MANA: Reasons

Shown: "Thisismyboomstick" (or "Ash")

This contains language, a mild sexual situation, etc. While I may put a mature block on this, it only blocks the illustration, not the story...so...your call, my readers.

PREVIOUSLY ON:


It is highly recommended that you read previous segments.

The first time Randy kissed her, she found herself shivering a little. His breath was hot, his hands well placed, his timing? Impeccable.

He was nothing like Matthew. That man had been insecure, overly involved in every aspect of her life: what she wore, who she hung out with, where she would go after high school, what she would do after high school. He had a large ring on his right hand that had left a permanent scratch on her lower jaw. And when she found her way back to her mother’s doorstep years after moving in with Matthew?...her mother had told her to wash her face and try harder at not angering him. Men shouldn’t be argued with. It was God’s way. Maggie tolerated that way until Matthew shot at her and then at himself. He missed once.

Randy was nothing like Ramon either. Ramon who had, years and years ago, stopped outside her hotel room in Delaware and knocked on her door. He could hear her from his own room on the other side of the wall, crying to herself and there was no way he could sleep with her crying. He had come in, his hands tucked under his arms as he sat and listened to her weep for several minutes without saying a word. When she said nothing, he’d gotten up to leave, then turned around and returned, pulling his shirt over his head so that for the first time she saw the marks criss-crossed on his back. He was saying…I’ve been hurt too. I’ve seen such horrors. . Ramon never made it more than it had been and neither would she. That night she needed to be in the arms of someone who knew what it was like to be struck by another human being and Ramon understood that better than anyone else she knew. He was gentle and thoughtful and a little frightened. He just wanted her to stop crying, maybe smile, and his unpracticed moves elicited both from her.

But Randy. Her third was a marvel and a wonder. He didn’t ignore her needs, but he didn’t actively seek to fulfill them either. He didn’t talk much, didn’t ask permission, didn’t stumble around, or blush…sometimes he didn’t even bother to strip, didn’t even bother to find a more comfortable locale. The slender man in a well tailored suit simply walked into his home in Del Mar, right out of the car that had picked him up from the airport…walked into the door as direct as any professional stallion and into her waiting embrace. He wrapped his right arm around her waist, lifted her off her feet and carried her to his office. They were like clockwork, she imagined, like a hundred fine tuned moving parts that knew where they belonged.

“You have to work?”

“Yes,” he replied, “but it’s the most beautiful piece of work my desk will ever see,” he replied. He threw her down on it, scattering dozens of papers in every direction.

Later as she sat on the sofa in his office, wrapped up in a warm blanket, watching him work, she decided now was as good a time as ever. “Randy?”

“Hmmm,” he mumbled from his desk, going through a stack of papers as usual, his glasses on, his long dark hair hanging over his shoulders, framing his face. He reached up and brushed it out of his eyes, turned and looked her. He appeared so very normal when he was working. His suit jacket was hanging up now; the remains of his clothing from the torso down were still in a pile at the foot of his desk. He sat there, half naked, his shirt partially unbuttoned at the chest and wrist, and he had his pen in his mouth. He always had a pen in his mouth when he was thinking hard about something.

Maggie smiled at him; it was a tentative and nervous little smile that twitched at the corner of her lips.

He read her face through his bangs, took the pen from his mouth, “Let them come. A rivalry would be good publicity.”

It unnerved her a little how easily he did that. How he analyzed everyone in seconds, deduced their intentions and their ability to convert those intentions into a legitimate threat, before reacting. Sometimes, most times, you never saw his reaction, but you could tell by an unsettling vibration in your sternum that he’d come to some conclusion about you. Once, during an early date, he pointed out a group of men, complete stranger to them both, sitting at a dinner table at the opposite end of the room. He whispered little secrets into her ear about their movements, their expressions, their postures. Within a minute, he’d told her the life story, motivations, and potential weaknesses of those six men at the opposite table, and then he grinned down at her with his most predatory smile. Man number one was cheating on his wife with man number three. Yes, he repeated. Man number three owned the company man number four and six wanted to do business with. Man number three was going to give a large portion of the business to man number one because, obviously, they were fucking and blackmail was involved. Man number two was about to be fired. She had never known how important the handshake was, about how much body language translated within the most powerful of circles, how leaders jockeyed for position so that their hand was on top in the photograph, how a slap on the back might translate over or a less polite shove through a door. Randy had told her about posture, eye contact, positions of the shoulder, centers of balance, small minute movements that a trained eye followed. He had learned these things early, he explained, because it helped him to know when he was going to be shot at, fucked, or merely negotiated with.

