“Read the handbook,” I said. “Many times. With a highlighter.”
It’s possible my tone was a little sanctimonious.
Jack set down his phone with a sigh. “Look,” he said. “I won’t be going to clubs or restaurants—or meeting with strangers at unknown locations. I’ll just be staying home—or going with my mother to her doctor’s appointments.” He sighed. “I will also … under duress … make a few trips out to my parents’ ranch, but God willing, those visits will be short and rare. And that’s it. I’m not here to have fun, or make trouble, or get assassinated. I’m just here to be a good son and help out my mom.”
“Great,” I said. “That makes our job easier.”
He started to pick his phone back up.
I added, “I just need to collect fingerprints, a handwriting sample, and a vial of blood, and we can call it a day.” I was forgetting the Very Personal Questionnaire. But I was doing pretty well, all things considered.
“A vial of blood?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m trained in phlebotomy.” Then I glanced down at his forearms. “And you’ve got veins like firehoses, anyway.”
He put his arms behind his back. “What do you need blood for?”
“Basic bloodwork. And to confirm your type.”
Now he was blinking in disbelief. I enjoyed shocking him a little.
This was way better than being the maid.
“Your assistant filled in your blood type on the form as AB negative,” I said, “and, if that’s confirmed, you’re lucky, because that’s my blood type, too.”
“Why does that make me lucky?”
“We always like to keep at least one person on the team who can act as a donor for our principal,” I said, pulling out the rubber tourniquet and snapping it. “So you might’ve just met your own personal blood bank.”
Six
TEN MINUTES LATER, I had everything I needed, and I was packing up my stuff, more than ready to get out of there.
There was something so exhausting about all that handsomeness.
Seriously. It was unabated. It was relentless. It was grueling.
And I wasn’t even looking at him! He was looking at me.
Finally, I paused to look back. “What?”
“You’re nothing like I thought you’d be,” he said.
I gave him a look. “Right back atcha.”
“I expected you to be bigger, for one,” he said.
“You didn’t even know I was coming.”
“Today, I didn’t know. We were planning to hire you before, though. Then I changed my mind.”
“And then the studio changed it back.”
“Something like that.”
Jack was still assessing me, and I can’t begin to describe how strange it was to be the watchee rather than the watcher.
He went on, “I guess I thought you’d be more of a tough guy.”
I was not a tough guy. I was the opposite of a tough guy. But I wasn’t telling him that. “Nothing about this job requires you to be a tough guy.”
“What does it require?”
“Focus. Training. Awareness.” I tapped my head like I was pointing to my brain. “It’s not about being tough. It’s about being prepared.”
“But a bodyguard, you know? I just feel like you should be larger. You’re, like, tiny.”
“I am hardly tiny,” I said. “You just happen to be enormous.”
“What are you? Five-four?”
“I am five-six, thank you.” I was five-five.
“So what would you do if some massive guy tried to beat me up?”
“That would never happen,” I said. “We’d anticipate the threat and remove you from the scene before it ever came to that.”
“But what if it did?”
“It wouldn’t.”
“But just—hypothetically?”
I sighed. “Fine. Hypothetically, if it did—which it wouldn’t—I would just … take him down.”
“But how?”
“I’ve done jujitsu since I was six, and I’m a second-degree black belt.”
“But what if he was really big?” Jack lifted up his arms like a bear.
I squinted at him. “I don’t think you understand how jujitsu works.”
He squinted back.
“You don’t believe me?” I asked. “Do you realize how sexist that is?”
“It’s not sexist…” he protested. “It’s just … physics. How does somebody your size take down somebody my size?”