My Everything - Seth & Amber

by Melanie Shawn

  “She lasted two months and six days, for the record. And she was a basket case. Her leaving had nothing to do with sharing an office with me.”

  “Really?” he questioned lightly as she moved back behind her desk, apparently giving up the notion to go confront Cristal about his presence in her sanctuary.

  “Really,” she confirmed as she sat at her desk and turned on her computer. What was her computer's name again? Greg or Gopher...something with a G.

  “So what about Ken, Samuel, Trent, Laura…”

  She lifted her hand in dismissal, “They all had issues, none of which had anything to do with me.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that people aren’t lining up to volunteer for the risk.”

  She leveled him with a stare that was equal parts question and challenge, “You’re here. So...what? Did you draw the short stick or lose a bet?”

  “No, I volunteered,” he heard his voice get a little gravely as he said it. That always happened when he got turned on, he couldn’t control it. Most of the time it worked for him. Most of the time women ate it up. He didn’t think this was one of those times.

  Her eyes widened, and she finally looked intrigued. “OK, I’ll bite,” she said warily, “Why?”

  He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. He raked his hands through his hair. He shouldn’t say what he wanted to say, even though it was the truth. He needed to keep things professional, especially now that they were going to be working in such close proximity.

  Screw it. He wasn’t big on doing what he should do. Fortune favors the bold.

  He stood and crossed to her desk, setting his hands down he leaned forward. She looked up at him, surprised, as he began to speak from that vantage point.

  “Sharing an office with you,” he began, his voice more ragged than ever, “Seeing you all day every day...in my book, that’s not losing a bet. That’s winning the lottery.”

  Her breath hitched and she licked her lips.

  “Meeting time!” Cristal announced as she flung open the door.

  Raiza quickly stood, her sudden motion knocking the tape dispenser off of her desk. Mateo reached out and caught it before it crashed to the floor. After replacing it on the desktop, he noticed that Raiza moved it about an 1/8 of an inch to the left and straightened it.

  He shook his head. OK, so maybe all the office gossip about Raiza being OCD held a little truth, Mateo thought.

  "Am I interrupting something?" Cristal sounded more than a little amused.

  “Nope,” Raiza said briskly as she grabbed her iPad and purse and brushed past Cristal in her hurry to leave the room.

  Mateo's eyes automatically traveled to the sway of her hips. He honestly hadn’t meant to look at her ass as she exited, he had really tried to break himself of that habit. But, damn...it really was one fine ass.

  Cristal cleared her throat, reminding him of her presence. He snapped his gaze up to meet hers as she asked faux-innocently, “Enjoying the view?”

  Mateo had initially looked up expecting to see one very pissed off Cristal, but instead she just smiled and shook her head before heading out of the office. Just as the door was about to close, she shot one last parting remark through the remaining crack, “I gave in to your near-constant pleas to move into this office with my best friend, Mateo. Now, you kids better behave in here.”

  He looked around the small room and immediately only saw it in terms of a collection of surfaces that he wanted to “behave” with Raiza on. The desks, the walls, the chairs, the floors...he sighed. Damn. What had he gotten himself into?

  Excerpt: My First

  THE CROSSROADS SERIES

  Book One

  Chapter One

  “Welcome home!” Katie said sardonically to herself as she sat, eyes closed, in her rental car on the side of Highway 90. She had a paper bag pressed tightly against her mouth and a mantra running through her brain on repeat.

  You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.

  Katie had been back in Illinois less than two hours and here she was, smack dab in the middle of her first panic attack in eight years. She gripped the steering wheel hard, tried to soothe her racing heart, to anchor herself to reality. She forced her movements to be slow and deliberate.

