Page 67 of Leave It to Us
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” Lana said. She was fairly certain she should’ve gone over to hug her husband, whom she hadn’t seen in just about six weeks now. Or he should’ve run over to hug her.Well, the fact that she’d been beating him with a stick and her sister had been latched on to him like a rabid animal might have had something to do with the stalled greeting.
Isaac walked over to where she was still standing and pulled her into the hug she’d just been thinking about. “Hey, baby,” he whispered in her ear as he held her tight.
Lana hugged her husband back, inhaled the scent of his cologne, and realized just how much she’d missed him. She buried her face in his neck and closed her eyes, holding on even tighter.
He was the one to pull back from the hug first, but he didn’t completely release her. Instead, he lowered his mouth to hers for a desperate kiss. She wasn’t normally one for PDAs—even when the public was just her sisters—but it had been over a month since she’d seen her man. She opened her mouth to his tongue, and a little moan escaped because, yeah, she’d really missed him. But when the kiss was broken, she still stared him directly in the eyes and said, “What are you doing here?”
“Let’s go to your room, baby. So we can talk,” Isaac said.
Lana’s heart thumped wildly, her stomach churning in the way it had been recently whenever she thought about Isaac’s precarious situation. Peering around him, she could see that Yvonne had moved to stand next to Tami, who had both hands on her hips. They were staring at Lana and Isaac, and Lana knew why.
“If it’s about the gambling,” she said, “they already know. So just say what you have to say.”
Six weeks ago, she never would’ve said that to him. Never would’ve aired the dirty laundry of her marriage in front of her sisters. Because the last thing she wanted was for them to judge her any more than they already had. But when she’d told them about Isaac’s gambling earlier that week, their reaction hadn’t been what she’d expected. Her sisters had actually turned out to be very supportive.
“Lana, this is private,” he said. “And it’s urgent.”
At that last part, she tilted her head. “What’s so urgent that you came running all the way down here? What happened?”
“I do not want to talk about this in front of them,” Isaac said.
“We’ll go into the kitchen, Lana,” Yvonne said. “Close enough that if you need us, we’ll be here, but still giving you some privacy.”
Isaac turned to look at Yvonne, who was giving him an empathetic stare, while Tami made that motion of her fingers to her eyes and then his to let him know she was keeping an eye on him. Isaac sighed when they were in the other room; then he turned to her.
His hair was low-cut; his lips, which were usually easy to spread into a wide, infectious grin, were drawn into a tight line. “Baby, look, I need you to sign these papers,” he said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out an envelope. He handed it to her. “I need you to sign them tonight, and I’ll be on the first ferry out of here tomorrow morning to take them right to the bank.”
“What?” She took the envelope and opened it. “What’s this? And you know I’m not signing anything without reading it first.”
“It’s the refinance papers,” he said. And when she glanced up at him again, he rubbed his hand down the back of his head.
“I thought we talked about this,” she said through clenched teeth.
“We did, but listen ...”
She was shaking her head as she turned away from him to pace. “I told you I didn’t want you putting our home on the line for this, Isaac. Dammit! Tami suggested we take out a home equity loan, but we’d have to make sure we didn’t need to turn in receipts for any work done, or the bank didn’t require direct payments to be made to the vendors.” On a turn in her pacing, she glanced back at the family room, where the good time she’d been having moments ago with her sisters had faded.
“I’ve been thinking about it the last few days, and a personal loan might be better all around. I didn’t want to create another bill for us—especially not now—but that might be the best option,” she continued.
His hand was on her arm when she walked closer to him again, and he grasped her lightly. “Baby.”
Something in his tone had her looking up to focus on his face. His eyes were wide and etched with sadness—or was that ... fear? A muscle clenched in his jaw. But it was when he dropped his gaze from her momentarily that Lana’s heart sank. “You’re scaring me, Isaac.”
He returned his gaze to her. Then he had both hands on her arms, pulling her close to him. “I messed up, Lana. I messed up so bad, baby. But I’m trying to fix it.Thisis gonna fix it.” He nodded down at the papers still scrunched in her hands.
“Something happened, didn’t it?”
Isaac dropped his hands from her and stepped back. “Look, I’m gonna fix it. Just like I told you I would, and then it’ll never happen again. I swear to you, it’ll never happen again.”
Her limbs felt heavy, feet frozen to the spot where she stood, but blood pumped fiercely through her veins, filling her with that boiling heat of anger as she asked, “What happened?”
“They know who you are,” he said, rubbing both hands down his face now. “Fuck! Lana, they know who you are!”
“What ... what does that mean?” she asked, even though the pounding of her heart and the trickle of fear down her spine said she already knew. The fear that shot through her like a blast of light must have somehow shown on her face, because Isaac immediately closed the distance between them.
“No. No. No! I won’t let anything happen to you. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you!” He was back in her face, his hands smoothing down the sides of her hair, moving down to cup her chin. “That’s why I’m here now. I begged for an extension since I had to gather more paperwork for the loan officers, and they gave me an additional three weeks. But then ... the moment they mentioned you, I knew time was up, and I couldn’t risk waiting another second. Just sign the papers,baby, and I’ll take care of this—and I’ll pay off the second mortgage by the end of the year. This won’t happen again, Lana. I swear. I swear.”
But she was already backing away from him again. Tears stung her eyes as her fingers crumpled the papers. She’d never known whom Isaac owed his money to. At one point she’d assumed it was casinos—but then, once she’d seen a note he’d written on a sticky pad with the address and time of a private poker game, she’d tossed out that idea. So was it the men he played poker with whom he owed? Or loan sharks? Were they threatening to hurt Isaacandher if he didn’t pay up?
