by Sara Whitney
“Thanks.” He threw the envelope on his kitchen table, and common courtesy reared its head even though he knew it could be trouble. “Do you want to come in, have a seat?”
“No, I… I’m not staying.” But she stepped over his threshold anyway, eyes darting all around his barren apartment before finally settling on her feet. She took a deep breath and blurted, “I was worried about you on Wednesday. Your Jeep was in the parking lot, but you weren’t there. Robbie had to fill me in on your boy’s night out.”
What’s that? The woman who pretended he was invisible during their last encounter actually cared if he lived or died?
He shouldn’t push the issue, but, well, he’d seen the way she looked at his chest. “You were worried? But you hate me.” He took a step toward her, not bothering to hide the challenge in his tone.
She shook her head. “I don’t though. That’s the problem.” She lifted her head, and her lips tugged downward.
“I’m sorry, Mabel. So sorry.” It seemed he hadn’t left his emotions behind after all. But she deserved this apology, just like he deserved the pain of knowing he’d caused that frown on her face. “I hate that I hurt you. I wish it could’ve been different, but—”
“But you couldn’t tell me, could you? Because of your CPA Hippocratic oath.”
He blinked as the rest of his apology was rendered moot. “Yes, actually. The penalties for violating confidentiality are no joke. My hands were tied.”
“So Brandon tells me.”
More blinking. She was going to think he had an eye problem. “Brandon?”
“Tall, blond, kind of an asshole?” She scowled, then her face softened. “He explained the trouble you could’ve gotten in if you’d said anything to me. It was… weird.”
“I imagine.” He rested his hands on his hips as he tried to picture what that conversation must’ve been like.
Mabel interrupted his thoughts by pacing toward his kitchenette, her sandals slapping against the tile. “Here’s the thing: you didn’t trust me. I thought we were building something. Why didn’t you think I could keep a secret?”
He followed her but kept the round kitchen table between them as a buffer. “Habit. I never mix personal and professional. Never had anybody I was even slightly tempted to break the rules for before.” He blew out a breath and braced for honesty. “And part of me worried that you’d go straight to Brandon and get me fired. So yeah. I guess I’m not used to trusting anybody but myself to keep my career safe.”
She wrapped her hands around a chair back and studied her knuckles. “Okay. Fair point. I suppose I’m the same with my career.”
Sadness still clung to her, and all he could do was say it again. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what though?” She let go of the chair and paced back to the living room.
He shook his head in confusion, the whole time drinking in the sight of her. In her short green dress, she was the only spot of color in his newly beige world.
She crossed her arms over her chest and leveled a look at him. “Are you sorry for not telling me? Or for hurting me when I found out?”
His mouth snapped shut, but apparently his face gave away the answer he didn’t want to say out loud, because she huffed out a bitter laugh.
“So you’re sorry for hurting me, but you still think you did the right thing by not trusting me.”
He could lie. He should lie.
But no. He at least owed her honesty now, even if it killed him. “I apologize. I’ll apologize every day for everything, but the thing is, I did do the right thing.” Disappointment moved across her face and landed like a blow to his gut, but he forced himself to continue. “Confidentiality is part of the job. I’ve sacrificed so much to get where I am, and I can’t just throw it all away.”
The length of his apartment separated them, and he keenly felt every foot of that distance. He moved toward her, desperate to make her understand. “What I’m doing with Lowell right now is going to get me a partnership, finally. I couldn’t jeopardize that, couldn’t jeopardize my whole life. Not even for whatever we are.”
“Whatever we were,” she whispered.
Her defeated tone stripped away the last of his pretenses. All his promises to himself about recommitting to work and pushing aside his hopes for a relationship fell away when he looked at her. He still wanted her, and he wouldn’t, couldn’t, walk away from those feelings yet, not after he’d lived without them for as long as he had.
“We were amazing.” He closed the distance between them to stand in front of her. “We could still be amazing.”
