Page 54 of Naked Coffee Guy

The cloud of confusion is swirling around her now. “You knew…me? You knew I didn’t drink?”

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I move toward her, but she pulls away, clutching her stomach. She’s looking at me now like I’m a stranger, like I’m a predator.

“Please, let me just start from the beginning.”

I do, starting with all those years ago around the time I started working for Benji, when she was one of his newest tenants.

“Benji, my guardian, owned your building; well, at the end, I did. But back then, it was Benji’s, and I worked for him in maintenance.”

She’s digesting what I say, her eyes shifting as she tries to make sense of all of this.

“But it said Malcolm D. Anderson on the last lease I signed,” she says, “I saw it, noticing it changed.” Her eyes narrow. “You lied about your name?”

“My name is Mac Dermot, but my birth name is Malcolm Dermot Anderson.” I pull my wallet out, flipping to my ID. She glances at the card as if she can’t bear to look at it. But then her eyes widen, and she grabs the wallet from my hands.

“I knew you,” she says, running her hand over the face on my ID. I’m clean shaven in the photo, and a lot leaner.

“You did.

“You worked maintenance,” she continues. I nod.

“I did. It was kind of a family affair. Benji used me to do the manual labor because I could. He put Brock at the front desk because he wasn’t worth a shit.”

“And Brock was…”

“My brother.” Her eyes widen, but I continue before she can speak. “My foster brother. He was a runaway, like me, and came to live with Benji and me a short time after I got there. He got the best of everything. The best room. The best job. Better pay. But all of that didn’t matter as much as him getting you.” I shake my head, biting back my jealousy. Maren didn’t need this right now.

“He didn’t have me,” she says, rolling her eyes.

I look away. I want to tell her all of it, how I wanted her for years, and she was always out of reach. But when I look back at her, I can see this isn’t the time.

“Tell me about the apartments,” she says, “Tell me exactly how you came to own the building only to kick all of us to the curb with only thirty days to gather our lives and find somewhere else to live. Tell me how we were supposed to do that when there wasn’t a place in town that would come close to matching the rent we were paying.”

“I’m sorry.” I hang my head, but she shoves me with open palms.

“Tell me! I’d love to know all the ways you screwed me out of a home just so you could line your pockets. Tell me, Mac, how many fancy cars do you own? How many suits? How many expensive watches?” She leans in close. “How many more Cartier brooches?”

“It’s not like that,” I say, but I might as well say nothing at all, because she’s not buying it. “Benji bought the lot years ago,” I start, “He’s had this vision to make these high-end apartments, much like the ones he’s made all over Southern California. But when it came time to build, he got involved with a few other projects that took up most of his time. So he took a bunch of shortcuts with the Beale Street Apartments. He hired the cheapest contractor he could find, bought his way through permits, and had that apartment building standing in just a couple months.”

“That doesn’t explain how you—”

“Hold on, I’m getting there,” I interrupt, “Brock and I had been living with Benji a few years, doing odd jobs to earn our keep. This is what he did, apparently. He called it mentorship, but I now realize it was child labor.”

The guilt gnaws at me for saying the words out loud. Benji, who kept me from a life in prison, who gave me a roof over my head and three squares a day. Benji, who gave me a steppingstone into a world of wealth I never would have known before.

But also Benji, who whipped Brock and me if we ever half-assed our work, or if we complained about being tired, or if we so much as looked at him wrong. Benji, who dictated our every move so that, even now as I clean up his mess while he lays dying in his home, I cannot speak against him without believing I am biting the hand that fed me.

Benji, who let me know that I was nothing without him—and I came to believe it, to the point that when he does finally die, I’m not sure if I will mourn or feel relief. Right now, I feel numb.

“I realized right away what a shitty build the Beale Street Apartments were,” I continued, “I was working maintenance while taking real estate courses, and we were taught to look for things that add value to an apartment. That’s when I started to see the things Benji was ignoring.” I peer at Maren. “Didn’t you notice anything weird in your unit? Any smells? Dark patches?”

Her face gives away that she had.

“How about headaches?” I continue, and she looks at me sharply.

“That was connected?”

“It was black mold. It was deep in your walls, the ceiling, the floorboards. When I came to your apartment, I could tell right away. I couldn’t do anything about it back then because my hands were tied. Benji wouldn’t…” I stop, unable to throw him under the bus any more than I had. “That was only the start of what was wrong. Once I started my own brokerage and it began making money, I tried to buy the apartments off Benji just so I could fix what he wasn’t. But he wouldn’t sell. Then there was the lawsuit, and then…”