CardsNeverLie

by Heather Hiestand

  “That’s one babysitter who bit off more than she could chew,” Rob agreed. He sneezed.

  “You’d better get home and get into the shower,” Melanie said, rubbing his back. “We must be a mile away from our cars though.”

  “Let’s walk fast,” Rob suggested.

  “Let’s,” Melanie agreed. “I’m afraid some microorganism is going to take root in you if you don’t get that primordial ooze washed off.”

  “Kids swim in this water,” he protested. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  “You know what kids do in the water, don’t you, Rob?”

  He grimaced. “Don’t tell me. In fact, let’s change the subject. Are you going to follow me home?”

  “Sure.”

  “And then we can spend the day together tomorrow?”

  “I can’t. Family picnic.” Melanie tried to slow down, but Rob’s pace hurried her along.

  “Want me to come along?” Rob grabbed her hand.

  She tilted her chin up to him. “Let’s keep this private, okay?”

  “How come?” Rob demanded.

  “Because it’s so new,” Melanie said. “We don’t know where this will take us.”

  “I don’t want to sleep with a woman who won’t introduce me to her family,” Rob growled. “If you aren’t sure about me, then let’s go on a few more dates.”

  “Don’t you ever just want to lose control for a night?”

  “No.”

  Melanie bit her lip. “I just got divorced you know.”

  “What does that mean? You aren’t looking for anything serious?”

  “Not exactly, but I want to relax and not take things so seriously.”

  “So you just want to fuck me.”

  “Why not?” she grinned. “Isn’t that what you want too?”

  “Not without knowing we care about each other.”

  Melanie stopped walking and put her hand on his arm. “I do care, Rob.”

  “Fine.” He said. “We’ll go on another date.”

  “But—”

  He put his finger on her lips. “When you’re sure and I’m sure you’re sure, we’ll go to bed. I’m through with crazy gestures like that night in Vegas. It’s not me.”

  “It’s not really me either,” Melanie admitted. “But I thought it might be fun to be wild for a while.”

  “Too bad. You met me.”

  Melanie laughed, hiding her disappointment and maybe just a little sense of relief. “So when do I get my next chance? Monday?”

  Rob sighed. “My monthly dinner with Jack O’Brien. He’s an old friend and also a vice president at LeatherWorks.”

  “Tuesday?”

  Rob’s face brightened. “That will work. Our second date. How about the third?”

  “Do we have to plan it now?”

  “It’s taking my mind off the smell coming off my legs.”

  Melanie laughed. “The third date, huh. You sure are confident.”

  “How often do I meet a nice girl? At least one that’s usually a nice girl.” Rob corrected himself as Melanie punched him in the shoulder.

  “I’m as nice as they come. Married at eighteen, divorced at twenty-eight, sadly faithful until the last. So third date.” She thought for a second. “How about Lake Crescent Lodge? We can hike in the Olympic National Park. It’s supposed to stay muggy and hot all week. It will be nice to wander in a cool forest.”

  “That sounds like a weekend together,” he said doubtfully.

  “Third date,” she reminded him, “There was a wild and crazy time when you tried to get a weekend away to be our first date, you know.” But by the next weekend, they would have known each other nearly a month, a reasonable amount of time, even by his conservative standards, to wait before making love the first time.

  “Fab-ul-ous.” The way Rob drawled out to the word made Melanie’s toes curl.

  “It’s what, a three-hour drive from here? Can you leave Friday night?”

  “You bet,” Rob promised. “Our first weekend together. I can’t wait.”

  “Me either,” Melanie said. “I’ll print off some information and a map on the internet and bring it to Date Number Two on Tuesday.”

  “Great!” They reached their cars. Rob faced Melanie and rubbed his hands down her arms in little circles. She shivered even though he was careful to avoid touching her below the hips.

  “I want more of this,” she moaned as he leaned forward and kissed her. Melanie couldn’t resist wrapping her arms around his waist as she smelled that wonderful cranberry, cinnamon musk.

