Derek pushed a button on his telephone and leaned close to the speaker. “Miss Barrett, get my travel agent on the phone for me, please.”
ON TUESDAY a ragged bicycle messenger brought a thick manila envelope into the accounting department. Mr. Gleason looked more disapproving than ever when Connie immediately jumped up and rushed to Summer’s desk. “Well?” she demanded. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m almost afraid to look.” Summer carefully peeled back the flap. The envelope was filled with travel brochures. Brightly colored, glossy booklets extolling the virtues of the Bahamas, Japan, China, Australia, Southern France, Italy, India and more. A plain white card bore Derek’s distinctive handwriting.
You want adventure? Tell me when you want to leave.
“I think I’m going to cry,” Connie wailed when she read the card.
“Do that and Gleason will fire us on the spot,” Summer protested, blinking back her own tears.
“I guess you’re right. But it really is sweet, Summer.”
“Yes,” she whispered dreamily. “It really is sweet.”
Derek wasn’t playing fair at all.
ANOTHER ENVELOPE CAME on Wednesday. Mr. Gleason was heard to utter a rare curse when half the accounting department gathered around Summer’s desk to watch her open it. Her heart pounding in her throat, Summer smiled tremulously at Connie and ripped open the envelope. Then shook it. Then pulled it apart and stared into it.
“It’s empty,” she concluded finally, looking up in bewilderment.
“It’s empty?” everyone repeated in disappointed unison.
“He must have forgotten to put whatever it was in the envelope before he sealed it,” Connie said slowly. “Though goodness knows that doesn’t sound like Derek.”
Summer pursed her lips and frowned thoughtfully at the torn package. “No,” she said finally. “Derek didn’t forget to put anything inside. This envelope was meant to be delivered empty. Just don’t anyone ask me why. I have no idea.”
“You mean,” asked one of the women nearby, who had always found Summer and Connie thoroughly amusing, “some guy paid a fortune for a bicycle messenger to deliver an empty envelope?”
“I think so,” Summer agreed.
The woman giggled. “Can you beat that? I always knew that you’d fall for someone as funny and unpredictable as you are, Summer.”
The women went back to their desks, delighted with the unusual romance being carried on in their normally routine workdays.
Connie and Summer stared at each other for a moment, then burst into helpless laughter.
THE ROOMMATES RUSHED home from work Wednesday afternoon, both in a frenzy to get ready for their respective appointments. Munching on a peanut butter sandwich, Summer stripped out of the sweater and skirt she’d worn to the office and pulled on a purple-and-yellow-printed knit shirt and a pair of baggy yellow overalls. Then she began to look around her bedroom for the notes she’d need during the final rehearsal of the Halloran House talent show. Naturally, the papers were nowhere to be found.
“Dammit!” she muttered, heedlessly trashing the tiny writing desk in one corner of the bedroom. “Where are those notes?” Paperback romances and leather-bound classics fell into a heap on the carpet, followed by an oversize pictorial history of musical comedy movies and a Cosmopolitan magazine.
When the desk failed to produce the papers she needed, Summer groaned and began to go through a stack of magazines on the floor beside her bed.
“Summer! I can’t find my red knit dress. Do you have any suggestions where it might be?” Connie’s voice from the other room sounded frantic.
“It’s at the cleaners. You asked me to take it with my things just yesterday,” Summer yelled back, tossing magazines in all directions.
Connie screamed.
Summer sighed and pushed herself to her feet, going off to assist her friend.
Connie was nearly hysterical. “What am I going to wear?” she wailed. “Joel will be here in twenty minutes, and I look like Bertha the Bag Lady. Help!”
“Calm down, Connie,” Summer ordered, amazed at her roommate’s unprecedented behavior. Connie went on dates nearly every night of the week and more times than not did not come home until morning. Now she was having a nervous breakdown over a routine dinner date, for Pete’s sake. “Wear your gray paisley silk with the black jacket. It makes you look classy.”
“You think so?” Connie asked dubiously, reaching for a dress that she’d spent half a month’s salary on, to Summer’s dismay at the time.
“Absolutely,” Summer declared. “It’s perfect. Much better than the red knit would have been.”