  'This seems to be working, albeit slowly,' she assured herself. When the overpriced therapist who had taught her the breathing exercise and suggested the mantra had laid out his plan, Katie had wanted to roll her eyes. She had wanted to tell him that he clearly had no flipping idea what a panic attack really felt like if he thought that repeating a little magic spell about breathing inside of her head was going to have any effect at all. She had wanted to tell him that panic attacks didn't feel like nervousness, for God's sake, or butterflies that you could just calm with the power of your flipping mind. They felt like having a heart attack, like you were dying, and have you ever heard of someone having a heart attack curing themselves by simply telling themselves to BREATHE for heaven sake?

  Of course, Katie hadn't said any of those things, she had smiled politely and practiced with the bag and kept her judgment of his professional aptitude (i.e., that he was a total quack!) entirely to herself.

  Still, since she hadn't had a panic attack in the past eight years, she hadn't ever gotten to test out the technique and prove his quackitude with rock solid evidence. Now that she was in the middle of one, and the exercise actually seemed to be working?

  Well, I'll move his status down to 'Jury's Still Out on the Level of His Quackosity' but I'm not nominating him for the Nobel Prize just yet, Katie thought cynically.

  The panic attack was subsiding, but Katie was still feeling some of the physical symptoms. Her head felt as if it were floating away, her fingers were tingling as if they were being stabbed by a thousand tiny needles, and she was being bombarded by an obnoxiously loud ringing sound. She forced herself to anchor to the sensation of the paper bag around her mouth to ground her in reality, and repeated the mantra (which, she had to admit, was kind of growing on her...)

  You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.

  Slowly, bit by bit, she drifted back to the present and into her body. She closed her eyes to appreciate the little sensations that she was now aware of - the leather of the seat pressed cold against her back...the icy breeze from the air conditioning blowing refreshingly on her face.

  She was aware of the weight of her chest rising and falling. Her arms felt heavy. Lowering them to her sides, Katie was vaguely aware that the paper bag had slipped from her hand and landed on the console beside her.

  Her breathing had returned to normal, and the ringing sound in her head had grown sporadic. She searched her memory in an attempt to identify if ‘sporadic ringing in the head’ was a normal side effect post-panic attack. She hated that these horrible attacks used to occur with such frequency that she actually HAD a personal database of experiences to check her symptoms against.

  Nope, she concluded, the sporadic ringing is new.

  Turning her head to take in her surroundings, she saw cars whizzing by on the interstate. She squinted against the glare of the sun, which was shining brightly down on the pavement and bouncing off of the car windshields speeding by.

  Katie retrieved the paper bag and folded it up, returning it to her purse. She didn't LOVE the thought that she might need to keep it handy for future use, but better safe than sorry. I mean, let's be real, she told herself. You're twenty minutes off the plane and barely starting down the highway toward Harper's Crossing and you had a panic attack. You really think you're getting through the rest of the weekend unscathed?

  As she placed the paper bag inside her gigantic 'in case of emergency' carry-on bag, she discovered the source of the ringing.

  She felt like an idiot. One the good side, she told herself, is the fact that I don't have to add Tinnitus to the looooong list of symptoms which char
acterize my flipping panic attacks. On the bad side? Apparently I now no longer recognize my cell phone's ring tone.

  Picking up her iPhone, she swiped the screen to answer, saying warmly “Hey Sophiebell!”

  “Katie where are you? I thought you would be here by now. Did your flight get delayed? I can’t wait to see you” Sophie squealed, the words tumbling out of her mouth, one over another. Katie smiled to herself. She had always thought that Sophie could paraphrase that old Army motto to adopt as her own, 'I say more before 9 am than most people say all day!'

  “The flight was fine. I am on my way, and I will be there in twenty minutes Sophiebell, I can’t wait to see you, too!”

  .“Okay, hurry,” Sophie pleaded, but then followed it up with the command, “but drive safe!”

  “I will. See you soon, doll!” Katie tried to cover the stress in her voice with ebullience as she said goodbye and hung up the phone.

