“January, feel like dancing?” Jonah asked as we started to walk away. January’s hand tensed on my arm.
“No, thank you, Jonah. I’m busy working,” she politely answered.
“Working. Is that what they call it now?”
We both turned around and I read the recognition in his face. He knew we were "together."
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked him.
“Nothing, see you next week.”
“No, you won’t,” I told him.
“Oh, you will.”
“And how would that be possible, Jonah? Unless you were cheating,” I asked him, inches from his face.
January was grappling at my arm. “He’s not worth it, Tom!” She yelled over the din of the crowd.
Jonah stepped closer. “Because you’re going to tell me where you’re going.”
I laughed loudly and stepped back. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before I help your ass out. Do your own homework.”
I turned to walk away but Jonah stopped me with his next sentence.
“You’ll do it, or I’ll tell everyone that you and January are sleeping together and that’s the reason she’s on the road with you.”
January’s grip on my arm tightened. “You wouldn’t, Jonah.” She spoke before I could.
“I would,” he told her, a pathetic sympathetic expression on his face.
January’s face looked amazingly hurt, making me want to pummel Jonah. “Why?” she asked him simply.
“It’s business, January, nothing more.” He smiled at her sincerely. Asshole. “I see how he looks at you. You’re his only weakness. I’ve tried for years to one up this guy, but he keeps taking all the glory and for a while there I figured it was a lost cause trying to hit him where it hurts because nothing seemed important to this asshole. That is, until he met you.”
Gently, I removed January’s hands from around my bicep. I rushed Jonah in an instant, pinning him to the bar behind him. Several people scattered at once. “You tell a single soul that lie and I will make you hurt so bad, you’ll wish you’d never been born.” He started to laugh and I squeezed my hold around his neck even tighter, choking it off. “Do we understand one another?” I asked.
He nodded and I dropped him. He gripped the bar top, still grinning, casually resting against it as if I hadn’t just threatened him. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll still find you.”
“You won’t.”
“I will,” he promised.
I guided a sullen January toward the exit. We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. If I’d stayed another second, I would have wiped the floor with Jonah.
“We’re leaving?” she asked me, dazed.
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“He stole the band we’d come here to talk to but mostly because I can’t be in the same building as that unethical bastard.”
She nodded.
After a few minutes of walking the streets of Paris, we’d chosen to forget all about Jonah, purposely becoming absorbed in the beauty of the city.
Then it dawned on me. Watching January react to the city around her, I realized she’d never been here before.