They had talked more about it in the car, that night, when she admitted to him that he sounded more like some secret spy to her than a lobbyist or arbitrator or investor or whatever it was he really did. He’d grimaced, sighed, looked out the window of the car at the rainy world outside and explained that being a spy would have been easier. As a spy, you have the protection of your country. As an arbitrator, you are alone, outed and alone, with no one to support you but the men you pay for yourself and God help you if someone pays them more.

Maggie stared at him in wonderment then, and she was staring him that way now she realized with a blush. Randy saw that too, she guessed, but again there seemed to be no real reaction. He turned, picked up a glass of water, ice clinking against the sides, took a sip and then he returned his focus to his desk, one eye on the three different computer screens relentlessly refreshing the latest stocks. The computer fan hummed and the hard drive chattered as updates flooded the system every millisecond, filling his office with the quieter sounds of Wall Street. The computer screens themselves were an organized collage of colorful charts, graphs, and tickers, all of which Randy understood and reacted to faster than she had ever seen. It was reflexive, she guessed, the way Eddie and Gwyn had told her things were in the middle of a race. You saw a hole and you made your move, calculating all of the outcomes at an impossibly fast rate, or you lost the race.

When he wasn’t glancing at the screens, making quick almost imperceptible transactions with a few deft flicks of his finger hovering over a nearby mouse, he was browsing through dozens of papers in dozens of languages.

Maggie sighed. Stretched. Yawned. Brushed out her tangled hair with her long fingers.

“Randy?”

“Hm?” He answered in a far away voice. He was checking his blackberry at the moment.

“Nevermind.”

She stood up, absent-mindedly folded the blanket and tossed it back on the couch. She meandered around his office in her bare feet, padding across it, her toes flexing into the dense threads. The carpets here were soft and lush. Most other places in his house were bare; footfalls resonated in them like drumbeats against giant timpani. It felt like walking through a modern, clean canyon. His office was so different. It was his sanctuary, she realized, where he spent most of his time. There were small sculptures, and books, so many books. She creaked open a cabinet below a bookshelf stacked with language guides and saw a collection of board games. She laughed at their titles: Risk, Diplomacy, Axis and Allies, even, she smiled to herself at her discovery tucked away behind a chessboard, a bag of multifaceted dice. She poured them out into her hand and waved them at him.

“Dungeons and Dragons, Randy?” she teased.

“It’s strategic.”

“It’s fun,” she pressed, slinking back toward his desk. She fingered the dice in her hand and then poured them back into the little felt bag.

He remained quiet.

“My little brother used to play it all the time,” she reminisced.

Randy sat up a little straighter; his eyes were on her now. “I didn’t know you had a little brother.”

She shrugged, “You don’t discuss your family much either.” She glanced at him and noticed something different in his eyes. Something she’d never seen before.

“Well, we have our reasons don’t we?” he choked out, returning, a little quickly she noticed, to bury himself in the inbox of his blackberry.

“You know,” she began, “we don’t really have to.”

He ignored her.

“Ramon and I,” she continued, “when I first showed up…we used to play a game where we’d trade secrets so that someone we knew and loved knew them too. Then we wouldn’t be alone.”

He snorted at that, “You and Ramon, playing truth or dare.”

“Not really truth or dare, just…I don’t know, we were talking but the back and forth it was like a game. Here,” she reached forward and took away his pen.

His expression told her that was not a good move.

“God, Randy, chill, you’re like Eddie and his freaking whip.” She held it close to her chest. “I have the pen and that means I get to talk.”

Randy rolled his eyes at her.

“Just listen, just try.”

He sighed and leaned back in his large leather chair, putting his arms behind his head. He was listening now.

“Okay,” she started, “I have a brother. A little brother and he was a very creative D and D player.”

