Designs of the Heart

by Renee Ryder

  Hannah entered the store with clear ideas, but seeing how many different types of hats she could choose from, she felt lost. An entire wall displayed ones for women; ones for men were on the opposite side. Some were gigantic, but she didn’t spare more than a curious and entertained look at them, since they were obviously for weddings. Instead, as Keisha suggested, she concentrated on a table of models made for her purpose—she needed one with a large brim that would protect her face and the back of her neck. Just for fun, she tried on one with a colorful diamond pattern, much to Keisha’s amusement, before opting for a more practical choice—considering the space in her luggage—a white hat, a neutral color that would match any outfit and repel the sun.

  On the way back to the office, they enjoyed the cool breeze that carried the sounds of traffic and chitchat to them.

  “There’s something you’ve got to tell me,” Keisha said all of a sudden.

  “What?”

  “How did you get Alex to give you two weeks off in a row?”

  “To tell you the truth, I was terrified to ask him for it. I was sure he’d say ‘absolutely not.’ ”

  “Keep it real though, is it like a reward for never using a sick day in a year and a half?”

  “Is that what you think or did you hear something?” She forced a smile at Keisha.

  “That’s just from me. It seems weird that he would’ve agreed on it only because projects at work are in a good place right now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve known him for four years.”

  “Why don’t you test the waters for your vacation? Then we’ll see if I just got lucky and caught him in a moment of generosity.”

  “If you say it was really just a normal request, then that’s what happened. It’s the only explanation.”

  “Well, I told him ab— Whoa!” she cried out, startled by Keisha grabbing her arm.

  “A damned hole! Thank goodness I didn’t break the heel of my shoe. You were saying?”

  “I explained the situation to him. My grandma, Italy, my birthday, Ryan, his parents who already booked the trip …”

  “You mean that behind his grouchy scowl he’s hiding the heart of a softy?”

  “Ha! Alex, a softy!”

  “But keep that between us. I don’t want him to fire me!”

  “Don’t worry, mum’s the word. But actually, being so strict about putting productivity above all else could be a just a front.”

  “Maybe to keep his employees under control.” Keisha speculated, brushing away her hair as the wind blew it across her lips.

  “If I were you, I’d ask him for vacation time.”

  “Nah. Right now there’s nowhere I’d really like to go visit. Plus, I don’t have anyone to go with, like you do.”

  “Oh. Well, I assume you’re putting the pedal to the metal and picking a guy to go with,” she joked, but paying more attention to her choice of words than she had been with Lauren the night before.

  “Honestly, no.”

  “No?”

  “If someone interesting hits on me, maybe a brother like that one,” and she indicated a dark-skinned guy, tall, in a jacket and tie, who was hailing a cab across the street from them, “I’m not gonna make him jump through hoops. Plus, I avoid letting myself get emotional because life’s taught me that things change.”

  “Things change, and …?” She pressed Keisha, eager to hear a more experienced viewpoint.

  “And we can’t control those changes. It means that if you fully lean on something that you have no control over, it’s possible you’ll wind up falling on your ass.”

  She didn’t detect any resignation or regret in Keisha’s voice. Only pragmatism.

  A gust of wind blew towards them, whipping through their long hair and accentuating the racket from the vehicles.

  “You know, Hannah, when you swear before God to stay with someone ‘until death do us part,’ and a few years later you realize the things that ‘part us’ are way less lethal than death, well, you start seeing life from a different perspective. If you don’t count on things too much, when they change it’s not as upsetting. So in that sense, yes. You can bet that I’ll put the pedal to the metal when it comes to men. Like they say in the movies, it’s better to live for the day.”

  Not for the first time, she was dying from curiosity about why Keisha had gotten divorced, but didn’t feel like asking about it directly. Hopefully showing what a contemplative person she was would push Keisha to talk.

  “Before meeting Ryan, for more than a year I didn’t go out with anyone.”

  “He’s so cool! Every time you mention him it reminds me of last year, when he showed up at the office with roses and sushi. It was so funny and romantic!”

  “ ‘You have to work? Okay. If Hannah can’t come to the date, the date will come to Hannah,’ that’s what he said to me,” she confided, smiling at the memory and Keisha’s frivolous turn of the conversation. “It was a wonderful date. He told me he would’ve brought his guitar, too, but was worried about embarrassing me in front of everyone in the office.”

  “He plays?”

  “Yeah. Sings, too. And he’s really good!”

  “Wow. He seems like the ideal boyfriend.”

  In that instant, she realized how fortunate she was to have a love like the one Lauren worked so hard to achieve and that Keisha once had but lost.

  “I remember that Alex let you use the small conference room for your little tête-à-tête.”

  “Who could forget!”

  “See? He really is a softy.”

  “I guess it’s true. You know what? I can’t wait to be alone with him without having to think about work.”

  “Alone with the softy?”