Bam. The temperature in the room jumped twenty degrees. The tips of his running shoes brushed against her purple-polished toenails as she tipped her head up to meet his eyes.
“No. We can’t. I have to stay away from you.” But even as she spoke the words, her body swayed toward his.
“Why?” he rasped. “I mean, I know why. I work for Lowell, I wasn’t honest with you, you’ve had bad past experiences. But that’s done now; the decisions are made. Why keep fighting this?”
She shook her head slowly. “Because… because it’s not safe for me.” She probably didn’t mean to give away what she was thinking, but her hand drifted up to press against her heart.
He covered it with his own, relishing the press of his skin against hers. “I’m not dangerous.”
“You are.” Her voice cracked in the quiet of his apartment, and she shook off his hand, spinning to make a restless circuit toward his kitchen. “I let myself start to care for you, and then you couldn’t even meet my eyes in that meeting. I get that you had no choice, and I get that it’s irrational for me to be angry with you for that. But you hurt me.” She folded her arms. “I just… I don’t think we’re a good idea.”
He ran his hands through his still-damp hair and let them fall to his sides, panic surging in his chest. “So, what, we keep it professional then? Ignore all this chemistry?”
His heart slammed against his ribs as he watched the animation drain from her face to be replaced by remote politeness. She was closing the door on their relationship, this door that almost never opened for him, and all he could do was stand by and watch her do it.
“Yes.” She lifted her chin. “From now on, it’s professional Mabel or no Mabel at all.” She twined her fingers together at her waist as she waited for his answer.
He sucked in a deep breath. “Nothing at all then.” He fought to speak through the despair that threatened to suffocate him.
Silence followed his words until Mabel broke it with an unamused laugh. “Okay. I get it.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
She didn’t know about him. He hadn’t explained what it meant for a demisexual to fall for someone. How rare it was, how deep his feelings ran. How after Asha, he’d believed that he’d never find another woman who would draw this out of him. Not until Mabel came along with her voice and her wit and her body. Fuck, what if he never found that again? What if this was his last chance? What if she was the one, his person?
But he clenched his jaw and said nothing. Telling her any of that now would just pressure her, manipulate her even, and he’d never do that to her. But he could touch her one more time, and so he did. He cupped her jaw and stroked his thumb over her cheek and down across her lower lip. She gave a shuddering sigh and closed her eyes, leaning into his palm as he struggled to find the words to explain without explaining why he was making this choice.
“Just for a little while, I can’t…” He inhaled hard. “Seeing you but not being able to touch you is too hard right now.”
He needed time to grieve, to lick his wounds. But when he searched her face for some indication that she understood that this was the opposite of a rejection, her features were an expressionless mask.
She pulled away abruptly and spoke with a crispness in her tone that he’d never heard before. “Message received. I’ll steer clear if I see you around the office. Bye, Jake.”
Sh
e turned and walked out of his apartment without another word.
This is what he should want. It’s what the Jake of three months ago would’ve wanted. But it wasn’t what he wanted now, not that it mattered. Still, he’d respect her decision and go back to his solitary, work-focused life. He survived his last breakup. He’d survive this too.
She was gone, and he was alone, his sweat drying to a sticky film on his skin.
Twenty-One
Mabel’s eyes snapped open at four forty-five a.m. on Monday. She hadn’t set any alarms, but apparently her body no longer needed external stimulus to get her out of bed that early.
“This is a terrible superpower,” she grumbled to Tybalt, who lifted his furry head from the foot of the bed, cracked one eye open in a withering feline glare, and dropped right back to sleep. She groaned and mashed her pillow over her face, shouting into the goose down. “The only good thing about this situation is that I get to sleep in, and I can’t even do that right!”
Grumbling, she flopped and repositioned herself, but by five thirty, she admitted defeat and rolled out of bed, shuffling into the kitchen to dump a heap of coffee into a filter.
