by Jessie Cooke
“What’s this all about, asshole?” the text message read.
Within seconds, his phone rang. He saw it was Luke calling, and answered with a gruff voice.
“I hope you’re gonna stay on the payroll at that design firm of yours because you’re going to need a way to pay for the damage you’ve done here,” Reece growled into the mouthpiece.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Luke said in return.
“Don’t insult me,” Reece said. “You expect me to buy that crock of shit?”
“Buy it or not, it’s the truth,” Luke replied. “There’s nothing more I can say. What would even motivate me to do such a thing?”
“Bella?” Reece tried.
Luke laughed. “I think I’m having better luck with Bella than you are, my friend. Why would I be jealous of you? She wants nothing to do with you, and she’ll make certain it stays that way when she knows all the details about yourself that you haven’t divulged to her. Like the way you hired me just to keep her from finding true love.”
Reece seethed through the phone. “Oh, I guess that’s right. You didn’t you know that Bella and I had ourselves a little date yesterday. Surprised she didn’t mention it. Let’s just say that I gave her plenty to remember and plenty to think about.”
“Yesterday, you say?” Luke asked suddenly.
“Yeah. We spent the afternoon together,” Reece informed him.
“Well, afternoons are one thing. Nights are totally different,” Luke said.
“Speaking of nights, why don’t you just go ahead and tell me where exactly you were last night,” Reece said as he played his own detective.
“Last night? That’s easy. I was with Bella. I finally convinced her to try a little backdoor loving. You are right about one thing: that woman is an animal in the sack. She’s definitely more of a wild one in the bed than in the world, but don’t they say that about the quiet girls? I know they do about guys.”
Reece hit the disconnect button on his phone. He was not amused, and he was going to find a way to make Luke pay—not just for the damage he’d done to the car, but for the damage he’d done to his chances with Bella and a happy life.
“Who was that?” Bella asked as Luke handed her the coffee she’d requested.
“No one,” he mumbled perturbed, and Bella could tell she shouldn’t push the issue.
“So, let’s put our business hats on for just a moment,” Bella said as she crossed her legs and took a sip from the coffee cup Luke had given her. They were seated in her office facing each other on the small loveseat, her attempt to make this a more comfortable conversation for them both.
Luke cleared his throat. “Let’s not beat around the bush,” Luke suggested. “We both know why I’m here. I know that Rita is forcing some performance reviews and cuts at both offices. We both know my numbers have slipped. We both know I’m on the chopping block. So, just do me a solid and don’t try and placate me. Give it to me straight.”
Interesting word choice, Bella thought. Exactly what I wonder if you’re doing to me. She shook her head free of thoughts that were not on Dreamscapes and work at the moment.
“What would you say has impacted your job performance in the last year?” Bella asked, all business.
“I don’t have much of an answer for that. I’ve had fewer projects on my own and played second-fiddle to top designers, but that doesn’t do anything for my own clientele, and I know that. I’m not making excuses, but I’m also not going to deny the fact that I’ve taken opportunities for myself and my craft that took me outside the company. I would do it again, too, if it meant working with some of the great up-and-coming designers in our field. In the long run, I think that makes me more marketable, not just for Dreamscapes, but for myself.”
“I’m hearing a lot of ‘I-statements’,” Bella said with a frown. “Would you call yourself a team-player?” She was definitely seeing a side to Luke she wasn’t familiar with nor was she completely comfortable with it. She didn’t know if it was just bravado or self-defense, but she didn’t like the seemingly self-centered, self-aggrandizing person she saw sitting next to her on the loveseat, and she didn’t like it especially for Dreamscapes.
“I wouldn’t say I’m not a team player. I think I’m an asset to any team I’m on, and I think sacrificing my numbers and putting myself at the bottom of the production totem pole shows that.”
“How?”
“Because I’m allowing others to make themselves look better by not being the top biller on every assignment.”
“So, by being a consulting designer or co-designer—either for Dreamscapes or anyone else—you are being a team player?” Bella clarified.
“Sure,” Luke stated confidently.
Bella shifted uncomfortably. She had expected this meeting to be tense, but it was becoming even tenser as the conversation wore on. Maybe he’s trying to make it easier for me, she thought, by making himself look like an asshole, and while she wasn’t sure if it was true, she decided that she would believe it anyway to keep her from having the unpleasant reaction she was having towards his attitude.
Bella took a deep breath before she went forward with her news. “I know that there is no surprise to your numbers, Luke, and I think it’s admirable that you work with other designers and learn from some of the greats. I just wish there was a way for you to learn to balance the two worlds here. I hope that you will continue to grow and learn from the greats. But after careful consideration and deliberation, we’ve decided to let you go at the end of the month.” She handed him a slim folder. “Your severance is included in here. I think you will find it very generous, especially in this economy. You also retain all your stock options, and we’d like to keep the lines of communication open so that in the future we can team up again.”
