by Vi Keeland
I diverted my eyes in the nick of time, a half second before she looked up at me.
Her smile was genuine. “We did good tonight. I’ll admit, I wasn’t so sure we could work together.”
“I’m easy to work with.”
She rolled her eyes—a common response to my shtick, I’d noticed. But this time, it was more playful than real.
We packed up what we’d brought into the bullpen, and Annalise wrapped the leftover pizza in some tinfoil she found in a drawer.
“Can I borrow the Sharpie you were using to sketch before? I want to label these.”
I reached into my pocket and handed it to her. In big, bold letters, she wrote across the front of the silver foil: NOT MARINA’S.
“She’s going to think I did that.”
She smirked. “I know. I agreed you were easy to work with. I didn’t say you weren’t an asshole. I saw you looking down my shirt before.”
I stilled, unsure how to react to her comment, and closed my eyes. The sound of her heels clicking on the floor told me when it was safe to open them. A few steps from the door, she spoke without stopping or turning around. But I could tell from her voice she was amused.
“Good night, Bennett. And stop watching my ass.”
Chapter 10
* * *
Annalise
I hadn’t been to the gym in more than three months.
Andrew was a creature of habit and went daily at six a.m. sharp. I’d tried to join him at least three days a week when we were together, even though I preferred to exercise in the evening. But after our break started, it became awkward to see him there. We’d wave and say hello. Once or twice we even chatted. But the goodbye at the end of our conversation made my heart ache all over again. I’d stopped going for my sanity.
Until today.
I had no idea what possessed me to pick today of all days to go back to the gym, especially since it had been nearly one in the morning by the time I got home from work last night. But I arrived at five fifty, wanting to be already on the treadmill by the time Andrew walked in…if he walked in. We hadn’t seen each other in more than two months, since the wedding of a mutual friend from college, and it had been almost three weeks since we’d even exchanged texts.
Picking a treadmill in the corner—one with a straight view to the locker room exit as well as the front door—I popped in my earbuds and hit shuffle on Pandora on my iPhone. The first five minutes were rough. Maybe avoiding exercise all together hadn’t been that good of an idea after all. I huffed and puffed like a two-pack-a-day smoker until eventually my adrenaline kicked in, and I found my groove with the pace I’d set.
Although finding my groove didn’t stop me from staring at the doors like I was waiting for Ryan Reynolds to walk through at any second.
At ten after six, I felt my shoulders start to relax. Andrew was never late. Unlike me, he was a stickler for time. He must not be coming today. For all I knew, he could be away, or had even changed gyms. Although the latter wasn’t too likely. Andrew didn’t do change—he ate the same whole wheat toast with two spoonfuls of organic peanut butter at five fifteen every morning and walked into the door at the gym at six. By seven, he sat in front of the computer at his desk to start his daily writing.
With the anxiety of anticipating his arrival dissipating, I upped my speed to six miles an hour and made the mental decision to not stop until I’d run a full three miles. It was probably better that he didn’t show up and find me since I was feeling so out of sorts lately, anyway.
After I hit the three-mile marker, I did a ten-minute cool down walk and then wiped off the machine. I hadn’t brought clothes to shower, but I needed to pick up my purse from the locker and stop in the ladies’ room before heading home to get ready for work. I’d made it halfway to the locker room when the front door opened and two people walked in, Andrew being the second person. My heart raced faster than it had on the treadmill. And that was before the woman who’d walked in right before him turned to laugh at whatever he’d just said.
They’d come together.
I stopped in place about two seconds before Andrew looked up and saw me. I must’ve looked like a deer in the headlights about to get creamed by a Mack truck. He said something I couldn’t hear to the woman he’d walked in with, and she looked up at me, frowned, and headed toward the elliptical machines.
Andrew took a few hesitant steps toward me.
“Hey. How are you? I didn’t expect to see you here.”
Obviously.
I nodded and swallowed back the taste of salt in my throat. “You’re late.”
“I changed up my routine. Writing later in the day. Even at night sometimes.”
I forced a fake smile. “That’s great.”
“I heard about Wren. How are things going with the merger?”
“It’s tough.”
Small talk was killing me. I looked over my shoulder and found the woman he’d walked in with watching us. She turned her head away immediately. My pride wanted me to not mention her and escape with my head held high.
But I couldn’t help myself. “New workout partner?”
“We didn’t arrive together, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
I couldn’t hold back my emotions any longer. My lip started to tremble, so I bit down. The taste of metal flooded my mouth as I sucked in blood.
“I need to get to work. It was nice seeing you.” I walked away before he could say anything. But he never even made an attempt to stop me.
***
To say I’d been distracted this morning was an understatement. I’d spent three hours answering half-a-dozen emails and staring at copy that needed approval by noon, but I still couldn’t get past the first two sentences. I also mustn’t have heard Bennett walk into my office or even begin to speak.
“Earth to Texas.”
I looked up.
He waved his hands in my line of vision. “Are you in there?”