  It's 8:30 AM on Thursday morning, she told herself, repeating the mental math to herself. My return flight to California is at 7:00 P.M. Sunday night. All I have to do is get through the next four days (preferably without having a nervous breakdown!) and then I can wing my way back to my lovely, safe, predictable life in San Francisco.

  Let the countdown begin.

  It had been ten long years since Katie Marie Lawson had set foot in Harper's Crossing, the town of her childhood and her youth, the town that was in many ways responsible for making her the person she was today. It was definitely rife with memories, both beautiful and dangerous.

  There were so many things about Harper's Crossing that Katie had buried deep inside, and sometimes she wondered if she had buried the good along with the bad. She could already feel the effervescent rising of those memories to the surface, and she worried about what would happen if only the dangerous memories came up, with none of the beauty to temper it.

  But, she had to keep reminding herself, this weekend wasn’t about her, it was about little Miss Sophie Hunter, who was getting married to Bobby Sloan Jr. the youngest of the five Sloan boys. Sophie had called her, ecstatic, three months earlier to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid of honor.

  Katie breathed out a sigh as she pulled back onto the highway. Nothing short of the apocalypse or her beloved Sophiebell's wedding (the two events which anchored the opposite sides of the 'cosmic scale of awful to wonderful possible events' in Katie's mind) could have brought her back to the apparently panic attack inducing town that had raised her.

  Sophie (or 'Sophiebell' as Katie had called her since Sophie was six and decided that she was Tinker Bell) was the closest thing Katie had to a sister.

  Katie was an only child. She and her Mom, Pam, had gone to live with her Aunt Wendy in Harper’s Crossing when Katie was four, immediately after her parents divorced.

  Craig, Katie’s Dad had come to visit his daughter exactly one time since she moved to Harper’s Crossing. It was one month after she and her Mom had arrived, Craig took Katie to Tasty Treats for a double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

  He talked about how much he loved her and assured her that the divorce and the move had nothing to do with her. He also promised to see her once a month…suffice it to say, he didn’t keep that promise.

  Katie had not seen her father since that cold October Saturday 24 years ago.

  Growing up, she had always just assumed that he had stayed away because he and Aunt Wendy “did not see eye to eye” as Katie’s Mom always said (although, now, as an adult, she was leaning toward the theory that it was because he was a shitheel).

  Honestly, if Katie’s memory served, she hadn’t really seen a lot of her Dad even when he and her Mom were still together. It had seemed to Katie that ‘pre-divorce’ it was just Katie and her Mom and then ‘post-divorce’ it was Aunt Wendy, Mom and Katie.

  She never really missed her Dad. Sometimes she would miss her idea of what having a Dad in her life would be like. But never the man who had fathered her, she really never knew that man, and what she had known, had been unpredictable. Promising to come visit her once a month and then never showing hide nor hair of himself ever again really just seemed par for the course where he was concerned. It was just the last in a long line of broken promises that had characterized their father-daughter relationship, and – even at four years old – Katie didn't remember being terribly surprised when the months rolled around and he didn't.

  She had always accredited the fact that she didn't miss him terribly to how full her life had been, how utterly surrounded she was, by people who loved her. Although she would sometimes get lonely in Aunt Wendy’s house – Aunt Wendy had a full time job and Katie's mom usually held down two jobs just to make ends meet, so there was a lot of time that Katie was alone with her just her imagination and books to keep her occupied.

  But, oh boy, how that had changed the summer before Katie’s 7th grade year!

  That was the summer that Sophie Hunter (aka Miss Sophiebell) had moved into the house next door to Aunt Wendy. And right away – literally, Katie thought, starting immediately on moving day – Sophie had become Katie's shadow. Not that she minded or anything! Katie loved finally having someone, anyone other than a doll, to dress up and play tea party with.

  Sophie’s dad, Mike, was a fireman and her mom, Grace, was a nurse. Katie babysat for Sophie when Mike and Grace's shifts overlapped. Katie’s house felt a lot less lonely with a bouncing, laughing, full-of-life four year old in it. But Sophiebell wasn’t the only distraction that the Hunters brought with them when they moved to Harper's Crossing. They also brought Nick, Sophiebell’s older brother and Katie’s first love.