“I already know that,” Randy mumbled.

“Shush, I have the pen.”

She smiled at him. He remained unsmiling. She passed him the pen, “Your turn, Randy.”

He held it for a while, contemplating. Finally, with a sigh, he muttered, “I had two younger brothers.”

“Had?”

“Quiet. I have the pen.”

She thought she caught a flicker of something playful in the middle of all that hurt he had in his eyes. He gave her the pen back. She looked at him, crawled back onto his desk and sat half-naked and cross-legged in front of him. He smiled at her now. She held the pen to her chest again. “I ran away from everything when I was twenty-two.”

“I already know that.”

“Randy!”

“This is unfair,” he complained.

“Alright,” she sighed, her eyes following the edges of the ceiling. She squeezed them shut and took a deep breath. “My husband, Matthew, killed himself.”

“He also beat you, I know this.”

“Dammit, Harada!” she shouted at him, throwing the pen. He caught it mid air and raised an eyebrow. “What do you not know about me? I don’t know anything at all about you!”

“It was your game,” he argued. He replaced the pen in its holder.

She dropped her head into her hands and sighed. He reached forward and took them.

“Maggie.”

She mumbled an unintelligible, why do you love me into them before he pulled them away and pulled her back onto his lap.

“Maggie.”

“It was a stupid game, a stupid silly game, Randy, I know, but…you don’t talk to me. You sleep with me but then you don’t talk to me. I don’t…know…anything about you right now other than what your dick tells me,” she cried.

“Maggie. Don’t cry.” She looked up at him with her tear-streaked face. He chuckled, “Crying is unfair. You forfeit the game if you cry. It’s an excessive advantage.”

“It’s about time I had an advantage,” she muttered, letting him wipe her cheeks dry with his fingertips. “I’m not going to give this advantage up easily, Randy. I want you to talk to me.”

He took a deep breath, “Ask me what you want to know.”

“Seriously?” she replied, her eyes wide.

He shrugged, but he was obviously dreading her next words, “I’ll try my best.”

“You had two brothers?”

She saw that the question pained Harada, enough that his usually stoic expression cracked and his eyes glassed over. He stared straight back at her and said very slowly, “You know my old job…it involved sacrifice?”

For a moment, she wondered if he going to do his little mind trick again where he told a story that had no business whatsoever in their conversation in order to draw attention away from him. He was like a magician, in that sense, pulling your eyes and mind away from what he was really doing. But, that glassy look, she’d never seen it before. “Yes, you told me that spies had it easy in comparison?”

He grimaced. “A spy has an alternate identity. They endanger themselves and then, at the end of the day, they resume their life. An arbitrator doesn’t have the luxury of a double life. They know me. They know my family. They know who I am, where I live, what I do. Or did.”

Maggie remained quiet.

“Every action I took or didn’t take could have had direct consequences on my family, which in turn would have had direct consequences on my ability to perform. What I was doing as an arbitrator meant more than having a family at that time. I prevented wars, Maggie. World Wars. Important work. Expensive work. It was the most logical thing for someone in their position to do.”

She was staring intently at him.

And then in a voice completely devoid of emotion, an act of supreme willpower, he finished, “They killed themselves.”

Maggie remained sitting on his lap in stunned silence.

“My father said if I left my line of work because I was afraid, it would shame him and my mother and my brothers and the family. He would make it so I couldn’t be afraid. I had no idea what he meant, Maggie, I was twenty three.”

“Oh, Randy.”

“I was Sansei, they were Nisei, and I wasn’t as…Japanese…as he was. They gave me an American name, sent me to American schools, did everything so I would fit in, it didn’t occur to me. I didn’t even…know, understand what he meant.” His face darkened and he became very angry, “A great deal of good it did them too, I left arbitration years later. After it’d taken everything from me. So you see, I’m selfish and possessive and quiet, I’m everything your Ramon and Cornelius and Eddie call me, but I have my reasons, just as I told you earlier before you pushed this on me. And I won’t apologize for it. I’m no longer interested in losing what I love, and if it requires that I split a barn, a family, to protect it, I’ll do it. In fact, there's really not a whole lot I won't do.”


NEXT ON: