Listed: Volume II

by Adams, Noelle

  Listed

  Volume II

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks referenced in this work of fiction: Tylenol, Advil, Tiffany & Co., and Jeep.

  Contents

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Publishing Schedule

  Four

  Paul needed more coffee.

  He’d had four cups already this morning, but he’d gotten up just after four o'clock, run on the treadmill, showered, dressed, and had been working in his study for four hours.

  His old friends wouldn’t recognize him. Sometimes, he couldn’t even recognize himself.

  Not too long ago, he’d been in the habit of sleeping late, often until noon. Ever since his mother died, though, he’d been waking up earlier and earlier, compelled by some unstoppable need to move, to act, to do.

  He’d only been at his job a week, but he’d already fallen behind because of the wedding and the deposition. He knew the board had him on a very short leash, and he was determined to prove himself, for once in his life.

  So, after they’d wrapped up the deposition in the early afternoon yesterday, Paul spent several hours catching up while Emily rested, and then he’d woken up early today and had managed to get through all the tasks and messages that had piled up in his inbox.

  Paul felt better without the weight of all that work pressing down on him. So far, the board could have no reason to complain about his performance.

  As soon as he opened the door of his home office, he was greeted to a warm, familiar scent. He followed it down the hall toward the kitchen, sniffing the air like a rapt bloodhound.

  He found Emily at the end of his search.

  She sat on folded legs on a stool at the kitchen bar, leaning in a relaxed sprawl on the black granite countertop and focused intently on her smart phone. Her fingers curved loosely around a mug of coffee.

  She was probably texting Chris again. She’d talked to him on the phone more than two hours the previous evening. Paul knew because he’d heard her talking to the boy in the media room when he passed by at eight in the evening, and she was still on the phone with him when Paul got up to stretch his legs again at ten o’clock.

  Paul doubted Emily would have enough to say to him for that long.

  “Hey,” she said, smiling brightly when she glanced up and saw him standing there. “I’m making cinnamon rolls!”

  “I can smell them.” He wandered into the kitchen toward the coffee maker. “I’m very impressed by your culinary energies.”

  “Don’t be too impressed. They’re just the pop-out-and-bake kind.”

  “Ah,” he murmured, pouring fresh coffee into his mug. “Then I’m less impressed.”

  “Well, they still taste good. And I went through the trouble of asking Ruth to buy them for me yesterday. Then I popped them out, put them on the tray, and stuck them in the oven—which is more culinary energy than you exerted this morning, Mr. Boring-Protein-Bar-with-his-Coffee.”

  He chuckled at her choice of words and tried to peer into one of the ovens to see how far along the cinnamon rolls were.

  “So you don’t have to pooh-pooh my efforts.” She’d gotten up and walked around the bar to pour herself more coffee too, but she gave him a decidedly peeved look over her shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t dream of pooh-poohing your efforts.” He tried to suppress a smile as he reached into the refrigerator for the half-and-half and handed it to her. “I’ve never had the pop-out kind before, but they smell good.”

  After doctoring her coffee, Emily leaned back against the counter, holding her mug with both hands. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, pleasure evident on her face. “I love that smell.”

  He stared at her silently for a moment as he sipped his coffee, wondering how she managed to so genuinely enjoy herself—enjoy such little things—when tragedy had struck her so hard, when the shadows had closed in around her so ruthlessly.

  He’d understood her the other night when they’d talked in the car after their trip to the lake. He’d known exactly what she was feeling, since he’d felt those shadows before too.

  He knew he wouldn’t have been able to handle circumstances like Emily’s with such courage and resilience. If he’d been told he had so little time to live, he was pretty sure he would drink himself into a three-month-long stupor or maybe just shoot himself.

  He understood Emily’s shadows, but he didn’t understand how she was managing to hold them back.

  He had his own shadows. His father was waiting for trial, and Paul would have to testify against him. Even with his intense focus on his new job and his responsibilities with Emily, Paul could barely manage to hold those shadows back.

  After a moment, Emily opened her eyes again and caught him staring at her. She gave him an impatient frown, the one he was starting to recognize as her thinking he was feeling sorry for her.

  Her annoyance was fleeting, and she stepped over to check on the rolls, peeking into the oven after she’d opened the door an inch. “They’re starting to puff up,” she informed him, as if he’d been waiting for this update. “But they still have a few more minutes.”

  Since he had time to kill, he went over to the entry table and got the three newspapers that were delivered to the apartment every morning. His mother had always had daily subscriptions, and Paul couldn’t bring himself to cancel them, even though he almost always read the news online.

  Emily had sat down again, but as he returned he caught her scanning him from his head to bare feet with a little sneer.

  “What?” he asked, genuinely baffled by her apparent disapproval of how he looked. Since he wasn’t going anywhere this morning, he hadn’t thought much about his appearance, but he seemed to be basically presentable in khakis and a black t-shirt.