  “Ewww,” she moaned against his lips as she came too close and felt his clammy leg against hers. “You haven’t warmed up at all!”

  “Sorry.” He stepped back and glanced at his BMW.

  At his disgruntled expression she asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh just my upholstery. I really don’t want to transfer whatever’s on my legs to my leather seats.”

  “Hold on.” Melanie pulled out her keys and unlocked her trunk. She rummaged through a bag of clothes meant for Goodwill and pulled out a Budweiser towel.

  She handed it to Rob. “Here you go. It was a giveaway.”

  “Thanks!” Rob grinned and kissed her on the cheek. “Does it come with a beer?”

  “Not anymore. I drank it.”

  Rob raised an eyebrow. “Saucy, I see. I’ll get with you Tuesday for some behavior modification.”

  Melanie stuck out her tongue at him and turned back to her car. This caution stuff was the pits. She’d much rather be driving back to Rob’s house and washing that gunk off his sexy legs herself. She bit her lip, hesitating, then turned back to Rob’s car. Unfortunately, he was already inside and turning his keys in the ignition. Oh well, it was for the best. She didn’t want to move so fast that she scared her soul mate off. Rob seemed happy the way things were. But next weekend would be different. All the stops were coming out.

  * * * * *

  “You what?” Brisa cried into the line. Melanie moved her ear away from the phone and winced. The Worst Monday Ever had her fighting a Headache From Hell.

  “You heard me. I got fired. Sacrificed, just like my tarot reading said.”

  “Oh my God,” Brisa said slowly. “I can’t believe this. You’re home, right?”

  “Yeah.” Where else would a jobless person be?

  “Don’t go anywhere,” Brisa commanded. “I’m on my way. Ethan is at a friend’s until five o’clock.”

  “Bring ice cream,” Melanie advised. She knew eating was a bad idea in a crisis, but she didn’t have any better ideas now that she had called her cousin.

  “I’ve got strawberry Haagen-Daz in the freezer.”

  “Get chocolate,” Melanie ordered. If she was going to imperil her thighs, it might as well be with the strongest medicine available.

  “Sure, cuz. Anything you want. I’ll be there in under thirty minutes.”

  “Thanks.” Melanie hung up the phone, suddenly feeling the urge to fight back tears for the first time since coming back from lunch and finding Al in her office. At one o’clock today, her life as she knew it had ended.

  How could this be happening? How was she going to pay her mortgage? Why hadn’t she taken more from the divorce? Because she wanted to be independent, she reminded herself. Of course, she’d thought her six-year career at Professional Massage was stable at the time. How had it all fallen apart in only three weeks? She kicked the refrigerator.

  Bad idea. Melanie winced as pain spread from her big toe to her shin. She opened the freezer door and grabbed an ice tray then limped over to her plastic bag drawer and dumped the ice into an old Safeway bag.

  In the living room, she collapsed onto the couch and dropped the bag of ice onto her toe. Melanie banged her head against the back of the couch when she realized she could have grabbed a bottle of white zinfandel when she was in the refrigerator. Well, she wasn’t moving now. She channel-flipped until she found a music video channel playing the top one hundred love
songs of all times and settled in for a good, solid depression. If only she and Rob had progressed to the point where she could turn to him for support. Of course, Gerald had never offered any. She needed to rely on herself. And chocolate.

  Twenty minutes later, Brisa walked in with her bag of assorted ice cream and found Melanie in tears on the couch.

  “What’s that doing there?” she asked, pointing to the bag of ice on Melanie’s toe.

  Melanie sniffed. “I stubbed it.”

  Brisa sat down next to her. “I don’t believe you. You kicked something, didn’t you?”

  “What’s it to you?” Melanie kept her eyes on Tupac Shakur rapping something unintelligible on the screen. Tupac was young, pretty and dead. It was very depressing.

  Brisa opened her bag and tossed Melanie a pint of Ben & Jerry’s chocolate fudge brownie ice cream and a plastic spoon. “Eat this,” she advised. “It’s medicine.”