Luke opened the folder and took a perfunctory glance, then closed it. He looked at Bella. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Not unless there’s anything you’d like to say for the record,” Bella answered.
She held onto a fleeting hope that he would smile, give her a wink, something to indicate that he wasn’t taking it personally, and while she knew she needed to make some decisions about their relationship outside of the office, she still didn’t want anything to affect that right now.
Luke stood, smoothed out his pants, and uttered a quick, “Nope,” before he left the office. As he shut the door behind him, Bella couldn’t help but wonder if he’d shut the door on their friendship as well. She put her head in her hands and pulled in a deep breath before slowly letting it out. She hadn’t expected it to be easy, but at least it was over. She knew what she was up against; everyone in the office knew that Luke’s work had fallen short several times and he’d cost the company a few important clients by not delivering on his promises. His billable hours were next to nothing, and he had no new clients on the list. On the flip side, everyone also knew that he and Bella were dating. It was a small office, and they hadn’t really done much to hide the fact that they were seeing each other—kisses in her office, holding hands in the parking lot. She knew she had to make the right decision for the company; it was part of the job, but she also felt somehow that people didn’t believe she’d go through with it. Still, she couldn’t help but feel horrible for his misfortune, and she knew he wouldn’t be able to afford his life style or his apartment without a full-time job.
Her head popped up in an inspired moment. She crossed the small office to retrieve her cell phone from her desk and opened up a message and began typing to Luke.
“I am so sorry,” it read. “I feel horrible. Do we still have a date tonight? I’d understand if you don’t’ want to see me.”
The ding of an incoming message grabbed her attention, and she read Luke’s response. “Your place or mine?”
She smiled, her heart felt twenty pounds lighter at the hint that Luke was not holding his termination against her personally, and she quickly texted back a “mine” with a winking emoticon.
Why indeed? She loved his company, that was for sure, and they always had a great time together. She knew he had her best interests at heart and wanted to see her succeed—he’d proved that with the Haiti job and by pulling her head back into the game at critical meetings with Rita. He was a great partner, a true partner. So why was she still comparing him to Reece? Why was she still drawn to Reece so inescapably?
“Get yourself together, Bella,” she said to herself aloud. “You’re a big girl and it’s time to start acting like it. Do what big girls do when they fall in love with a guy: ask him to move in.”
She was resolved. She had one more performance review, and then she’d blow the office a little early. She’d get dinner, wine, candles, the whole nine yards, and then she’d pop her question to Luke. With any luck, he’d agree and they could move on with their lives and put some distance between herself and Reece Hamilton.
51
Luke used his own key that Bella had given him to open the door to the apartment. She stood leaning in the doorway of the kitchen in a frilly apron and little else.
“Wow!” Luke smiled. “If this is what a fella gets when his girlfriend fires him, I’ll take it.” The light from the candles deepened the corners of his mouth making his grin look even more sinister than it was.
“I thought it was the least I could do,” she said as she approached him and put her arms around his waist.
“I heard talk that Tom was let go as well,” Luke said. “Hope he’s not getting the same treatment.”
Bella hoisted herself up on her tiptoes. “Tom’s a married man,” she said. “Makes his severance a little different.”
“Oh, I see,” Luke laughed at her wittiness and then leaned down and pressed his lips to hers. “I can’t decide what’s making me hungrier: this vision of you or the Thai food I smell.”
She snaked an arm around his neck and ran her fingers through his hair. “Well, I have a proposition for you,” she said.
Luke grinned. “You’re finally going to let me try some anal, right?”
A moment of apprehension passed across Bella’s face. She had felt it, but she shoved it away by pulling him down to her mouth again. “A different kind of proposition,” she said as she pulled away from him and moved towards the table to pour the wine that had been breathing. She handed him a glass before she went on.
“I don’t know if you understand how hard today was for me,” she began. “I know it was hard for you, but it was difficult for me, too, and I have been really worried that it could take its toll on—well—us.”
Luke sipped his wine and then set it down on the table. “Bella, business is one thing. We are another. We’ve done a good job of not bringing business to the bedroom. Why would we start now?”
“Well if you want to be honest about it, had it not been for business, there would be no bedroom,” she mumbled.
“True,” he said. “But work was just a place we met. Everything else with us? That’s us—not Dreamscapes, not work, not the office, nothing.” He tilted her chin up so that she was looking him in the eyes. “You had to do what you had to do for your job. That has nothing to do with me as your boyfriend.”
She pulled in a breath. “We keep throwing around these words, you know.”
“What words?”
“Well, ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend.’ Are we really? I mean, we never, you know, made any sort of agreement or anything.”
Bella could feel the awkwardness. She held a fleeting hope that perhaps he would open up and answer all of her unasked questions regarding his sexuality. Maybe he’d tell her what he really wanted from their relationship. Maybe it would involve another guy. Maybe that would be okay with her. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe they’d explore.
