful. Her husband can carry the Tokugawa name. I just have to find someone I like for her. Someone strong.”

“Because who wouldn’t want to erase his own family when he can be placed on the Tokugawa
koseki
? Is that what you want to do? Steal someone else’s son because you’re not happy with the one you have? Your daughter isn’t even born yet, and you are already bargaining with her as if she’s your property.” Any hope of keeping his temper was gone, and Ichi’s searing anger ate up his calm. “When will you ever learn—”

“When will you ever realize you are Japanese?” His father cut through, slicing past Ichi’s arguments. “The Tokugawa—
our clan
—have a dynastic responsibility to the people who work for us. Not just the corporation but everything else. The farms. The homes. We are—”

“We are responsible for ensuring their lives are enriched and they have the means to be successful. It doesn’t mean my sister—my goddamned unborn sister—should be whored out so you can live out some feudal wet dream,” Ichiro spat back.

“It is funny how you did not feel that way about Megumi,” Tokugawa growled back. “You were set to marry
her
until you turned your back on your family.”

“I didn’t turn my—you stick your knives into me as if you have no blame in what happened between me and Megumi. After I went to school, how long did you wait to convince her to marry you? Or were you already sniffing at Megumi before I even left Tokyo?”

“The family has obligations. My
children
have obligations.”

“Including Megumi’s daughter? Are you going to use her like you used me? Is she going to be bound to someone before the doctor cuts the cord to her mother? Like you did me?”

“I did what is best for you. The Tokugawas remain strong through good ties with other families. You would have benefitted from your marriage—a marriage you chose to walk away from. Now you blame me for taking up that debt? We
owed
Megumi’s family.
You
owed her family.”

“I owed them nothing. I owed you nothing,” Ichiro snorted when his father hissed through the phone. “That is all family is to you, old man. Coin you create out of thin air to pay off blood debts. The Tokugawa line is so tied up in familial debt we cannot turn around without cutting off our own skin.”

“You speak of the family
koseki
as if you haven’t already tarnished our name. If Megumi carried a son, your own name would be but a memory on our registry. I would erase you as quickly as I erased your mother. There—”

Ichi hung up.

Then for good measure, he threw his phone against the fireplace, reveling in the crackling splinter of plastic and metal on stone. A black puff of fur exploded out from under a side table, hissing and complaining while scrambling across Ichiro’s leg. Neko gave one final indignant mewl and launched off Ichi’s shoulder, rocketing upstairs, where she’d be safe from flying pieces of technology and angry tattoo artists.

“Fuck, that was stupid.” Juvenile even. And Ichi felt a hell of a lot better for it. “Son of a bitch. Fucking son of a—”

“Whoa there, Sunshine. What the hell did that phone do to you?” A shadow loomed over Ichi, blocking out the waning sun coming through the windows. Sighing, Ichi looked up at Bobby, too pissed off to enjoy the view even as he mumbled a regretful apology at his outburst. Bobby studied him intently, then lifted his foot, nudging Ichiro’s leg. His cockiness was gone, instead Bobby sounded… sincerely concerned. “You doing okay? You look like you’re about ready to skin someone alive.”

“Don’t tempt me.” As if an alarmingly rotten and unobtainable temptation of Bobby’s crotch in his face weren’t enough to seal Ichiro’s bad mood, spotting his oldest brother’s shock of black hair bobbing past the house’s windows was enough to make him go over. “Fuck. Family. I just—don’t want to fucking deal with them anymore.”

Mike would take one look at Ichiro and work to excavate what was wrong. Ichi’s oldest brother existed to run other people’s lives—mostly Cole’s, but Ichiro was now a close second and a ready substitute in Mike’s eyes. Bobby glanced out the window, and Ichi could have sworn he winced painfully when he saw Mike ambling by.

“I was going to ask if he’d been the one to piss you off, but I’m guessing no,” Bobby said, jerking his thumb toward the back of the property. “Usually that’s how Cole is after he’s tangled with Mike a bit.”

“Good to know my brother and I have so much in common.” He experienced a small pang of regret for his phone’s shattered corpse. “My father drives me fucking crazy. Mike has a long way to go before I do something as childish as throw my phone against the wall. God, I’m stupid. I’m more together than this. I don’t
lose
my temper.”

“Fathers can do that to you. Mothers too.” Bobby’s wince rippled over his whole face. “Uh… sorry. About the mother crack. Shit. I just came in here to pee.”

“I just came in here for some breathing room. Can’t leave. My Jeep’s blocked in. Just—too many people, and I needed….” Ichi debated what he’d thought he wanted when he fled the laughter and conversations. “Guess I needed to sulk. Maybe pity myself for a bit.”