  Nicholas Hunter was three months older than Katie and he never let her forget it. He had sandy blonde hair and the most beautiful green eyes Katie had ever seen.

  The day before school started in seventh grade, two weeks after the Hunters had moved in, Nick came to Katie’s door to get Sophiebell for dinner. She'd never forget that day. Before he left the porch he looked over his shoulder, his green eyes sparkling in the sun. They were even extra green due to the fact that he was wearing his favorite Fighting Irish t-shirt. SWOON!

  He had asked, “Hey, do you think you would want to be my girlfriend? It’s a lot easier to start a new school when you already have a girlfriend.”

  He then proceeded to shoot her a smile that she would later come to know had gotten him anything he wanted since he was an infant. And with good reason, it was one helluva doozy of a smile!

  As much as Katie wanted to act like the smile didn’t affect her, she knew the heat she felt in her cheeks meant that they were bright red. Dang. No way could she hide the evidence.

  Still, that didn't mean she had to acknowledge it. So she did what any super-cool eleven year girl would have done faced with Nick Hunter’s dreamy proposal.

  She shrugged and said, “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Sweet,” he smiled,” I'll be here at 7:45 so we can walk to school together tomorrow.”

  He then jumped off her porch before she could say another word. She slowly closed her front door and, once it shut, started to scream and run around in circles until she fell on her couch in utter exhaustion. Katie always did lean towards the dramatic.

  Katie had no way of knowing then that the relationship she had just entered would last for the next six years of her life, and end in tragedy.

  The summer after Nick and Katie's senior year of high school, Nick had been out late one night joyriding and had tragically driven his truck off Spencer Point.

  Hours later, when the police pulled the truck out of the steep embankment, they found a nearly lifeless body inside. Nick had lain in a hospital bed, deep in a coma, for three weeks following the accident. Katie and his family had been by his side every moment that the hospital staff would allow them to be.

  Finally his parents, Mike and Grace, had made the most horrific decision any parents could ever have to make. They took Nick off life support.

  His funer
al was held three days later, and Katie had left that very same night to go stay with her grandmother in Chicago. She needed to escape, and she'd been running ever since. That had been the last time she had set foot in Harper's Crossing.

  Until today.

  As she turned the corner onto Harper Lane, the street she had grown up on, she was amazed at how it looked as though nothing had changed. It was as if time had stood still on her street.

  Not the rest of Harper's Crossing, though, that was for sure! On the drive in, Katie had barely recognized the town that she had spent most of her childhood in. The last time she had been in Harper's Crossing, it contained two traffic lights and one four way stop. Today there was a traffic light or four way stop at every intersection!

  The field that Katie had learned to ride her bike in when she was five, played tag in, had attempted and failed to smoke a cigarette in when she was thirteen, and had spent almost every Friday and Saturday night parking in with Nick after he turned 16 and got his black Chevy truck...was now a strip mall.

  The quaint, one story hospital that she had been admitted to when she had been suffering from chicken pox and had a temperature of 104 at age six, had her tonsils removed in when she was eight...and had spent three weeks practically living in when she was eighteen, keeping her vigil beside Nick’s motionless body as he lay in a coma...was now a four story hospital that looked to be straight out of the pages of Architectural Digest. And, if the exterior was any indication, it was now state-of-the-art.

  She had counted four McDonald's, three Burger Kings and two Taco Bells since she had entered the city limits. This was quite a contrast to her days in Harper’s Crossing, when there had only been one fast food restaurant in town – a Dairy Queen – and it had been the local hang out for all the pre-teens and teens in town. Katie had noted sadly that the Dairy Queen, which was another place that held so many of her teenage memories, had also been obliterated at some point in the past decade. Replaced by an Office Depot.