As the machine burbled to life, she plunked herself down at the kitchen island and propped her feet on the stool next to her, picking up her phone.
Mabel: Don’t you dare be too funny without me.
Ten seconds later, Dave’s reply zipped back: Weird in here without your hideous face.
She immediately pulled a cross-eyed grimace, snapped a pic, and hit Send. It was almost like being there with him.
Except that it wasn’t. Like, not at all.
With a self-pitying sigh, she filled her mug and hesitated in front of the radio in her kitchen. Listening was masochistic. Not listening was wallowing in denial.
“Go big or go home,” she announced to her empty kitchen as she pressed the power button.
She listened to every minute of Dave’s first solo show. It was awful. Not the show, of course. It was solid enough. She thought he did better matching wits with another person, but then again, she was probably biased. But she and Dave had been a broadcasting duo since they’d been paired up on a group project their sophomore year. Not being in the studio with him that morning felt wrong. So she sipped her coffee and nurtured her loathing of Brandon, the cause of her misery. She moved from the kitchen to the living room couch, where she ate handfuls of dry cereal out of the box; to the bathroom so she could shower; then back to the living room, where she stared at the wall as Dave thanked the listeners for putting up with his first solo outing and signed off.
“Well, the world didn’t end after all,” she informed the cat snoozing on her lap as her phone buzzed.
Dave: Guess the world didn’t end.
She barked out a laugh. That Arrogant Asshole could separate them, but it didn’t mean they weren’t still psychically linked.
She arrived at the station around eleven and parked in one of the available slots on the shade-free side of the lot. Yet another grievance to add to Brandon’s pile: no longer having her choice of parking spots. Nerves propelled her through the parking lot and into the studio, where she’d left herself plenty of time to prep. A solo show was a whole different beast, and she’d be radically changing her usual presentation. She felt like she was standing at the edge of a cliff while her evil new boss stood behind her with a hand on her back, nudging her toward the edge.
She claimed the new desk in the greenroom and listlessly read through Google news while Skip ran his show on the other side of the glass. Until now, she hadn’t fully appreciated the talent it took to make talking to yourself for hours entertaining. Skip was a master, rattling away about the finer points of the weekend’s White Sox game. Lucky him; sports would be a disaster for her.
Frustrated, she slammed her laptop shut and opened the door to the booth as soon as the On Air sign turned off. She dropped into the chair opposite Skip and wilted dramatically over the side. “I can’t do this.”
He glanced up from the computer screen where he was searching through songs. “You’re gonna have to, sister. They already sold the ad time.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, anything to make Lowell Consolidated a little richer.” Mabel shifted to drape her legs over the left arm of the chair, deciding that the early-afternoon sunlight slanting through the slats of the venetian blinds would bathe her in angelic light. Poor Mabel, martyred at the altar of profit to appease the gods of rock ’n’ roll. She tossed her head back dramatically.
“Why are you squirming? That chair’s wobbly, and you’re making it worse.”
“Fine.” She grudgingly straightened herself and watched Skip do his thing for the rest of his shift. With ten minutes to go before her afternoon debut, they switched places so she could take over the control board.
“You ready for this, kiddo?” he asked, caterpillar eyebrows arching upward.
She puffed her cheeks with air and exhaled. “Nope. But I don’t think I’ll ever be, you know?”
“I kept a bucket next to me so I could throw up between bits during my first solo show twenty years ago.”
Mabel leaned her elbows on the counter. “Wow, Skip. Thank you. That’s so… disgusting.”
His laughter carried him out the door, leaving her to her final prep. She needed to stop being a drama queen. She’d flown solo plenty of times in the past when Dave was sick or when she filled in for vacationing deejays. She knew how to work a board, and she knew how to fill the hours on air.
“You’ll be fine,” she muttered. “You can do this.” God, was talking to herself round-the-clock her new solo-show persona?
