by Liz Crowe
At that split second, preparing for the warm-up, letting the familiar dialogue and patter of the instructor soothe her into a semi-happy—or at least a non-thinking—place in her head, she glanced out of the doors. Hard not to, considering she was bumped up against them, the room was so damn full. Having almost, but not quite, forgotten the existence of the too-young, too-hot man who’d made her fall over and almost lose her water bottle like some kind of a lame ingénue, she startled when she discovered he was staring straight at her, his mouth half hanging open.
Heat rushed through her as she did a quick assessment of herself. Realizing she was at least three seconds behind on the breathing exercise, she shifted her gaze to the bank of mirrors across the front of the hot room. She was wearing one of her new bras—thank God for small favors. One of those currently trendy, multi-strappy across the back things with a small bit of padding in the front, which helped her slightly flat chest seem less so. Her shorts were the expensive brand, with the goofy pseudo-Greek letter logo thing on the back she could never for the life of her remember the name of. They were a deep, sapphire blue, matching the bra.
She glared at herself a few seconds, then caught up with the rhythm of the warm-up, smiling at Helen when the woman shot her a concerned glance between instructions. But instead of her usual calm, focused self, she felt more rattled than a kid on the first day of school. Her breathing was off, strained. She was wobbly on her feet. It took her straight back to her earliest days in here, when she’d been so blind with grief it was all she could to do get up every morning and provide her physical self with basic nutrition.
Tears threatened.
Fuck this guy. I refuse to let him get into my head like this.
She tried to catch Helen’s eye, to let her know she was all right but had to get some cool air into her lungs. But in the end, she just leaned on the door and pushed her way out into the lobby. Her skin pebbled in the air conditioning, making her shiver. The tears came and she let them. She’d learned that much about herself. Holding them back made it worse. She’d had more crying jags in this particular lobby than in the chic leather chair at her therapist’s office.
She looked up after a few seconds, grateful it had been a mild bout, understanding how they came and went with brutal regularity—even now, almost three later. When she leveled her gaze at the young—too young—man still outside the window, she noted he had his hard hat and safety glasses off and was staring straight at her.
His buddy was leaning on the platform railing, ogling the much younger and tighter lady flesh behind her in the hot room, as he should be. Gayle gathered herself, put her hands on her hips and gave the young man a stern look. He blinked in the face of it, ran a hand across his thick crop of dark blond hair and grinned—grinned!—at her.
“Sorry,” he mouthed, before plunking the hat back on his head and giving his buddy a hard elbow in the side. The other kid frowned, mouthed a few curses then looked at Gayle. He didn’t just look. He gave her a rude, blatant, up-and-down stare. She stood still, her hands on her hips, willing the mortification away. She looked hot as shit and she knew it.
Grieving for almost three solid years meant not eating for the better part of eight months, then therapy which included an aggressive exercise program. She’d made other changes too—just for the sake of them, really. She’d stopped eating meat and barely ate any dairy at all. Between her diet, spinning, hot yoga and pilates, her almost-forty self could pass, and had passed, for someone ten years younger.
But the man—the boy, Gayle. The boy—and his grin and those eyes and his utter physical perfection had struck her like a thunderbolt. Horrifying, and yet oddly exhilarating at the same time—something she’d not felt since the moment she’d nearly rear-ended someone on the Pacific Coast Highway, listening to the phone call that had changed her entire life.
Her face flushed when she realized the hot guy’s buddy was giving her two thumbs-up and a cheesy grin. The other man, the one who’d sent her into such an immature tailspin, was frowning now, first at his co-worker then at her. He stuck his safety glasses on, said something to the other guy then picked up his drill.
Gayle watched them—okay, she ogled them, and wasn’t that a strange thing to admit—a few seconds longer before ducking back into the hot room with an ‘I’m okay’ nod to Helen. If she were not mistaken, her scalp was tingly. Her body was still broken out in goosebumps even in the heat. She caught up with the tail end of the breathing warm-up and spent the next eighty-two minutes focused straight ahead, on herself in the mirror as she was supposed to be, even while half her brain was fully aware of the men still working away outside the window.