  “With Ryan, silly!”

  “Okay. By the way, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got to admit it kind of hurt that you only told me two days ago that you were going. I mean, Alex approved it a month ago, and all this time we’ve been working side by side but you never once said …”

  “You don’t know how much I wanted to tell you! I lost count of how many times I had to bite my tongue. It’s just that in a month so many things can happen, and I didn’t want to jinx it.”

  “I didn’t take you for a superstitious person.”

  “Well, I confess … I am a little bit. But you were the first one that I told the whole story to.”

  “All right, you saved yourself there.” Keisha winked at her, making her laugh, too, as they headed back into the office building.

  3. A Few Days

  Hannah was singing along to Luce by the artist Elisa while she rechecked for the last time that her airline ticket confirmation slip, passport, and wallet were safe in her purse when the doorbell rang.

  Damn! she thought, rushing to the two pillowcases that she’d hung out to dry.

  She took them down and then removed the wall-to-wall clothesline that she set up when she washed just a small load—times when she considered the dryer a waste. She tiptoed across the studio apartment, which was arranged to look bigger than it actually was. The kitchen took up one corner, the bed another near a closet, and in between sat a small couch facing a TV on an entertainment center. At the door, she checked the peephole; a well-dressed young man about six feet tall, dark hair slicked back with a clean haircut, athletic, waited on the doorstep looking tense.

  Even though she wore only short shorts and a tank top, she opened the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  He gave her a lost look and she responded with a smile. The tension vanished from his face.

  “Good evening. I’m looking for Ms. Hannah Morrison.”

  “You found her. What can I do for you?”

  “I wanted to see if what they told me was true.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “That I could find the eighth wonder of
the world in this building. I was skeptical at the entrance downstairs, because it seemed too modern for the glorious ancient world, but I decided to come in anyway. And now that I can admire you for myself, I have to say tha—”

  “Oh, cut it out!” she giggled, hugging Ryan.

  After a passionate hello kiss, she pulled him inside by the hand while he pulled the door shut behind him.

  “I missed you.”

  “Let’s see,” she said, with a smile. “Yesterday we went to lunch together, I spent the night at your place, we texted all day today, and you still missed me?”

  He replied with another kiss, hotter than the last.

  He tasted of mint, like usual. Always attentive to detail, especially his breath. Yet another reason she loved him.

  She didn’t understand what he said next because he was kissing the curve of her neck, so his voice came out muffled and warm on her skin. She asked him to repeat himself.

  “I said, how can you be in my arms and I still miss you?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” she flirted, arms crossed over her chest.

  “Wow, what a sight for sore eyes,” he said, taking in everything from her amber hair to her magenta toenail polish.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  “What’s this?” he asked her, looking at the video playing on YouTube.

  “Annalisa’s Il Mondo Prima di Te.”

  “Oh. I like that ‘buonanotte’ one,” he said and started humming the melody of Fiorellino.

  “Yeah, that’s by Francesco De Gregori. Wait, I’ll find it for you.” She headed for her laptop on the table.

  “No, don’t bother. I had a bad day.” He checked his phone.

  “No way. You seem as relaxed as if you just had a nap.”

  “I’m being serious, babe.”

  He pocketed the phone, his expression clouded.

  “What happened?” she asked, pausing the music video.

  “You know those cough syrups that taste terrible but make you feel better later?”

  “Uh oh. This sounds like the classic ‘I have good news and bad news.’ ”

  “Yes, that’s more or less it.” Ryan pulled out a chair and gestured towards it.

  Damn it, I have to sit down for this? She was starting to worry because he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “You know I hate surprises, right?” she murmured in a vaguely threatening way after making herself comfortable.

  He stopped on the other side of the table, took off his jacket, and placed it on the back of another chair.

  “As you know, in the last few weeks I’ve been working on selling some new software to a big company in Tacoma.”

  She nodded, distractedly closing the laptop.

  “I have been bending over backwards to make this deal go well. Like, John loves baseball, right?”

  “I don’t even know who this John is.” Her patience was wearing thin.

  “Of course you do! John Lundry. I’ve mentioned him to you a hundred times lately. Anyway, he’s the Director of Engineering at this company who’s our client. Seeing as how he’s a baseball fanatic—and you know how crazy those guys can be, right?—I had to take him to a Mariners game. Three hours of kissing his ass and what does he do? Asks me to get him a signed ball. And what can I do, do I have a choice? He says it’s for his son. How can I say no? But most importantly, who can I ask this favor from, when I don’t know anyone who works there? So I get on the phone to find someone who can hook me up, who I have to promise things to, and all to get this fucking ball with someone’s scribble on it!”

  “You already told me this.”

  “I did?”

  She rested her elbows on the table and laced her fingers before pasting on a long-suffering smile.

  “And why didn’t you stop me?”

  She watched him impassively.

