by Susan Conley
I’m outta here, Annabelle thought just as Kelli appeared at the top of the next flight. “There you are, sugar! We’re all just waiting for you!”
Annabelle smiled wanly up at the vision that had appeared on the landing, turned out in a severely tailored oyster-colored designer suit. Unlike the majority of New York females of ‘a certain age’, Kelli actively cultivated a settled and matronly air, mitigated by expensive clothes and unmistakably real baubles. Her ash-blonde hair looked entirely natural, and her seemingly innocent ice-blue gaze was bracketed by barely discernible lines. In spite of all this — the Ladies Who Lunch suit, the limpid gaze, and the lazy drawl, Annabelle knew that if she so much as made a move to leave, Kelli would be on her like a puma on an antelope.
She meekly followed Kelli into the exclusive eatery’s ritzy private dining room.
Head down, she charged toward the only empty place, uncomfortably squeezing her bags between the table and her lap. She nodded to what looked like several ethereal dancers across the table, and sneaked a glance down the long — Maria Grazia!
She raised her eyebrows slightly. What are you doing here.
MG flicked her lashes at Kelli.
Annabelle waggled her head a shade. Thought you were immune …
Maria Grazia lightly rubbed her thumb over the fingertips of her right hand. Amex.
Annabelle smirked and sat back, and began arranging the tools of her trade on the table. She knew that Kelli liked to get business out of the way of the enjoyment of not only the food, but also of her own particular brand of bonding, which involved the amplification of everyone’s accomplishments, a continual recital of the project’s worth, a gentle reminder to all and sundry of the career-boosting properties of the job at hand, and matchmaking.
Laptop was joined by pad and pen. Annabelle could cross-platform multitask, and relished any opportunity to do so. She set up her micro-cassette recorder with its multi-directional mic — better safe than sorry — and rolled some tape.
“Testing … testing … one, two, three — ”
“Da da dada dum DADA dada dum — ”
Annabelle heard the voice — a wordless rendering of the opening bars of New York, New York, in just about the worst Frank Sinatra impression she’d ever heard — but all she saw, at first, was an arm, male, sheathed in a blinding white shirt. The sleeve was turned up to reveal a rather fine specimen of forearm, but her vision was filled with the whiteness of the shirt, and the texture of lovely, heavy cotton. Her nose twitched, entranced by the shirt’s freshly laundered scent, with just the hint of the heat of the iron lingering. What was it about a clean white shirt on a man? A nicely pressed white shirt, as she let her gaze slide upwards, that billowed over the outline of a solid bicep, that clung so evocatively to a strong male shoulder?
She cut her eyes up to the face that was smiling down at her. Green eyes, tousled auburn hair, and a dimple in the cheek greeted her discomfited gaze. Her apparent chagrin only increased the blinding quality of his grin.
He shrugged. “Thought it might give you something more interesting to listen to.”
Annabelle rewound, the screech of the tape covering her increasing … What? Her increasing what? So what, she thought, cute guy, with an accent, nice shirt, dime a dozen — is my hand shaking?
She played it back, and grimaced as his voice came on. “Your Liza Minelli needs work,” she … teased? What? Am I teasing? What am I doing?
“Ah, now, no need to pander to the ego,” he rejoined, and bumped her shoulder with his.
Which she ignored, because she got a look at what was spread before him on the table. “Is that — ” she gasped for air. “What is that, that … mess?” She looked up at him — Up? Was he tall on top of everything else? Wait, what ‘else’?
And Jamie Flynn’s first good look at Annabelle Walsh involved two very wide, very outraged, and very, very blue eyes.
“What, my gear?” He looked down at his pencils, colored and otherwise, the sheets of slightly crumpled paper, the pad that had long since lost its cover, the edges of the pages curling willy nilly, the squashed tubes of gouache, the battered brushes, and the large and a blackened wad of kneaded eraser.
“It’s a mess!” Annabelle squeaked, and had to sit on her hands to resist smoothing the papers, lining up the brushes, and squeezing the bottom of each and every tube of paint until they were uniformly ready to dispense color evenly and manageably. “Is that how you treat your tools?”
“Now that’s a kinda personal question.”
Annabelle grimaced. “And was that supposed to be Mae West?”
“Are you keeping your sense of humor packed away somewhere in that unimaginatively orderly rucksack?” He gestured with a chewed-up charcoal pencil, a look of equal distaste on his face.
“This, if you must know, is the way a professional keeps on her toes when on location, when the number of variables that would impede a successful transcription of events naturally increase a thousand-fold.” Annabelle pretended to tend to her laptop, even though it was already well tended.
“Calm yourself, missus, I’m only joking you.” He reached into a brown paper bag (Annabelle actually closed her eyes) and tossed some more arty implements down on the pile. “You really shouldn’t scold strange men about their tools.”
Annabelle turned and tried to keep her eyes off the growing pile of disorganized stuff that was spreading all over the floor like a virus. “Hmmm,” she said, changing the subject. “Irish.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Indeed.”
Kelli came meandering by, a bit breathless, as usual. “We’re just now about to start, ya’ll. So exciting. Oh, have you two met? Annabelle Walsh, Jamie Flynn. Jamie, Annabelle.”
“Sort of,” said Annabelle, cutting her eyes at him.
“She’s been criticizing my tools,” Jamie said, cutting his eyes right back.
“Isn’t that fiiiiine,” Kelli murmured, absently, and meandered away again.
Jamie looked at Annabelle and laughed, and she felt a weird little thrill, something that reminded her of something else that she couldn’t put her finger on. This thrill was located somewhere in her belly, and it rolled around as if she’d unexpectedly swallowed a goldfish. She immediately felt self-conscious, and began to move things around in front of her. Was she flustered, or something? She was definitely nervous all of a sudden, the gleam in Jamie’s eye triggering something kind of simple and kind of complicated at the same time. She grabbed her wine glass.
“So, you’re the playwright?” Jamie shifted in his chair to fully face Annabelle. Maria Grazia, who had been meditating over a glass of truly fine Bordeaux, perked up, curious.
“God, no!” Annabelle booted up Word. “I’m a writer, but I think in this instance, I’m more of a scribe.”
“I’ve got some parchment in here if you’d rather go the medieval route — ”
“Don’t! Don’t take anything else out of that bag!”
Jamie laughed again. “I don’t need to take my show on the road, generally, as it were.”
“Aren’t you the set designer, or something?”
“Uh, no. Doing Kelli a favor … ”
“You and everybody else,” Annabelle muttered into her wine.
“’She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.’”
“Excellently rendered Robert Redford — ”
“Ah, now. You’re just winding me up.”
“So, what do you do?” Annabelle twirled her wine glass — and then made herself stop. Just a question, she thought. Not flirting.
“I’m a painter,” Jamie replied. “Well, you know. I paint, not so much selling yet, but some. I restore things, paintings, painted furniture, and the like. So I’m a restorer-slash-painter.”
“Slashed, huh? So you must be living here for a while.”
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“A good few years, almost six and a half.”
Any continuing banter was interrupted by Kelli’s suddenly business-like voice delivering her spiel. Annabelle listened with half an ear, aware of the guy beside her, aware of Maria Grazia signaling her from her end of the table. MG spun her butter knife around to point in The Irish Guy’s direction.
Annabelle shrugged her right shoulder a fraction. So?
Maria Grazia tucked a curl behind her right ear and tilted up her chin. So who is he?
Some guy. Annabelle flicked her fingers dismissively.
Maria Grazia blinked slowly. Hot.
Annabelle took up her pen and began to make nonsensical notes. Stop it.
MG smiled into her wine, but stopped it.
The pitch — which wasn’t really necessary, they all could use the abundant funds Kelli was sending their way — was brief, ardently attended by the dancer types, who were painfully sincere, and somewhat less zealously heeded by those who felt shanghaied. Annabelle snuck a look at her watch, energy flagging, that dragging feeling of sadness and emptiness threatening to swell —
“Sorry?” Annabelle looked up as Jamie’s elbow nudged her side. “Yes?”
Kelli smiled brightly, a sure sign she was peeved. “I was just sayin’, sugar, that this was where you come in! We need words, words that encapsulate the essence of the work. Beautiful words. Unique words. Nouns. Verbs. Adjectives.”
They all looked expectantly at Annabelle, Jamie managing to mug at her with only half his face.
“Uh. Sure. Can you give me an idea of what you’re looking for?” Good bluff.
“Nice one,” Jamie whispered, finding himself having to resist reaching out to flick her blushing cheek playfully.
Kelli took a deep breath. The dancers joined her as one, with hands clasped at their hearts. “Scallop. Waft. Bedazzle.”
Jesus. Annabelle dutifully typed them into the blank document as the dancers cooed. “Got it,” she said, and stifled a sigh.
“Wonderful!” Kelli enthused, and called a halt to the proceedings.
“Need some help?” Jamie leaned in again as Annabelle shut everything down. “Let’s see. Gallop. Shoelace. Noodle — ” As she laughed up at him, the first true smile he’d seen on her face, he added a few to himself: Gorgeous. Bright. Sexy …
Annabelle tidily returned everything to its place in her bag, and tried to keep her itching fingers away from Jamie’s brushes. Surely she had some zip-close plastic bags on her; she rarely went anywhere without them, and she could casually offer to show him how easy it would be to scoop up the tubes of paint and put them in the —
“I see I was a bit too hard on ya.”
Annabelle broke out of her reverie. “Huh?”
Jamie pointed at her bag. “That. It’s a nice touch.”
Annabelle glanced down at her bag. Tucked into a corner as if it was meant to be there was one of the blossoms off the mystery monster plant. “Hmph,” she huffed, and glared at it, and then, by extension, Jamie. This seemed to strike him as funny, and he snickered again, a mischievous little giggle that sounded as if it had its roots in his childhood.
“Surely I’m not to blame for that as well — ”
“Everyone! Let’s all move ourselves around now, we must all meet one another if we’re going to be a team!”
‘Everyone’ rose, and began to mill about, changing places. A scenic designer started brandishing an old-fashioned Polaroid camera, one that actually spit out pictures, right there, in the moment, and Kelli nearly swooned. Jamie swept his gear off the table into the paper bag, and was treated to another shocked glare from Annabelle. He did take care, however, with the pencil sketch he’d done of her, of her smiling face …
The meal dragged on. Trapped between two mimes, Annabelle ate as quickly as was humanly possible, refused a coffee, and said her goodbyes to Kelli. Maria Grazia tapped her throat — Call me! — and Annabelle tried to ignore the staring Irishman, until, annoyed at his gawking, she stuck her tongue out at him and left.
“She’s a funny way of flirting with a fella,” he murmured, but not indistinctly enough for Kelli’s finely tuned ear.
“Why, Jamie, was our Annabelle flirtin’ with you?” Her drawl increased exponentially with the prospect of romantic intrigue.
“I reckon it was flirting. I — she — we’d been having a chat, like, and well, it was, you know. Feck’s sake, like.” Jamie briskly dug into his crème caramel.
“That’s real interestin’,” Kelli drawled. “You interested?”
“In her?”
“No, in investing in the stock market.”
“Both, actually,” Jamie grinned.
Kelli patted him on his forearm (so muscular) and couldn’t help letting her hand linger to give it a little squeeze. “I’ll have my broker call your broker, but as far as the other is concerned … well. Annabelle’s somewhat emotionally distressed, due to an unexpected and inelegant termination to a long term relationship.”
“So she’s single?” Jamie’s eyes lit up speculatively.