Chapter Three
“Gayle Connolly, I still can’t believe you’re here, in my office, asking me to hire you.”
She smiled at the silver fox of a man leaning against his massive desk and grinning down at her. “Well, Ben, I guess I decided never working again wasn’t the life for me.”
“But…okay, never mind. I don’t want to ask, lest you talk yourself out of it. When can you start?”
“Well, um…don’t you want to, I don’t know, ask me some questions? See if I’m a good fit? That I know what I’m doing?”
He laughed—a deep, melodious thing which added to his handsome factor. Gayle shook her head at herself. Ever since the yoga man incident earlier in the day, she’d been thinking the oddest things about the various men she’d encountered. It was as if that weird moment had popped the lid off her formerly healthy, overactive, libido—something she’d assumed was as dead and buried as her husband.
“Don’t insult me, Gayle.” He went around to his seat and pulled out a file folder, flipping through papers she assumed included her headhunter-provided resume. He stared down at something, shook his head, a distressing, yet familiar sadness filling his eyes before he shut the file.
Gayle set her jaw. She would not allow today’s forward motion to get derailed by a bunch of sympathy. She’d had all the fucking sympathy she could stomach in her life—in four or five consecutive lifetimes. She forced herself to smile and wait for him to collect himself. “Well? No questions for me?”
He flinched as if he’d forgotten she was in the room, then sighed. “Okay, how about this one. We have the biggest portfolio of Michigan-based craft beers in the state and we are bloody well drowning in the stuff. Every day another one shows up at my door with their eager faces and samples, hoping just by signing a distribution contract, their futures are made.” He leaned back in his seat and steepled his fingertips. “How are we going to separate the wheat from the chaff in all this and stop wasting our sales hours trying to sling useless liquid that won’t be the same batch-to-batch and might not even be around in six months?”
She tilted her head. This was exactly what she needed—this challenge. “Well, Ben, as you know, Connelly & Company had the same issue on the West Coast. We had it well before you did. It’s not easy, but it will require a hard look at the numbers—I assume you have some decent analysts in here somewhere—plus a few come-to-Jesus meetings with some of the non-sellers. I’m willing to bet you have a nice fat thirty percent cushion of garbage we can slice out with little effort. The next thirty is a little harder to target and get rid of—salesmen get wedded to them sometimes, so you have to listen to their pitches. When you’re down to a hard core of real accounts, then we re-focus the sales staff on them.”
“Sounds ugly,” he said, a frown creasing his forehead.
“It is. But you said it yourself. Your sales people are wheel-spinning, trying to accommodate a ton of breweries that are, in a word, shitty.”
“Yes. Agreed.” Ben heaved a huge sigh. “I’m really sorry, Gayle. About Ethan and…”
She held up a hand. “I know you are. You’ve said it before. You and Janet were among the first to arrive for the…funeral stuff and among the last to leave. Don’t think I’ve forgotten it.”
“I just never thought you’d get back into it. Since you so
ld Connolly and decided to come back to Michigan.”
“This is my home, Ben. You know that. Ethan was the West-Coaster, not me.” She bit her lip. “Listen, I want to help you out. I mean, this is what I did for my own company.”
“And you were damn good at it, too.”
A flush crept up her neck to her face. She had been good at it. She’d started as a merchandiser—the lowest on the totem pole of the sales force—at Connolly and Company, having been lured west by thoughts of sunny days, nights and weekends plus a break from her nosy mother. She’d spent hours building relationships in groceries, gas ’n sips, liquor-lotto stores, various restaurants, just proving she knew what she was doing. She’d reset and tidied beer shelves until a sales position had opened up and she had leapt at it. Five years later, she’d been the top craft beer seller in the company, which was saying something, since Connolly had all the big names in the Bay Area market. Two years later, she’d been named brand manager for three of the biggest breweries, and a short year later she’d made sales manager for the entire craft beer portfolio.