  She gave him a disdainful sniff. “Do you always have to look so nice and pulled together, even first thing in the morning?”

  Paul’s eyes widened in surprise. He wasn’t dressed up. His trousers were slightly wrinkled and he wasn’t wearing shoes.

  Evidently recognizing his astonishment, Emily explained, “I’ve never seen you sloppy. Don’t you ever just hang around in your pajamas?”

  Sometimes he did, but Paul had made a point of not doing so when Emily was around. It didn’t seem quite right to lounge around half-dressed with a dying, seventeen-year-old girl in the house.

  Emily evidently had no such qualms. This morning, she was wearing what she’d obviously slept in—a little black tank-top and gray, cotton pajama pants. She was barefoot, and her hair looked unbrushed, hanging around her shoulders in messy waves, almost red-gold in the morning light.

  It made Paul a little uncomfortable to have Emily looking so much like she’d just rolled out of bed, but he didn’t have the heart to ask her to not go around so under-dressed. She should be able to feel at home here.

  He just had to make sure not to look at her too closely.

  When he saw her eyeing him strangely, he realized he’d never answered her question. “It’s not first thing in the morning for me,” he explained, shifting the conversation to something more impersonal. “I’ve been up since four.”

  She shook her head. “That’s just wrong.”

  He gave a huff of laughter, took the newspapers to the bar, and sat down on
the stool next to her. “I haven’t been able to sleep in lately, for some reason, and I’ve found I can get a lot of work done in those early hours of the morning.”

  “Did I make you really behind at your job?” she asked, a flicker of concern in her eyes.

  “No. I’m all caught up now.”

  “Are you sure? If you need to work, just tell me. I know you’re just starting out in this position, and they might be looking over your shoulder all the time. You really don’t have to do all the stuff on my list with me. It’s really okay if you—”

  “Emily, stop,” he interrupted, a little sharply. “I’ll tell you if I’m too busy.”

  She frowned at his tone. “Okay. I just worry. I don’t like to be a nuisance. Are they really dumping all their unwanted projects on you?”

  “Yes. Some of this stuff has been sitting on other people’s desks for months, and now they have someone to give it to.” He heard an edge of bitterness in his tone, so he tried to temper it—not wanting to sound like he was whining.

  “What kind of work is it? Just stupid, tedious stuff?”

  “No. Well, yeah, there is some tedious stuff, but my position is too high on the food chain to waste on entry-level work. I’m getting all of these no-win projects—the stuff everyone knows is going nowhere good and so no one wants to take on. Like the reorganization of one of the departments.”

  “What’s so hard about that?”

  “I don’t see how it can be done without firing a third of the personnel. I’m sure no one else can figure out how either, which is why they stuck me with it.”

  She made a face. “Oh. That’s awful.”

  For some reason, her sympathy was comforting. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can think of some creative way to do it and not fire all those people. They might think it’s a no-win project, but they don’t know how brilliant you are.”

  He snorted, although he was rather pleased by the off-hand compliment. “You have no evidence of said brilliance.”

  “Are you kidding me? You graduated from the Ivy Leagues and then got your MBA without ever slowing down your partying and crazy adventure sports. There’s no way you could have done that if you weren’t naturally brilliant. If you keep working as hard as you have this week, you’ll figure out all of those projects. They’ll see you aren’t the reckless kid they think. Everyone will be awed by you.” She patted his arm in a casually supportive gesture.

  He felt strangely self-conscious and looked down at the front page of the newspaper. “You’re pretty good at the supportive-wife act for just being married a week.”

  She giggled. “I must be naturally talented at it.”

  They smiled at each other, and Paul had the oddest sensation of being heard.

  Emily gasped and jerked upright. “The cinnamon rolls!” she squeaked, scrambling off the stool and running over to the oven. She grabbed a hot pad and pulled the tray out, dropping it on the counter.

  “Are they all right?” he asked, leaning over to get a look at how well-done the rolls had ended up.

  “Yeah,” she said, relief evident in her tone, “They’re not burned. Just a little browner than I usually make them.”

  She already seemed to know her way around the kitchen, since she easily found a big plate and two knives. She grabbed each hot cinnamon roll between her finger and thumb and quickly dropped them over onto the plate.

  “You should wait until they cool down a little,” he said, when she blew on her fingers.

  She frowned. “They need to be iced while they’re hot.”

  “Ah. I didn’t know there was icing.”

  “Of course, there’s icing!” She brought the plate over to the bar and, after picking up a little tub of white icing, she handed him a knife.

  Paul took the knife automatically and then stared at it in his hand blankly.

  Emily climbed back onto her stool, grinning. “Now,” she said, as if she was making a great concession, “You can help, but you can’t hog the icing. They never give us enough in these little tubs.”

  He watched as she scooped an enthusiastic amount of thick icing onto her knife.

