by Amy Matayo
From the way Terry smirks at me over her shoulder, I’m pretty sure he senses it. Who couldn’t? He’s staring at the same girl as me. Thank a merciful God that he has a wife and four kids waiting on him at home, and I’m single. If no cares about our no-hiring-family policy, I just decided not to care about our no-dating-coworkers policy. If anyone questions it, I’ll win that battle. Now, to figure out a way to make it happen.
“I wondered if you had time for a drink,” Terry asks. I swallow a grin. He just provided the opening whether he meant to or not. “I thought we could take Mara to Callahan’s and fill her in on how things work around here. At Mr. West’s request, of course. If that works for you.” Terry looks at me for an answer, eyeing my clothing choice. He’s still wearing a suit. I’m not going backwards.
“If you don’t mind me looking like this,” I say, gesturing to my outfit. It’s a humble move, but I’m aware it’s an insincere one.
She shrugs, sliding her bag higher up her shoulder. “I think you look great. You sure you both have time? I hate to take up your Friday night.”
God bless Terry and Mr. West and all the angels that must have orchestrated this moment. “I have all the time in the world,” I say. “Give me just a second, and we’ll go.”
I watch as they walk out of my office, then sprint to my private bathroom to spritz cologne and down some mouthwash. After a quick hair check and a second to rethink my outfit, I decide I look fine and walk out to meet them.
I should have stayed inside.
I should have cancelled the plans.
I should have done a lot of things that never once occurred to me.
Instead we go out for drinks. Stay through dinner. Get to know each other. Mara posts a few photos of us online. We talk well into the evening. Nearly four hours, to be exact. Terry headed home after just one. Which left me alone with Mara for three. Time has never passed so quickly.
It’s isn’t until dessert is ordered, and I’m pouring our second bottle of wine that I remember Presley, long gone from waiting on me at a restaurant across town.
TWO
She’s back to ignoring me again, which for me is on par with a splinter in my thumb or a popcorn kernel stuck in my teeth. I’ve called her four times, and texted her three times that much and…nothing. I’m losing my mind. Ready to cut my proverbial thumb off just to make the nuisance go away. Of course I don’t blame her. I was a jerk, but she should not be this stubborn or unforgiving. It isn’t flattering. It isn’t what I’ve come to count on. Presley always forgives me, so what’s taking her so long this time? This is what I’ve asked myself all day.
Until Mara walks in wearing a red dress and matching heels and looking even better than she looked a couple of nights ago at the bar. She’s carrying a single sheet of paper in her hand but doesn’t reference it. So I don’t either.
“How are you this morning?” I say, unable to keep the eagerness out of my tone. Settle down, Leven. I make a show of studying my computer screen as though I’m concentrating on something important.
“I’m great,” she says. “I see you’ve managed to recover from your incident. No bruise, at least.” She laughs, music and lyrics all rolled into a perfect song.
I can’t help a smile. The incident involved me having a little too much to drink, tugging on my jacket, turning to leave the bar, and smacking nose-first into a metal pole right beside me. Who puts a pole in the middle of a bar? Granted, I should have remembered it was there, but I didn’t. And my nose bled for a solid minute while she ran for napkins and pressed them to my face. I’m not normally clumsy. Then again, there’s something about Mara that seems to have turned me into a different person entirely in just forty-eight short hours.
I peer up at her over my screen. “No bruise, except to my ego. It might require a few stitches and multiple layers of bandages.”
“Oh, come on.” She sits down in the chair and in front of me and leans forward. “It wasn’t that bad. I’m pretty sure at least one person didn’t turn around to look at you.” She plays with a thin gold chain around her wrist, a move that has me wishing I were the chain, and she was playing with me. I’m pathetically immature, and I know it.
I close my laptop and lean back. “Thanks. You sure know how to make a guy feel better about himself.”
“It’s what I’m counting on.” She raises an eyebrow, holding my gaze. Bold. Daring. Her long blonde hair cascades over her breasts in perfectly smooth ripples. I’d like to hold the strands in my fist, curl them around my hands.
“I’m counting on the same thing.” I laugh then. The tension between us could quickly become addictive, but I need to break it now. I’m on-air in less than thirty minutes. I need to think about the news and the terrible state of the world, not all the scenarios that might leave me completely disheveled and unable to breathe.
“So,” I say, determined to lighten the mood. “How is your first day going? Do you like the job?”
She nods. “I like it more than I thought I would. Of course, I’ve been aware of this business for a long time, but it’s far more intricate and involved than I thought it would be. And the pace. You never stop around here, do you?”
“We never stop.” I lock eyes with her. The innuendo vibrates between us, and we’re right back where we started. Refocus, Leven. “And you’ve learned all this on your first day?”
She smiles, uncrosses and crosses her legs. I don’t miss the way her skirt slides higher up her thighs. She wants me to notice. “I learned all this before I had my first cup of coffee this morning. This is a bit different than heading up charity events.”
I grin, trying to mentally fit myself into her world. It isn’t all that difficult. At the bar, Mara explained to me that up until now, her job was managing charity fundraisers put on by her family and the foundations they support. The numbers are vast, so it was a full-time job. Mara comes from money. Outrageous money. Her uncle owns this station and several downtown Atlanta properties. A wing at Emory University Hospital is named after him. It’s a lot to manage. But her job has been a solo one, run at her own pace. The pressure to perform has been entirely self-imposed. She was ready for a change, something in the real world, as she called it, so when this job came open she applied. Which meant all she needed to do was call dibs—apparently it’s the way of the wealthy and highly connected—but still the job is a challenge. Different in the level of demand. It would be that way for anyone, including her.
Including me. Talking with her the other night made me realize, maybe for the first time, that there could be a woman out there who has the same ambition in life as me. To dominate their fields and launch themselves to the top. Not a bad life by anyone’s standards.
I tent my fingers and study her. “I’m sure it is. So what brings you up here?”
She answers me, but my phone chooses that exact moment to buzz and light up with Presley’s name in big bold letters. My pulse trips in my throat; it’s all I can do to stay calm. I should ignore the phone and focus on Mara, but I can’t. I turn the phone around with a finger and quickly scan the message.
Presley: You’re a jerk. I’m not speaking to you anymore.
A boulder drops in my stomach and I flip the phone over, furious with myself for looking at the message at all and worried about her words. If threatening to never speak to me again wasn’t such a common thing, I might be a little worried. But I’m not. I’m a lot terrified. Because this time she might actually mean it. I’ve never stood her up before.
“Something wrong?” Mara asks. Her voice is smooth and soothing, and I swallow around my fear. Presley doesn’t mean it. She never means it. I’ll fix it however I have to, and we’ll get back to normal. In the meantime, the woman in front me is perfect, and she’s here right now. And she is definitely not calling me names, whether I deserve them or not.
I attempt a casual shrug. “Just an irate acquaintance. Nothing I care much about dealing with right now.” Thank God Presley can’t hear me. She’d pro
bably shoot me and leave me on the ground to bleed out.
Mara smirks. “I’ve dealt with plenty of irate people in my life, most of them family members.” She stands and places the paper on my desk. “But before you get too worked up, can you sign this? It’s a release to use your image on a billboard downtown. We’re starting a new advertising campaign next month.” I don’t miss the way she’s moved to my side, her thigh casually brushing my elbow. She’s good. Very good.
I scrawl out my signature without reading the document, thinking only of the scent hovering around her. Peppermint. Hibiscus. Sex. I’d agree to sign every page of our employee handbook if it would keep her standing here smelling like that.
“Done.” I say it like my world hasn’t suddenly been knocked off kilter, then slide the paper in front of her. I look up to see her smiling down at me, full lips, almond eyes, disarming expression. She looks nothing like Presley. I can’t help but think it.
“You busy after work tomorrow tonight?” The question is out before I think about it. “I’d like to take you to dinner if you don’t already have plans.” And I would. I just wonder if I should have checked my schedule first.
She smiles as though she’s won a little game. “Dinner it is. I’ll be in your office at seven and we’ll go from there.”
She picks up the paper and walks out, but not before her fingertip lightly traces my shoulder. It leaves a burn. Even after delivering the news for a solid hour, I can still feel the impression her touch left on my skin. To heck with schedules.
“Does he do this very often?” she asked.
We were drawing on her sidewalk again, this time before sunrise; the girl back to her pink butterflies and me drawing lightning bolts that were supposed to strike fast and kill them dead. I didn’t dare tell her, though. The girl was a rescuer, that much was obvious. She cried when we found a dead baby bird on the sidewalk and insisted we bury it under the tree. It took me twenty minutes to dig a hole big enough with the plastic spoon she grabbed from inside her house, then another five until she felt like our little impromptu funeral was sufficient enough. That was twenty minutes ago, and her tears have finally dried. I wasn’t about to admit to killing her butterflies in my mind. The fact that the lightning bolts were green rendered them a little less effective, anyway.
“Once a week or so, depending on how much he made in tips.” I could always tell if it was a good night based on three things: One, if he came home whistling. Two, if he came home and didn’t immediately scream my name to blame me for some issue—the trash not completely emptied, a dirty glass in the sink, a cabinet door left open. Or three, if he came home with a new bottle of bourbon. Bourbon isn’t cheap; he only bought the stuff when money flowed smoothly out of customers’ pockets and into his own. The only problem with this particular liquor? It was hard. I learned quickly that the hard stuff made his temper harden faster. I liked it better when my dad drank cheap wine.
“Where does he work?”
“At Davidson’s downtown.” Davidson’s was a bar situated on Wright and Fifth, a corner where the good side of town met the bad side and drew a solid yellow line. Not everyone was too intimidated to cross it. In fact, that was their slogan: We’re here to serve all sides. And they did. The wealthy, the poor, the in-between. The problem was, even though Davidson’s was inclusive and diverse, the customers weren’t. In an unspoken rule, they came in clusters and carefully divided schedules. Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays were for the uptown crowd, Tuesdays through Thursdays for the downtown. You could call for integration as much as you wanted to, but if people want to segregate themselves, that’s what they’ll do.
“He work all night?”
“Yes. He works until five a.m., then drinks for a while, then comes home like this. Most Thursday mornings, you’ll find me right here.”
“But it’s a school morning.” She said it like this wasn’t a normal occurrence. It was.
I blinked. “Normally when he sends me out, I just head to school.”
Her eyes grew wide. “But Micah, it’s only six o’clock in the morning.”
I scrubbed a hand over my eyes, wishing I were still asleep. I was dreaming hard when my dad yanked me out of bed. “Someone always lets me in by seven. If I wait at the front door, the janitor usually sees me.”
She surprised me when she took my hand in hers. “Next time it happens, come knock on my window. That’s why I’m out here, because my window was open and I heard him yelling.”
I locked my fingers around hers. I’m not sure why I felt comfortable to do it, but I did. “Okay, I will. Sorry he woke you up.”
“I think I’m the one who should be saying that to you.”
Maybe it was the way she pointed out the abnormality of my situation, but suddenly I didn’t want to be outside anymore.
“Think we could go to your house now?”
She nods and stands up, wiping chalk on her yellow pajama shorts. “Follow me. I’m hungry anyway.”
I was hungry too. I waited for her to climb through the window and then I followed. I made it all the way inside when I saw what looked like burn marks staining her bedroom curtains. An icy shiver went up my spine, the way you feel when you sense you’re very close to danger but aren’t aware of the reason. Ghosts. I decided they still lived here.
“What if your mom sees me? Will she get mad?”
She shrugs. “I’ll just tell her it’s my fault and take the blame. Most things usually are anyway.”
I probably shouldn’t have been okay with her offer, but I was. It sounded like a perfect arrangement. For once, maybe someone else could get yelled at. For once, maybe I could come out on top. I liked this girl. Something told me we would be really good friends.
That’s when I remembered I still didn’t know her name. How can you be friends with someone if you don’t even know what to call them?
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Presley. I thought I already told you.”
“Nope. Like Elvis?”
“Yep.”
“That’s weird.”
“No weirder than Micah. That’s a girl’s name.”
I stopped making fun of her name after that. If she could be named after a dead rocker and live with it, I could live with my name, which did in fact sound kinda feminine.
She hasn’t looked at me once since I walked in.
“Can you stop pacing for one second?” I ask.
It’s early the next morning, I have a long day ahead of me, I’ve just driven an hour away for no apparent reason, and Presley won’t give me a single second of attention.
“I’m not pacing. I’m working.”
“You’re not working. You’re acting like you’re working. There’s a big difference.” That gets her to stop for just a second. She plants her feet and glares at me. If shooting hot daggers were an actual thing, I’d be standing next to Satan in hell, covered like a porcupine in flaming arrows. It isn’t a pretty picture.
I’ve seen this look before, but I refuse to flinch this time. She looks away again before I have the chance.
“Just because I’m not wearing a white robe and sitting in a chair, sipping coffee while being fawned over by makeup artists practically willing to climb on my lap and give me a free dance, it doesn’t mean I’m not working.”
I’d be insulted if she wasn’t right about most of it. But none of my makeup artists have ever given me a lap dance. Is that a thing? I pause to consider it. It should be a thing. I’m losing my train of thought.
“You’ve been sweeping the floor and picking up stray bits of newspaper the whole time I’ve been here, and I know good and well you have a janitor for that. Look at me, Presley. Don’t make me regret coming here.”
She reaches for a file on a high shelf and opens it without giving me what I want. “If you regret coming here, then get in your car and drive back where you came from. No one asked you to show up in the first place.”
Where I came from. She doesn’t mean
Atlanta. The words sting, just like she intended. Presley knows exactly where I came from. She came from there too, right across the street. The difference is, I left for good a decade ago, and she came back after college. I will never understand her decision no matter how much I try. After all our discussions about how we couldn’t wait to get out, she walked right back in like our worst memories didn’t take place less than a mile from where I’m standing. That’s the problem with the idea of an us—the chasm is too deep and wide when neither one of us is willing to fill it. She’s not leaving, I’m not returning. If there’s one thing my parents taught me, it’s that nothing is worth staying in one place for. Nothing.
“Presley, stop.” I sigh, so tired and worried. There’s isn’t a lot I’m afraid of anymore, but her anger is one of them. Not because she’s violent or even all that great at staying mad, but because I can’t lose her. It’s the underlying theme of our relationship: You do your thing, and I’ll do mine. But don’t go too far because I need you to be available. No one knows why we aren’t together, sometimes even us. Deep down, I think it’s because we love each other too much to risk it. Why ruin a good thing, you know? It’s not like we had the best relationship role models. “Will you please look at me, just for a second?”
Finally she does, and that’s when I see her eyes. They’re brimming with water, little pools of liquid clinging stubbornly to the edge, refusing to fall. She’s right, I’m a jackass. One who deserves to be kicked.
I rub my bottom lip and struggle with what to say, a habit I’ve had since childhood. “I’m sorry I left you at the restaurant. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking at all, I guess.”
“Yes, you were.” One tear slips out of her eyes and runs down her cheek. She lets it fall without interruption. “You were thinking about the way your date looked in her tight dress.”
“She’s a coworker. She wasn’t a date.”