She’d loved her life—her, a small town, mid-Western girl making a real living on the West Coast in an industry she adored. She’d had a cute, miniscule apartment overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, as much money as she’d ever seen in one place, her own friends, a cute little car, the works. She’d been the opposite of the girl she’d read about in the romance novels who gets swept off her feet by the company CEO or whatever the hell. She would buy her own jewelry, cars and vacations.
But it hadn’t lasted. Nope, it sure hadn’t.
Gayle blinked fast, fending off tears, while Ben poured her a glass of water and handed it to her, along with a tissue, without a word. She took it and sipped, then set it on the glass table to her left. “I need this, Ben.”
“Well, I think the feeling is mutual.” He held out a hand. “Welcome to TriCities Distribution. I’ll repeat my original question—when can you start?”
She stared at his hand a second, giving herself the time to consider it all. She’d gotten used to not working—to doing whatever the hell she pleased any time of the day. Having more money than God helped. When she gripped his palm, something inside her shifted ever so slightly, allowing a sliver of light to shine into the darkness she’d been inhabiting for two years, ten months, six days and…she checked the Patek Philippe heirloom watch Ethan’s mother had given her for a wedding present…two and a half hours.
“I can start Monday,” she said, surprising herself with the strength of her voice.
“Good,” he said. “Great.” He let go of her hand and his face rearranged itself into sympathetic lines again. She frowned at him. “Sorry. Don’t worry. This is not a mercy job. Unless you consider working for me a bit of a mercy.” He held out his suit-clad arms, taking in his expensively outfitted office.
“Hardly,” she said, rising to her feet. “False modesty is annoying, Ben.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned. “Hey, how about dinner this weekend? I know Janet would love to have you over.”
“Maybe,” she said. “I need to…take care of a few things before I start. Including a trip out to…out west. To sort of wrap a few things up.”
“Right. Okay. Got it.” His face reddened.
She smiled, marveling at how her widowed status could reduce grown human beings to stuttering middle schoolers. She hesitated a few seconds while he shuffled papers and calmed down.
“Gayle, I can’t tell you how much we needed someone just like you here. I mean, I would have asked a year ago if I even thought you’d…” He paused, smiled and resumed his alpha male mantle. “Anyway, why don’t you stop down at HR before you leave and get all the paperwork crap going so you don’t have to mess with it Monday?”
“I will, thanks.” She shouldered her bag and was headed for his door when he stopped her.
“Oh, shit, I mean…we didn’t even talk salary.”
She turned back to him, one eyebrow raised. She knew they hadn’t, but it was a minor detail to her at this point. “What does the job pay, Ben?”
“A hundred-ten base, plus quarterly bonuses based on performance, which I am certain will be no problem for you.”
“Okay, I’ll take it.”
“Wow, that was easy.” He had his hands stuck in his trouser pockets, his face quizzical. “I would have paid more.”
“I know you would have,” she said with a smile. “I’ll hit the HR paperwork and see you on Monday morning.”
“Yeah, great. Okay. Super.”
“Relax, Ben. What I have isn’t catching.” She winced. “I’m sorry.”
“Understandable. I just don’t know how…”
“You’ll get used to it.” Irrational anger was filling her head, making her ears hot and her skin clammy. “I’ll go now. And thanks, Ben. I think we’ll work well together.” She had to get out of there before she screamed. Maybe this isn’t such a great idea after all.
No. It was. It was the only idea. She had to do something with herself. And this was what she knew. No matter how utterly awful it was going to be rebuilding herself in this business—Ethan’s business. Their business.
She leaned against the wall, holding the tissue to her lips, wondering where the nearest bathroom was. The spasm—which was what it was, a spasm of grief that clutched at her viscera and left her gasping and spent—faded fast. It happened more often now—the fast fading. Which made her feel guilty and pissed off.
