Read Online The Mentor by Sebastian Stuart - Free Book Online Page A

it to grasp courage. “I know that,” she says.
    “You do?”
    “… Charles … I’ve read all your novels. I’ve read
Irreparable Damage
twice. I can’t even imagine what it must take to create like that.”
    Charles doesn’t answer, but a little smile plays at the corners of his mouth.
    “I’m not afraid of a little screaming and yelling,” Emma says.
    “No?”
    “Not if that’s what it takes.”
    He leans toward her, across his desk. “I’m very glad to hear that, Emma.”
    “Scream away,” she says with a smile of her own.
    He nods. Emma stands up to go.
    “And, Emma?” She turns and looks at him, into his eyes. “You’re doing a very good job.”
    She nods and closes the door quietly behind her. When she settles into her desk she tries to get back to work, but can’t. She’s overwhelmed by a physical sensation that moves over her body like liquid, a warm want that she has never felt before. There’s no way this job will be over in six weeks—she’ll make sure of that.

12
    “This is it,” he bored, harried young man in the inexpensive gray suit says with undisguised distaste, before lighting a Salem to recover from the four-story climb.
    Emma takes one look at the semifurnished studio and says, “I’ll take it.”
    She takes out her checkbook—her first ever checkbook—and slowly writes out a check for the first and last month’s rent plus the $200 key deposit the managing agent insists on.
    The agent—who Emma notices has a smudge of hair dye on one ear—examines the check and slips it into his pocket. He hands her the keys, mumbles a cynical “Enjoy,” and leaves without closing the door behind him. Emma watches him go down the stairs. There’s a ball of greasy paper on the second-to-last step. She hopes he slips and breaks his neck.
    Emma loves the sound the old lock makes when she turns it and the bolt slides into the wall. Then she turns and surveys the first home that she can call her own.
    The apartment is just one long room with three windows along one wall and a kitchen built into the far end. It smells faintly of soy sauce and fried dumplings, courtesy of the Chinese restaurant on the ground floor. The walls are the color of tobacco spit. There’s a double bed, a laminate desk, an ornate white dresser making a sad stab at French Regency, its top notched with cigarette burns, a frameless mirror above the dresser. Emma loves the cigarette burns; she runs her finger over the blackened hollows and imagines a poet, a bad girl, a good cop, a lost junkie from the Midwest who was once somebody’s son—all the Manhattan stories this room has hosted. Or maybe just one sad fat old woman lived here for twenty years eating junk food and smoking Winstons until her heart gave out.
    The Chinese restaurant has a red neon sign that snakes up the building and suffuses the room with a rosy glow, even in the afternoon light. Emma looks down at the street and sees an old Italian woman in widow’s blacks walking a just-groomed white poodle. She loves this shabby patch of the city where Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side converge.
    Continuing her inspection, Emma pushes open the door to the bathroom. She stops—the bathtub that bathtub.
    “Time for your bath, Emma.” They both knew what those words meant, the cheerful singsong a cruel mockery of their true intent. Emma would scuttle under her bed, stare up at the rusty springs, her head throbbing with dread and fear. “Didn’t you hear me, honeybunch? I said it’s time for your splish-splash.” And then the high-heeled mules would appear in the doorway and approach the bed and Emma would scoot farther under, as far away as she could get. “Where’s my little Mouseketeer? We have got to get you clean if we want Daddy to come home. You want Daddy to come home, don’t you?” And then her mother’s skinny arm with its gaggle of Bakelite bracelets would reach down under the bed, the hand grabbing at the air like a