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Mario Lopez is embarrassingly eager to save the malnourished malaria monkeys – to the point that Gina eventually has to shake him off by promising that he can come along on her next trip to Thailand to vaccinate and bottle-feed orphaned baby macaques.
(Gina doesn’t know crap about monkeys, but her mind does this weird thing when she’s conning someone where its able to pull up insane bits of trivia that she will never recall actually learning.)
“Thank you,” Mario says, clutching the business card she handed him with the time and location of her party. His eyes are all dewy and sincere when he looks back at Gina, and it kind of makes her stomach turn. “You’re doing such amazing work. I’m so glad we met, Pamplemousse.”
“Please, call me Ms. La Croix,” Gina says. “Now I must find my brother. Have you seen him? He looks extremely expensive- oh! There he is, bye now.”
Gina sashays past Mario without looking back, and lets out a breath of relief when she’s back in the lobby. She hasn’t actually seen Jake since the guards body-slammed him about half an hour ago. She hopes they didn’t end up calling the police. That would be excruciatingly embarrassing (for Jake – Gina will absolutely live-Instagram it if he’s arrested).
The light’s already fading into dusk and there’s a brisk breeze when she finally steps back outside the Manhattan Club. She pulls the white coat she borrowed from evidence lockup closer around herself and looks up and down the sidewalk in front of the club. She frowns when she finally spots Jake, sitting on a short brick wall at the end of the block, huddled over himself. She can only tell it’s him by the bright blue of his blazer.
“Jake, we did it! He’s in,” Gina calls out. “We nailed it with the monkeys- what the fuck, dude?”
Jake’s looked up at her, and in the twilight she can see that he’s covered in blood. He’s got his red ascot shoved up to his nose, but there’s blood around his mouth and chin, and staining his pink shirt and the front of the jacket.
“What the fuck?” she says again.
“The guards were a little overbearing,” Jake says, voice muffled through the cloth.
“If by overbearing you mean psychotically aggressive, then yes, holy shit,” Gina says.
She sits next to him on the wall and pulls the ascot away. His nose doesn’t look broken, it’s not even swollen much. There’s just a lot of blood.
She’s suddenly thrown back to when they were children, maybe 8 or 9 years old. Gina had brought her Pound Puppy (Doodles, because she hadn’t yet learned the Power of Names) to school, and at the end of the day stupid Byron Taka had grabbed it from her and refused to give it back. Jake – easily the smallest boy in their third-grade class, with wild curls that were always falling in his face – had demanded that Byron return it. There’d been a fist fight, fast and furious, and Jake had ended up on the ground with blood pouring out of his nose, his tiny body curled around Doodles and refusing to let go.
He’s been Gina’s best friend ever since.
Now, of course, she can’t kick Byron in the nuts and then walk to her house with Jake and help him clean up enough that his mom will never know he was fighting. Jake had cried all the way home, partly from the pain and the sight of all that blood, and partly out of fear that he’d get in trouble at school again. Three years later they’d repeated the walk with more blood but fewer tears when Jake got into a fight with Susan Clutch after Susan deliberately put gum in Gina’s hair.
(It’s not like Jake has made a habit of getting beat up for her. This is only, like, the tenth time over a nearly 30-year friendship.)
“It doesn’t look too bad,” Gina says, pushing the ascot gently against his nose again. “I think you’ll be fine for the party.”
“It’s not the nose, it’s everything else,” Jake says, wincing dramatically as he tries to sit up a little straighter on the wall. “Those guys were super into the kidney and crotch hits.”
“Wow, I knew the Manhattan Club was exclusive but not, like, nut-punch chic.”
“Illuminati, man,” Jake says, shaking his head slowly.
Gina laughs at that, and Jake does too, but then he groans and clutches at his side. When Gina pulls away a bit to get another look at him, his eyes are shut tight and he’s got a few tears rolling down his cheeks. Her heart sort of clenches, and she gently wraps an arm over his shoulders and lets him lean into her. His head rests in the crook of her neck and he’s definitely getting blood all over this white coat, and just then Gina doesn’t mind.
She’s a little rusty at this – the whole caretaking thing, when it comes to Jake. He hasn’t needed her in the same way in a while, not since Amy, but even before then. She can’t say she’s missed it, because she’s never been great at putting anyone else’s needs before her own. (Iggy’s the obvious exception, and honestly Gina’s pretty damn proud of her selfless commitment to her daughter. But Iggy’s also extremely self-reliant for a 15-month-old.)
Still. Holding Jake feels familiar and kind of nice (though maybe not for Jake, who – she twists around a bit to look into his face – yes, is still weeping). She rubs circles on his back and rests her chin on the top of his head, and she thinks how lucky he is to have her in his life. And okay, it goes both ways.
When it’s fully dark and Gina is starting to shiver from the cold and Jake’s just sort of sniffling against her shoulder, she taps the back of his head and says, “You ready to go home, Pineapples?”
Jake sits up gingerly, hand pressed into his side again. He pulls the ascot away from his face and unfolds it, mouth curling in disgust at all the blood drying on there. Then he uses it anyway to wipe the tears off his cheeks. Gina rolls her eyes, but she takes the cloth from him and dabs at his mouth and chin to clean the blood from the rest of his face.
Jake pulls out his phone when she’s done, checking the time. “If we leave now I can get cleaned up and changed before Amy’s home.” He gives Gina a knowing smile. “Don’t want Mom to find out.”
“Please don’t ever call Amy ‘Mom’ again,” Gina says, but she’s grinning too when she bumps his shoulder. She grabs his phone to get them a ride, and splurges on the UberX.
It’s not a walk home from school, Ninja Turtles lunch boxes swinging between them. They’re not two kids with too much free time on their hands and not nearly enough adult supervision. But under his blue blazer and her white coat and all the blood staining their clothes, they’re still Jake and Gina. It’s sort of amazing how these things never change, she thinks, and squeezes Jake’s hand before climbing in the car ahead of him.