“Umm hmm.” Kelli’s own eyes took on the dreamily fervent gleam of the unrepentant matchmaker, and her mind shot from zero to sixty — from the elegant dining room where they now were, to a simply gorgeous wedding reception at the Central Park Boat House — in under five seconds. She leaned conspiratorially against him.
“This might take some … finessin’. You just leave it all to me, ya hear?”
Chapter Ten
Plodding through the proofs of a banking annual report so dry, she felt as if she was physically dehydrated, Annabelle forced herself to focus. This was lucrative, if dull, work. And the deadline was insane; if she made it she’d be amazed, but she had incentive, and not all of it monetary.
Basically, she was terrified to go back to her apartment. What better way to avoid the mystery monster plant than to work, work, work? After all, it was her tried-and-true method of avoidance: in the past, it had been particularly effective on those Friday nights when she didn’t have a date, which, pre-Wilson, had been almost every Friday night …
She forced her attention back to the page she was currently proofing, and given that her mind was wandering, wasn’t really prepared for the next thought that came sneaking in: maybe if she’d kept at her own work, the dumping wouldn’t have been so painful? Or so unexpected?
“What the hell!” Annabelle snapped to herself. Why did that keep coming up? Everything had been fine, so what if he’d seemed ridiculously busy toward the end, and so what if she had had a few Friday nights on her own, she liked her own company, she needed a bit of solitude — why was she talking to herself in italics? She crossed out a particularly egregious misuse of ‘it’s’, and happily placed the printout on the done pile.
The enormous clock that hung over the steel desk in the tiny airless room ticked and tocked loudly, and Annabelle briskly worked through the next twenty pages, and blinked as her eyes began to feel heavy, heavier, heaviest. God, this stuff was boring. Had she honestly thought it would be a good idea to take a gig that had to do with stocks and bonds? Was she that desperate to avoid going home? She turned a page, and groaned.
The ‘fun’ section of the report should have been a relief: it was, mainly, pictures from all of the softball games and holiday parties … but wouldn’t you know it, wouldn’t you just know, there was Wilson, third from the right, grimacing into the camera at a recent charity art auction. Which was exactly the gallery in which the two had met.
She examined the photograph as though she were sifting for fragments of a pot in an archaeological dig. Was he remembering? Was that why he was grimacing? Was he grimacing due to the power of nostalgia and regret that was surging through him? Or was he just annoyed that he had to be there at all? She closed her eyes and put her head down on the desk. How
can this be happening to me? How many flippin’ banks were there in Manhattan? Why should she be the one to get this gig? How was she supposed to forget Wilson if he kept cropping up?
She had met him at an art opening, a last-minute reviewing-bone thrown to her by Kelli. The gallery was downtown, so far downtown it was practically in Atlanta, and she could tell that its sole purpose was to sell over-priced art to clueless bankers and brokers. One of those clueless bankers was Wilson, who despite being, oh, more than a shade shorter than she, was handsome, and interested in her: he talked to her the whole time, and then asked her for her number and then actually called!
So what if he’d liked the lame art, so what if she’d totally forgotten to make any notes and wrote the worst review ever written the next day. So what if he’d teased her several times about being a hack, and why wasn’t she writing The Great American novel? All she’d heard was ka-ching! A banker! All she’d seen was his fit build, the little crow’s feet by his eyes that crinkled when he smiled, his very expensive suit. All she’d felt was the yearning to be in a relationship — with him, of course! Not just any old relationship … right?
The thought made her gasp, and then forget to breathe, and then start to feel a little light-headed. I need some Rescue Remedy, she thought, scrabbling though her bag. “What the — ” she whispered as she came up with a handful of Polaroids. “How did — ” she muttered as she flipped through them.
They were from Kelli’s stupid dinner meeting thing, and there he was, that messy Irishman and his big goofy smile, grinning down the table, laughing over something that had been said. She sighed, remembering his laugh. He laughed at everything she said, which was, like, a dream of hers … oh, but maybe he was just an easy laugher? Maybe he just laughed at everything, even though he seemed to find her — oh, whatever, Annabelle!