I blinked a few times and shook my head. “Sorry. I was daydreaming on a campaign.”
Bennett squinted like he knew I was full of shit, but surprisingly, he let it go. “Come with me.” He nodded his head back toward my office door.
“Where?”
“Just come. I want to show you something.”
The fight had been sucked out of me today. So I sighed and got up. I followed him over to an alcove down the hall that held a file cabinet with closed accounts. He opened it and took out a random file. “Check out Marina.”
I looked down at the file. Whatever page was on the top was upside down. “Huh?”
He discreetly pointed his eyes in the direction of our assistant, whose desk was in our line of sight down the hall.
Following, my eyes widened “Is that…”
He turned a page in the upside-down file and grinned from ear to ear. “Yup. I think so. I did a drive-by and checked her garbage: two wadded up balls of tinfoil. And our leftovers are missing. I went looking for them to have for lunch, and when she saw me pass by, she smiled like she was on the crazy town bus with Jack Nicholson driving to go fishing.”
I laughed—something I didn’t think I’d do for a while after this morning. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
I shut the folder he was pretending to look at and dropped it into the file cabinet. “I think you’re both nuts.” I slammed the drawer.
He followed me back to my office. “At least when I ate hers, it was a legit accident.”
“Right. You meant to steal from someone else.”
“Exactly.”
I sat down behind my desk. Bennett helped himself to a visitor’s chair. Apparently, he wasn’t leaving.
“Did you bring lunch?”
“No. I forgot it in the fridge at home, actually.”
He picked up a small picture frame on my desk and examined it. It held a picture of mom and me on her wedding day to Matteo. Andrew had taken it. Bennett grinned and set it back down. “My girl l
ooked beautiful.”
I shook my head. Wiseass.
“I had a lunch meeting that canceled. Want to order in and I can show you the new logo concepts I did this morning? I’m in the mood for Greek.”
God, he’d already drawn new logos. I couldn’t afford to be distracted.
“Sure. I’ll take a gyro with the sauce on the side.”
“Great.” He stood. “And I’ll take a falafel with a side order of patates tiganites—those fried potato things.”
“What are you telling me for?”
He jammed his hands into his pockets. “So you can order. The name of the place is Santorini Palace. It’s on Main Street.”
“Me? Why am I ordering? You asked me to order with you.”
He pulled a billfold from his pocket and slipped out two twenties. “I’ll pay. But you have to order.”
“Is ordering beneath you or something?”
He walked to my door. “I went out with the woman who takes the orders a few months ago. Her family owns the place.”
“So?”
“I don’t want her to spit in my food.”
I shook my head. “You’re unbelievable.”
***
“The yellow and black look really good.”
We’d just finished lunch, and Bennett now showed me four different versions of the logo he’d developed this morning based on the sketches we came up with last night. He really was a talented artist. I pointed to the last one. “I like this one the best. The font is crisper.”
“Sold. We’ll move forward with that for our meeting with Jonas on Friday. Did you make any progress on the tagline and ad ideas.”
“I…sort of had a bad morning.”
“Get your head stuck in some other handsome guy’s windshield wiper?”
I smiled half-heartedly. “I wish. I just…I had a rough start to the day.” As if on cue, my phone began to buzz. Andrew flashed on the screen. I stared at it.
After the second ring, Bennett looked at me. “Aren’t you gonna answer that? Andy’s calling.”
“No.”
I’d thought I’d hidden my sadness, but after the phone stopped ringing, Bennett said. “You want to talk about it?”
My eyes jumped to his. His concern seemed genuine. “No. But thank you.”
He nodded and gave me a minute by cleaning up our empty food containers. When he sat back down, he turned over the paper he’d brought in with the logos and started to draw something. “I have an idea for an ad.”
I stared down at the paper the entire time he sketched, lost in thought.
“What do you think?”
I sighed. “I ran into Andrew at the gym this morning with another woman.”
Bennett wrinkled up the paper he’d just sketched on and wadded it into a ball. He leaned back in his chair, stretched his long legs out in front of him, and folded his arms across his chest.
“You just happened to run into him?”
I thought about saying yes, but decided to admit I was a loser. I hung my head and shook it.
“Who was the woman?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“What did he say?”
“Not much. He was definitely surprised to see me. I hadn’t gone to the gym in a while since it became awkward seeing him there.”
“And you’re sure they’re a couple?”
I shrugged. “He said they hadn’t come together. I think he saw in my face what it looked like to me—the same way the two of us used to walk into the gym together after spending the night at my place.”
“You said yourself that you could both see other people.”
“Saying it and seeing it are two different things.”
My phone began to buzz again. Both of us stared at Andrew’s name flashing on the phone. Before I could stop him, Bennett grabbed my phone and swiped to answer.
“Hello?”
My eyes bulged from my head as I glared a death warning at him.
“She’s…” He paused for a few heartbeats. At least I think that’s how long it was; my heart had stopped beating. “…busy right now.”