  “I just mean, this client is so important that I keep having to do things I hate.”

  “Yes, but I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

  “In the end, they bought the software. And I was the key player in closing the deal.”

  “Really?” She lit up, her initial irritation soothed at the knowledge of the importance of the sale. “Bravo, honey. Congratulations!” She stood up to give him a hug.

  “Thanks, babe.”

  Like always, feeling him so close pushed everything else from her mind.

  “I’m really proud of you.”

  She rubbed her cheek on his neck and breathed in his scent. She began planting soft kisses along his skin, moving upwards from his throat to his mouth and found his tongue. His taste triggered an ache of passion low in her body. But since he wasn’t responding to the kiss with her same ardor—maybe because of his bad day—she figured she should help him relax.

  She traced her fingers over the muscles of his back and pressed herself into him, trailing kisses across his jawline and grabbed his butt to pull him more firmly into her hips. By what she felt against her belly, she’d succeeded in getting his attention.

  “You know, Hannah, I worked hard to establish a good rapport with John so he would trust me.”

  Despite being alive and impatient in the lower part of his body, his upper part stayed distant. His arms still draped limply around her waist, so she moved against him sinuously, her breasts rubbing on his chest. She paused in her kisses to whisper, “You’re so smart,” and then slid her hand between them to the front of his jeans and along the length of him. “No one could resist you.”

  “Unfortunately that kind of rapport requires honor and commitment …”

  His dogged focus on ignoring her advances stopped her and she pulled back to look in his deep brown eyes, which were stubbornly evading meeting hers.

  “Ry? What’s wrong?”

  “Tomorrow our programmers go to Tacoma to install the software.”

  This response, completely irrelevant to the current mayhem of her senses puzzled her.

  “They go to Tacoma, and …?”

  “The boss wants … wants me to go, too.”

  “To Tacoma?”

  He nodded.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning, I just said.”

  She stepped back from him in shock.

  “But we have to check in at noon! What if you don’t make it to the airport in time? Okay, it’s only a half hour drive. But what if there’s traffic?”

  He remained silent, continuing to avoid eye contact.

  Standing in front of him she could almost physically feel his discomfort, when an unthinkable scenario formed in her mind.

  “Stop! Just stop. You are not telling me that …”

  “I have to stay with them, babe. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “You what?”

  “I understand how you feel,” he interrupted, as if trying to dam the river of rage in her before it overflowed. “But put yourself in my shoes. This is a major client and we can’t disappoint them.”

  “Ryan, but … but I’m your girlfriend!”

  “And I love you more than life itself.”

  “If you love me that much, you can’t choose a customer over me!”

  “But it’s not a choice. The programmers had problems with some software modifications that John requested and they couldn’t fix them in time. We can’t push it back because John’s bosses have production deadlines.”

  “But you’re just the salesman. What in the hell does it have to do with you?” she snapped as her dream of Italy began to crumble before her eyes.

  “You know what my job’s like. I help our customers mold their needs into what I can give them, because that’s what happens to be best for both of us.”

  “I know that you push them into wanting what you want … Is that what you’re doing with me right now?”

  The little chuckle accompanying the description of his modus operandi died on his lips.

  “Of co
urse not, babe. The programmers need to buy more time and I’ve gotta do it for them. I’m trying to talk to you on a rational level instead of emotiona— Wait a minute! Are you just looking to start something again?” Lust flashed in his eyes and he grabbed her by the sides.

  What timing! She thought, since her mood to mess around had definitely evaporated.

  “You must be joking,” she said, cold, when he sneaked his hands into the back of her shorts.

  Throwing this bucket of ice water on his sudden fire brought him back to the discussion at hand.

  “Look, the software is ready. Modifications included,” he said, stepping away, but failing to hide embarrassment at the heat he’d shown a moment before. “And there’s no time to really test it. Tomorrow they go to Tacoma to install it, hoping no problems come up. In case there are, however, things could get crazy complicated for them. We could have to pay penalties for breaking the contract and it’d be terrible for the company and for my reputation.”

  “And if there are no problems? Would you make it to the airport on time?”

  “Like I said, I have an excellent relationship with John. And also with Samuel Chen, their engineer in charge of the project. In any case, I have to stay there. To distract them, reassure them, protect the boss’ ass. Because—”

  Her eyes began swimming as she saw these hypothetical situations taking precedence over their actual trip.

  “—if God forbid something goes wrong, it’ll be my job to make sure there’s no breach of contract or even worse legal issues.”

  “And what about me? Did you put yourself in my shoes?” she shouted, letting her tears overflow.

  “No, babe. Please, don’t do this.”

  He tried to hug her, but she pushed him away.

  “You know how long I’ve wanted to go to Italy! You promised me that you’d take me there for my birthday, but it’s a lie. I had to do backflips for Alex to give me two wee—”

  “Whoa whoa whoa! Now you stop!”