It was one of the reasons she’d decided to take the ashes out to the mountains herself. She couldn’t just leave the damn things in their fancy box on her mantel in Michigan. Ethan had been a California boy through and through. And she needed to put him back there, where he belonged. She had the private plane booked and on standby, waiting for the right moment. And now the moment had come, about twenty minutes ago, when she’d agreed to go back to work in the beer business, as sales director for the biggest distributor in Michigan.
Later, she sat in her silk PJs and sipped a glass of Pappy Van Winkle, with her other hand resting on the box in her lap. The box that contained the ashes of what was left of her life.
Chapter Four
One month later
“Hey, Gayle, would you look at this for me?”
Gayle glanced up from her computer screen, irritated by the interruption coming during her mandated two hours of quiet in the late afternoon. An especially important time in which she was on the verge of making the second level of cuts out of their beer book. The first wave had been easy. TriCities had gotten greedy. Taken on way more products than they could fairly represent and sales were down across the board. So, she’d cut and slashed without mercy.
But it had to be done, and most of the sales staff were grateful for it.
This next round would prove more difficult. Some of these brands had real fans amongst the retailers. She’d made her list, run it by Ben and was going to present it during the next day’s sales meeting, but with the caveat that every sales person had her ear if they wanted to make a case for one brand or another. What they didn’t know was if they came at her with a lot of ‘oh my God we can’t cut these guys they’re awesome’, she would ask one question.
‘Okay, are they awesome enough for you to tie your next quarterly bonus to it? No? Okay, not so awesome then. Yes? Great. You’re now their brand manager. Bring me a turn-around plan in forty-eight hours, complete with a budget.’
If they actually took these steps, most times the sales would go up and she’d agree to keep the account. If not, they were yesterday’s news. The current craft beer market was drowning the public in options. It was time to contract and focus on the breweries who knew what the hell they were doing.
“Sure,” she said, holding out her hand for the proffered computer tablet. She studied the quarter’s reports, signed her name to them for the various taxation authorities then handed the thing back with as genuine a smile as she could manage. “Would you mind?” She pointed to the propped
-open glass door. “I need some time.”
The woman nodded and backed out, closing the door behind her. Gayle rolled her head around, trying to work out some of the kinks in her neck. Her eyes burned from staring at the screen for so long, so she got up and paced around the office, wishing she didn’t have to work in a fishbowl, but realizing Ben prided himself on his super modern building with its half-opaque glass walls separating the upper management from the plebe lands.
As she stared out of the window onto the bustling warehouse below, her phone buzzed with a text. Figuring it for one of her prima donna brewery accounts, she ignored it, but when it happened again, then a third time, she grabbed the thing with a curse. Noting who it was, she smiled, hit Call and stuck her wireless earbuds into her ears. “Hey, friend. What’s up?”
“Hey yourself,” Evelyn Fitzgerald said. “How goes it with the poison pen over there?”
She winced and sat in her ergonomically correct, ugly desk chair. “Word’s out, eh?”
“And how. They’re calling you the Evil Queen, among other things.”
“I can only imagine.”
“It’s the right thing. We get it. But we’re at the top of that food chain…at least I hope we are.”
“Of course you are. Since you’ve taken over sales and marketing, you’re printing money.”
“Helps to have good brewers…”
“Oh, hell, those guys are a dime a dozen now.”
Evelyn chuckled. “Don’t let Hoffman hear you say that.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t. I thought he left anyway. Opening the restaurant with Elle in Detroit.”
“He still consults. He’s out here two or three times a month. He’s too much of an anal control freak to give us up completely.”
“I’m sure.” She sipped from her water bottle. “What’s up, then? Not a problem with our sales people, I assume.” There wasn’t. Gayle knew where the company’s bread was buttered, and Fitzgerald Brewing Company held one of the biggest knives for that job. She rode herd big time on the large account brand managers—probably too much, but Ben had said she should run things like she saw fit. She was the boss. So she acted like it. As a result, of course, she had no real friends here. Only people who admired her with the same level of energy that they hated and were terrified of her.