All of these thoughts rushed through her head so quickly that she could barely catch the tail of one. Hearing her name again, though, she realized that while she’d been chasing these fleeting wonders, Luke had been talking to her.
“Sorry,” she said. “My mind got a little swept away,” she confessed. “What did you say?”
“I asked you what you’d like to do? To make this relationship official?” He walked her over to the sofa, sat her down, and then sat himself down beside her. “We haven’t really talked about this. It’s just been unsaid, I guess, but—well, Bella. I have to tell you something.”
She swallowed hard trying to hear over the rush of white noise in her ears.
“I do believe I’ve fallen for you,” Luke said. “I dream about you—about us, our future together. I’ve never wanted another woman like I want you,” he admitted. “And I know I’ll never want another one.”
Bella’s mouth was dry; her heart was beating quickly shaking the frills and lace on the section of the apron that rested on her chest.
“That’s more than I’m ready for,” she whispered. “I was just going to ask if you’d like to move in with me.”
Luke laughed at her. “Well, I do confess that I’m not ready to fully propose, but . . . yes, Bella. I would love to move in with you. I would love to live every day with you. I would love to wake up to you, to go to sleep to you, and moreover, I would love to see you in that very apron every single day.”
She laughed. Perhaps it was the guilt from the firing; perhaps it was the guilt from her rendezvous with Reece; perhaps she really was ready to begin a life exclusively with Luke. Whatever the reason, she knew that this was the right thing to do in this very moment, and she felt protected and cocooned in this decision.
And she refused to ask herself let alone answer that pesky question: why.
A month later, Luke had put most of his belongings in storage and slowly moved himself in with Bella. She had called Christo to tell him the news only to find herself disappointed in his reaction.
“You know why you’re doing this, Bella,” he had patronized. “You can’t run from yourself forever.”
She’d exploded at him, most likely because she knew he spoke the truth, and he had answered her with a sigh and a promise to love her no matter how unhappy she was determined to make herself. Seething from that conversation and livid with adrenaline, she called Reece to ask him to respect her enough to give her some time to work through some things on her own.
“I need to decide what is best for me,” she had told Reece on the phone. “You’ve had your time to work through your feelings; now grant me my time to deal with all you’ve told me and decide my own feelings.”
Reece had sighed a long sigh. “I think you know your feelings, Bella, but alright. I’ll do what you ask. Just remember that while you’re taking your time, my heart’s waiting, and it can’t wait forever.”
“I get it,” she whispered before she hung up.
And now, as she opened her eyes slowly to the sight of Luke’s bare buttocks as he left the bed for the shower, she felt a quick queasiness in the pit of her stomach as she quickly closed her eyes to feign sleep should Luke happen to turn around quickly.
Were she truly honest with herself, she’d admit that nothing had gone right since Luke had moved in. She found herself more irritable; more intolerable. Luke was a great roommate and always respectful of her space and her wishes, and that only served to piss her off. She would fuss at him about it being his space too; that he should act like he lived there too instead of treating her like a landlord he had to please.
“For God’s sake, can’t you in the least leave a pair of your shoes or something lying around? I look around, I barely see your stuff? It’s as if you’re afraid to admit that we’re doing this,” she’d yelled at him one day.
To which he had replied, “And if I did do that, you’d fuss that I was being messy and inconsiderate. Geez, Bella, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I can’t win here.”
Which only made her recall the conversation she and Reece had had in his car, where he professed tha
t he would ultimately win when it came to his pursuit of her, and that she’d realize that she’d be glad he did.
And now, as she heard the shower go on and the glass door shut, Bella turned over and stretched her arms over her head and asked herself the same questions she’d been asking herself every morning for the past three weeks: where had this gone wrong? And what was she going to do?
Luke had diligently been searching, but in spite of all of his supposed connections, he’d had no real leads. She knew that interior design wasn’t doing the best in this economy. So many people were cutting corners and this was one of them, especially with the influx of DIY channels on cable television that seemed to be convincing people that even they could redo their entire home like a professional. Bella was thankful for her own position, but she’d hated it at the time she had to let Luke go. He was followed by two others, and being Rita’s henchman out here in Fort Worth wasn’t her favorite part of the job. Rita had, however, made the contract renegotiation an attractive experience, and Bella was beginning to see her savings account looking healthy for the first time in years.
Luke’s phone sang out an alert as it brightened with light at an incoming message. She turned her head, fully intending to ignore it, only to hear the phone sing a few times more. Finally, she reached across the bed to the bedside table and saw that someone named Andrew had texted four messages back to back. The last one, still lighting up the phone: “Call me asap!”
She was tempted to read the other messages, but she avoided the urge to be nosey. She got out of the bed and went into the bathroom, steam from the shower already rolling around in the room.
“Hi,” she called so as not to startle him.
“Good morning,” he said from inside the shower. “You’re welcome to join me,” he offered.
“No can do,” she said guiltily. “Early meeting this morning. Rita’s coming in for quarterlies,” she said.