With three minutes until airtime, she nervously clenched and released her fists a few times and reached for her headset. Before she settled it around her neck though, the greenroom door burst open and Dave marched into the studio, wordlessly pulled her out of the chair and into a tight hug, then spun around and left.
That’s what she needed to slow down her heartbeat and boost her confidence. She was alone, but she wasn’t alone, and the thought wrapped its soft, fuzzy arms around her as she queued up her opening song—“All by Myself,” natch.
She flipped on the mic, shuffled her notes, and was hit by a bolt of inspiration so stupid, so ridiculous, so oh-my-God-Brandon-will-hate-this, that every part of her recoiled. She couldn’t do that, obviously.
But when she opened her mouth, it rolled out, unbidden. “Good afternoon, Beaucoeur! It’s Mae Bell here to take you through your commute home. As always, I’m joined by my partner, Dave.”
She let dead air sit for six seconds, about the length of time Dave would take to introduce himself and throw it back to her.
She picked up as if he had. “That’s right, Dave, it is weird to be on the air this late in the afternoon. What’s that big glowing yellow ball hovering over the horizon?”
Silence.
“Wait, I shouldn’t look directly at it? Well, I wish you’d warned me earlier.”
More silence.
“Hospital? I don’t think so. I’m sure this blindness is just temporary.”
And then she really committed to the bit, intentionally knocking over a stack of CDs on the desk to her left. They tumbled to the floor with an audible clatter.
“Ummm, Dave? Tell me I didn’t just knock over one of the fancy pieces of equipment that our new station owners bought us.”
Siiiiileeeence.
“Uh-oh. Guess I’d better play some Soundgarden in honor of this strange and confusing time of day.”
Mabel hit Play on “Black Hole Sun,” then leaned back in her chair, smiled, and waited for the next break.
After twenty more minutes of talking to imaginary Dave, she ducked beneath the counter, stretching the cord on her headset to the limit to rummage in her purse for some ChapStick. When she righted herself, she shrieked and grabbed her chest.
“Jesus! What if I’d been on the air?”
Brandon leaned against the doorway. “Yes, what
a shame to ruin such an entertaining show.”
She yanked the cans off her head. “What the hell do you— Um, what can I do for you?” She’d been expecting him at some point, but his appearance still had her heart thundering.
He pushed off the doorframe and strolled into the small room, stopping at the cluttered counter along the far wall to poke at the big magnet that erased the now-obsolete carts the station had used for commercials once upon a time. He straightened a tottering pile of fast-food napkins on the counter, then turned to face her.
“Knock it off,” he said.
She widened her eyes. Who, me? But he just looked steadily at her as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs played in the background, warning them that heads will roll. Man, he was good at the silent rebuke thing.
She broke first, muttering like a sullen teenager, “Fine. Whatever.”
“I don’t want to hear the name Dave even one more time on your show. Clear?”
Her lips twitched as a new idea hatched in her brain. He narrowed his eyes, obviously seeing something on her face he didn’t like, but she pasted on an innocent smile and said, “I’ll stop referring to my former cohost. Promise.” She traced a dramatic X over her heart, and after one last glare, he left the booth with a scowl. Well, he should be frowning. He’d just handed her her next move.
When the song ended, Mabel was back on, this time talking in standard deejay patter, no invisible cohost this time. But she spent the next hour introducing every song she could think of with Dave in the name. The Dave Matthews Band was low-hanging fruit. Then Joan Baez’s “A Song for David,” and her personal favorite, “David Duchovny” by Bree Sharp. She had to do a deep dive into the station’s archives to come up with “Dave” by the Boomtown Rats and “David Watts” by the Kinks, but it was worth it.
It took longer than she expected, but an hour into her all-Dave rock block, Brandon appeared outside the studio window, legs planted and arms crossed.
She flashed him a delighted smile as she flipped on the mic and said, “After the break, I’ve got David Bowie’s ‘Heroes.’ Hey, do you think David Bowie ever went by Dave?”