  As she slathered the icing onto the biggest of the five large cinnamon rolls, he dipped his own knife in the icing. He’d never iced cinnamon rolls before, but it seemed to be a fairly simple process, so he moved one of the rolls on the plate closer to him and coated the top smoothly.

  Emily was already digging into the tub with her knife for more, but she paused to watch him. “You don’t have to be so neat,” she told him with another frown.

  Paul blinked in surprise. He hadn’t been trying to make his icing neat, but a quick glance from his to Emily’s haphazardly iced roll made the difference clear.

  “You have to go fast, or they’ll start to get cold,” Emily added, smearing the icing on a second roll.

  Paul obediently sped up his icing process on the second of his cinnamon rolls. Then, while Emily iced the final one, he used the remainder of the icing to add to the rolls that had been cheated.

  “Now, then,” Emily said, her eyes laughing as she put down her knife on the counter and picked up the roll with the most icing. “Finally.”

  He watched in amusement as she took a big bite and closed her eyes with a little moan of pleasure.

  When she opened her eyes, she gestured toward the plate. “Aren't you going to have one?”

  Paul picked one up and took a bite. It was too sweet, of course, but the taste matched the warm, pleasant scent, and he realized he was hungry.

  They each ate two of the cinnamon rolls. When Paul was returning to his stool after refilling both of their coffee mugs, he noticed Emily eyeing the last roll greedily.

  “You can have it,” he told her, marveling that she could eat so much when she seemed so small to him. He wasn’t so foolish as to tell her that, of course.

  She shook her head with a little smile and pulled the last one apart, offering him one very messy half.

  Paul didn’t really want it, but he ate it anyway.

  Emily gave a happy sigh as she finished, but then she put a hand on her stomach. “Oh, I feel sick. I ate too much.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh.

  “You shouldn’t mock me when you reaped the benefits of my culinary energies this morning.”

  “I did,” he acknowledged, trying to suppress another ripple of laughter. “And I greatly appreciate it.”

  Paul felt a little sticky from the icing, so he got up to wash his hands. When he returned to the bar, he saw that Emily had gone back to her smart phone.

  “How’s Chris?” he asked casually.

  “He’s fine. I talked to him last night.” Then she seemed to realize what had prompted the question. “Oh, I’m not texting Chris. I was just reading.”

  “What are you reading?” Paul asked, leaning over from his stool to peer at the screen of her phone.

  Emily looked a little sheepish, but she replied readily enough. “Shakespeare.” At his questioning look, she explained, “One of the things on my list is to read all of Shakespeare’s plays. I still have a ways to go.”

  “Which one are you on?” he asked.

  “Coriolanus,” she said with a curl of her mouth.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She shook with laughter at his dry tone. Then she explained, “I’ve read all the normal ones. Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, Merchant of Venice.” She paused, evidently trying to think if she’d forgotten anything. “So now I’m stuck with the less appealing ones. I haven’t even started the history plays yet, since they scare me.”

  “Actually, the two parts of Henry IV, Henry V, and Richard III are really good. You’ll probably like them. But I’m afraid you do still have some rough going. Wait until you get to Titus Andronicus.”

  “Don’t scare me this early.” Emily made a face, but then she square
d her shoulders. “But I can do it. I’m a pretty fast reader, although it’s harder to get through Shakespeare than it is a novel.”

  “The more you read of him, the easier it gets. After a few more plays, you’ll probably be able to get through them pretty quickly.” He thought through the list she’d just rehearsed. “Wait, you haven’t read Hamlet?”

  “Not yet. It was never assigned in school, and now I’m saving it until the end.” She glanced away, a flicker of emotion on her face. “I mean the end of the plays.”

  “I know,” he said quietly, his relaxed mood subdued by this reminder of the shortness of her life. “It will be a great one to read last. If someone was only going to read one work from all of English literature, it should be Hamlet.”

  He suddenly realized he sounded rather nerdy. He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before.

  He had no idea what had happened to him in the last six months.

  She smiled, evidently not thinking there was anything unusual about his discoursing on literature. “Then I’ll have it to look forward to, since you like it so much.”

  Paul cleared his throat and returned to a less emotionally-charged topic. “Why are you trying to read the plays on your phone? That can’t be easy.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t have copies of most of them, but they're all available for free online. I use my computer too, when it’s convenient.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’ll buy you copies of them. You’ll strain your eyes trying to read that way, and it will take even longer to get through them.”

  “I don’t like for you to have to buy me everything. It will be a waste of money, since I won’t be around for—”

  “Paperbacks don’t cost that much,” he interrupted, feeling a familiar swell of frustration at her stubbornness. “Actually, I think I have something here…”

  He got up before Emily could argue and walked back to his office, trying to force down his annoyance.

  He’d meant what he told her in the car on Friday night about trying not to bulldoze her. He’d resolved to try to hear her side of things and make any compromises he could legitimately make.