Chapter 7: Talkative twin

She stared at him and didn't move a muscle, her face like a wax mask. But her eyes darkened, the way they'd done that day he'd told her to get out of his life. Her lashes flickered, and her bottom lip trembled, but she controlled it so fast, he thought it might've been his imagination.

She clenched her already fisted hands so hard, he could see the knuckles whiten. "All right," she agreed.

"I mean it, this stops right here," he warned.

"All right," she whispered again.

Uncomfortable now that he'd said his piece, Rafe turned to go. He didn't have any reason to feel guilty for the way she lived. She'd made her choices. "The talkative one, what's his name?" he asked the question that couldn't be held back anymore.

"What?" she asked, looking confused. She pushed her shiny blond hair behind her ear with trembling fingers.

"One of the twins is talkative and the other one quiet. I know for some reason you gave them my names, but I don't know which is which," he said impatiently. It was a violation that she'd give his names to another man's children. He wanted to ask her where this Bruce, that the quiet one had mentioned, was? If he was still in the picture? But Rafe wouldn't expose himself like that.

She clutched her arms around herself, pushing her breasts together, giving him an eyeful. On purpose? "Raphael is always talking up a storm, while Donatello silently plots trouble for them to get into," she said with such aching vulnerability in her voice, Raphael stepped back from her. He knew women weren't vulnerable - they could be vicious. Sometimes more vicious than men. He should go, but he was strangely reluctant to leave this small apartment that managed to look more like a home than his upscale apartment. "Why did they ask if you would pull their ears?" That odd detail had been bugging him on and off this last week.

A faint smile curled at the edge of her pink lips. "It's something the Spanish do on their birthdays - they read about it, and now I pull their earlobes on their birthdays. This year it was four times. They can't wait until I can pull on them ten times."

"I see." He didn't know what else to say. He shouldn't be standing here making small talk. She'd betrayed him five years ago and quite possibly put her sons up to getting money out of him.

Without a word, he turned on his heel and walked out. He didn't care about her, and he'd almost convinced himself that it was the truth when he heard her cut off a sob behind him. He hesitated.

The door slammed closed behind him with a violence that told him she'd have liked it to be his head.