He listened and then shook his head. “This is Bennett, a good friend of Annalise’s. And who is this?”
Quiet.
“Arthur. Got it. I’ll let her know you called.”
Pause.
“Oh. Andrew. Alright, Andy. You take care now.”
Bennett swiped to end the call and tossed the phone back onto the table.
“What the hell did you just do?”
“Gave the undeserving prick something to think about.”
“You have a lot of nerve picking up my phone and answering it.”
He bent his head so we were eyelevel and stared. “Someone has to have balls with that jerk.”
Then he got up and walked out of my office.
Chapter 11
* * *
Bennett
Women are way too fucking sensitive.
I reread an email from Human Resources for the third time.
Bennett,
As you are aware, the recent merger has left many employees feeling anxious about the long-term status of their positions here at Foster, Burnett and Wren. Because of that, statements from management may be scrutinized by employees in a manner that they had not been before. As such, we ask that you, as well as all senior managers, please be cognizant of the sensitivity of your responses to employees. Please refrain from criticisms such as telling an employee that they make “too big of a deal out of things” and to “suck it up.” Although no formal complaint has been filed, these types of comments can be considered harassment and lend to a difficult work environment.
Thank you,
Mary Harmon
I knew exactly who had complained. Finley Harper. Doesn’t the name just scream I have a stick up my ass? This was all Annalise’s fault. Finley was a transplant from Wren, of course. None of my crew had ever gone to HR. Hell, just last week I’d told Jim Falcon I didn’t care if he had to blow the client, I was firing his ass if the CEO of Monroe Paint didn’t come out of the conference room smiling like the fucking idiot he was after our meeting was over.
I shook my head. Annalise and her goddamn color-coding and team spirit. She probably cries along with the people she has to fire. And, come to think of it, where the hell had she been? I hadn’t seen her since yesterday at lunch when I answered the call from her sorry-ass excuse of an ex.
Maybe I should start to say and do the opposite of everything I thought from now on around these people from Wren. Next time Finley spends a half hour complaining that a client doesn’t like designs done to their exact specifications, instead of telling her to suck it up and get back to work, I’ll sit down and ask her how it makes her feel to have a client unhappy with her work. Maybe over some tea.
And Annalise—when she asks me what I think about her so-called break, instead of being honest and telling her that her dick of an ex wants his dick sucked by someone other than her, I’ll explain that it’s normal for men to want a period of separation every so often, and that I’d bet dollars to donuts he comes back a happier and more well-adjusted man because of her understanding.
Wake the fuck up, people.
I hit reply and started to type a response to Mary in HR, then thought better of it. Instead, I went looking for Miss Sunshine who had never delivered the copy for our meeting with Jonas tomorrow.
Annalise’s door was open, but her head was buried in her computer screen. I knocked twice to get her attention and then walked in.
“Before I say anything, are you recording this conversation to bring to Human Resources? If so, let me go back to my office and change into my pink pussy pants.”
She looked up, and it felt like I’d been hit with a sledgehammer to the chest.
Crying.
Annalise was crying. At least she had been recently. Unconsciously, I rubbed at a dull ache on the left side of my ribcage.
Her face was red and pu
ffy, and a streak of mascara ran down her cheek.
I took a few steps back toward the door, and for a split second I debated not stopping. I mean, what could she be crying over? Chances are, it was either work or her ex. I was the least-competent person to give relationship advice to anyone. And work? This woman was my adversary, for God’s sake. Helping her was helping myself right out of a fucking job.
Yet instead of walking back over the threshold, I found myself pulling the door closed—with me still inside.
“You okay?” My voice was hesitant.
Women were always unpredictable, but a crying woman needed to be treated like a wounded puma lying in the plain you’re trying to cross. She could continue to lie in pain, licking wounds inflicted by someone else in silence, or she could decide at any moment to tear into an innocent bystander and feast on him for lunch.
Basically, I was scared shitless of a woman in tears.
Annalise sat up straighter in her seat and started to shuffle papers around her desk.
“Fine. I’m just finishing up the copy for the Venus meeting with Jonas tomorrow. Sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner. I’ve just been…busy.”
She’d opened the door, giving me the chance to bail on discussing anything personal, and again I failed to back up. What the fuck was wrong with me? She was waving the Advance to Go (Collect $200) card in my face; yet I reached out and plucked the Go Directly to Jail card from the pile instead.
I took a seat in a guest chair in front of me. “You wanna talk about it?”
What the fuck?
Did that just come out of my mouth?
Again?
I knew I shouldn’t have watched The Notebook a few weeks ago, but I’d been too hungover to get up and find the remote to change the channel.
Annalise looked up once more. This time our eyes met. I watched as she tried to pretend nothing was wrong and then…her bottom lip began to tremble.
“I…I spoke to Andrew a little while ago.”
The douchebag. Great. Figures he’d hurt her over the phone while she’s at work. Any guy who utters the words “We should take a break” has no balls to begin with.