  Melanie pulled off the top and the annoying plastic wrapper inside and started spooning the ice cream into her mouth on automatic. About a fourth of the way into the container, she felt slightly anesthetized. The song playing now was aBeatles love song, which she liked. But John and George were dead. It was very depressing. And speaking of pretty men…

  “You know what really sucks?” she said.

  “What?” Brisa asked, around a mouthful of Chunky Monkey.

  “I was taking Rob to a lodge for the weekend. Now I’m going to have to cancel. I can’t possibly afford it now.”

  “Why do you have to pay?”

  Melanie found a napkin on the table and blew into it noisily. “I invited him.”

  Brisa took another bite of ice cream and hit the mute button on the TV remote. “I’m sure he’d rather pay than lose out on a nookie weekend.”

  “I don’t think I’m in the mood.”

  “You’ve got to work on your priorities,” Brisa advised. “Do you want to tell me how it happened?”

  “I think I need more ice cream first.”

  Brisa shrugged and turned up the sound on the TV again.

  “I really hate Lionel Ritchie,” Melanie said a while later. Her ice cream container was now three-quarters empty.

  Brisa smiled and turned off the TV. “What happened?”

  Melanie rubbed at her eye. “I’m not really sure. They said I was incompetent, which I’m not. Then they said I did material damage to Professional Massage by telling LeatherWorks that Professional Massage couldn’t afford to buy them.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Sort of.” She considered. “Not really. I told Rob that we didn’t have the cash right now, but in a few months we should.”

  Brisa tapped her spoon on her three-quarters-full container of ice cream. “I think the real issue is how your management found out what you said.”

  They looked at each other and said together, “Rob.”

  “I can’t believe he’d get you in trouble,” Brisa said quickly. “He’s a stand-up guy. At least I thought so.”

  Brisa grabbed the portable phone and started dialing. “We’re going to straighten this out.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Melanie moaned around a mouthful of ice cream. She coughed as it hit her throat the wrong way. “Don’t call him right now!”

  Brisa’s expression was stony as she sat with the phone against her ear. “Rob, this is Brisa Vanderpool. Do you know you just lost Melanie her job? How could you have told Professional Massage what she said about her company’s financial position? You’d better make this right.” She slammed the phone down.

  Melanie dropped the ice cream container and twisted her hands together. She sort of wanted to talk to Rob, but not in a you-screwed-me-over-asshole way but in a hold-me-lover-I’m-scared kind of way. “He wasn’t there?”

  “No. I got his answering machine.” Brisa put the cap back on her ice cream then took it off again.

  Melanie considered the events of this Most Horrible Day. “I don’t think he can make anything right.”

  “Can you prove you’re not incompetent?”

  Melanie made a face. “Well, yeah. We were in the final stages of developing two new products. One that I came up with entirely on my own and one that Al suggested but I still designed entirely.”

  “On schedule, under budget and all?”

  “As close as you can get with a moving target.”

  “Have you got any proof here?”

  Melanie nodded. “I’ve been working at home some, since I had so much to do.” She reflected for a second. “You know, I think firing me was a personal victory for Al. He looked positively happy to say the words. ‘Your services are no longer needed here.’ Bastard.”

  “Didn’t he accuse you of stealing ideas a couple of weeks ago?”

  Melanie nodded. “I still don’t know what that was about.”

  “Maybe you were set up,” Brisa suggested.

  A dim light bulb flashed in Melanie’s head. “He was threatening me before I ever left for that trip.”

  Brisa grimaced. “Maybe it’s for the best. It sounds like Professional Massage is a sinking ship.”

  Melanie leaned her head against the sofa. “There’s something going on.”

  “It’s not your problem anymore,” Brisa reminded her. “That’s the first thing you have to learn when you leave a company. You don’t have to care anymore.”

  “You know what? You’re right. It isn’t my problem.” Melanie tried that thought on for size as she said the words. But Professional Massage had been her life, practically.

  “Do you have savings?” Brisa asked.

  Melanie tried to shift her brain into practical mode and thought about her bank balance. “Not even a full mortgage payment.” She saw her cousin’s expression. “Not good, huh. But I got the house in the divorce and Gerald got the bank account. I was going to be okay on my new salary, but I only got the raise a couple of months ago. I just paid my parents back for the help they gave me right after the divorce. You know how it is.”

  “And Uncle Mel retired in June, so you can’t ask them for help again.” Brisa sighed. “You remember when we were kids? We always said we’d live together when we grew up.”

  “Who thought it would be in a homeless shelter?” Melanie tried to quip.

  “We’re not there yet.” Brisa stood up. “I think we need a drink. I arranged for Ethan to spend the night with a friend so I can stay late.”

  Melanie latched onto this idea. “I’ve got a bottle of wine chilling in the refrigerator!”

  * * * * *

  Fifteen hours after the bottle of wine had been opened, Melanie heard a ringing next to her ear. After a bleary moment spent recalling her name and reciting her Social Security number just to make sure she remembered who she was, she picked up the phone and croaked, “Hello?”

  “Melanie? Is that you?”

  “Rob?”

  “Yes.” There was a pause on the line. “You sound horrible.”

  Melanie considered this. “I think I feel horrible too.”

  “You aren’t sure?” Even through the fog in her brain, she heard the laughter in his voice.

  “Not yet.” She rested her head back on her pillow.

  “Need me to come hold your head?”

  She rewound through the events of the night before. “I didn’t get that drunk.”

  “Was Brisa’s message accurate?”

  Melanie thought back. “Yep.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  She sighed. She had no energy, therefore no anger. “Who did you repeat my Professional Massage diatribe to?”

  “Just my grandfather.”

  “I owe him a knuckle sandwich then.” She had no strength for deeper anger. Yet. Her security was gone and despite all the smart things Brisa had said the night before, that was all that mattered. She needed a job now, couldn’t function without one.

  “I’ll talk to him, Melanie, but I can’t imagine he’d have shared his source.” Rob paused. “I’ve watched hi
m my whole life, you know. He’d get more mileage out of being mysterious anyway.”

  “He must have said something,” Melanie said, a hint of sarcasm slipping in as she started to wake up.

  “I don’t believe it.” He didn’t sound defensive, but convinced.

  Melanie remembered their old conversations in Vegas. “In that case, maybe you were right about spies all along.”

  She could hear a clunk as Rob shifted the phone to his other ear. “There wasn’t anyone else listening. We were alone in his office.”

  The last sentence had sounded more like a question than a statement. “Rob?”

  “Except Tida. Shit.”

  “The new nurse?” Melanie asked, remembering the petite beauty.

  “Nursing assistant.”

  “You think Professional Massage planted her? That sounds crazy.” Where would they find a woman to masquerade as a wannabe porn queen and spy for them?

  “No crazier than you getting fired over something like this. From my first day in Vegas, I remember thinking someone from Professional Massage was going to show up there. Jack indicated that they really wanted to talk to me. Maybe my paranoia wasn’t wrong, just mistakenly placed on you.”

  “Maybe,” Melanie said, without much hope. Though she would get a tiny kick out of the beauty she’d been so jealous of turning out to be a baddie. It would serve Rob right, being so suspicious of her that he let the real spy slip in right in under his nose. Of course, she was the one who got hurt.

  “Hang tight, okay? Go take a shower. I’ll bring breakfast over in a little while.”

  “Okay,” Melanie said listlessly, then rolled over and hung up the phone. A second later, she sat straight up in bed. Time was passing and she needed to update her resume!

  Chapter Fourteen

  Melanie dropped her computer on the green paisley cushion and went to open the door as soon as she saw Rob pull up. She had been sitting anxiously in her psychedelic window seat, part of her summer sewing project, for forty minutes, staring at the screen of her laptop. She wondered how she could have felt so good only a few short days ago. Tonight had been their scheduled second date. At least everything in her life didn’t suck. Rob still liked her.