“My gray shoes! Where are my gray shoes?”
Summer counted to ten and prayed for patience. “One of them somehow fell into San Pablo Bay, remember?”
Connie screamed again.
“God, Connie, would you stop doing that? You can borrow my gray pumps.”
“They’re half a size too small. My feet will kill me before the evening’s over.”
“So what? I have it on the best authority that women who limp are incredibly sexy. Drives men crazy.”
“Judging from my brother’s behavior, you may be right. Give me the pumps.”
Summer went back to her room to find the missing notes, glancing anxiously at her watch. Clay was due in fifteen minutes. She stared around the room, then snapped her fingers and dived under the bed. After a few minutes of scrabbling she found the papers. “All right! Way to go, Reed!” she cheered herself aloud, clutching the scribbled notes in both hands, half of her body still under the bed.
“Is there something going on under there that I should know about?” a familiar male voice asked with interest from somewhere in the vicinity of her feet.
“Aaiii!” Summer raised instinctively and saw fireworks and stars when her head made solid contact with the underside of her bed.
“Hey! Are you all right?” Derek asked in concern, hauling her unceremoniously out from under the bed by her ankles.
Rubbing the lump that was forming beneath her silky hair, Summer stared at him as if she could not quite believe he was there. “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?” she asked him.
Kneeling in front of her, he laughed. “Isn’t that the same question you asked the last time you saw me here?”
“Probably. So answer it. Why are you here and—why are you dressed like that?” she demanded, staring at his clothes. Derek had on the most disreputable pair of jeans that she’d ever seen, complete with holes in the knees and white fringe at the bottom above his grubby once-white Adidas. Over the jeans he wore a faded yellow jersey with the letters USC peeling across his chest.
“This?” he asked innocently, glancing downward. “I’m just dressed casually.”
“Derek, this is not casual. We’re talking major tacky here.”
“No tackier than a purple-and-yellow shirt and yellow overalls,” he pointed out politely, lifting an eyebrow at her own attire. Once again he’d left off his glasses, and he managed to look so sexy that Summer was tempted to drag him under the bed with her.
“What are you doing here?” she asked again. “I have a rehearsal at Halloran House tonight. Clay’s picking me up in five minutes. Would you like to go with us?”
“No, thanks,” Derek declined graciously. “I’m not supposed to see you this week. I’m taking the time to think logically and seriously about our relationship without being distracted by your gorgeous body. You’ve got a cute butt, by the way. It was the first thing I noticed when I came into the room just now.”
Summer choked on a gurgle of laughter.
“I just came by,” he continued blandly, “to ask if you’ve been getting the gifts I’ve sent the past two days.”
“Yes, you lunatic, and you’re about to get me fired.” She frowned at him. “Okay, my curiosity is getting the best of me. What was the empty envelope for?”
“That’s the other reason I’m here,” he an
swered, his expression suspiciously serious. “I had to make today’s delivery in person. I didn’t know how to send it by messenger without being jealous.”
Then he leaned over and kissed her so thoroughly that Summer was trembling when he finally released her. “Don’t let McEntire put a hand on you tonight, you hear? No friendly kisses. And don’t overdo the dancing. You’ll hurt your leg again. See you this weekend, Summer. I love you.”
With that he left.
Summer sat in the middle of her bedroom floor, her eyes glazed, her jaw slack, until Connie came in with a curious look to announce that Clay had arrived. “What did Derek want?” she asked. “Or is it none of my business?”
“He was just bringing me the contents of that empty envelope I received this morning,” Summer answered in a voice that sounded distinctly odd to both of them.
“Yeah? What was it?”
“Well, let me put it this way. Do you happen to notice this smoke coming out of my ears?”
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah. Oh, wow.”
THE ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT buzzed with excitement Thursday morning. Mr. Gleason looked grim. Everyone was expecting a delivery for Summer.
They were not to be disappointed. When an outrageously costumed clown strolled into the office at just after ten o’clock, a huge bouquet of helium balloons in one hand and a gaily wrapped package in the other, the entire department turned and looked at Summer with grins of pure joy.
“Oh, my God,” Summer breathed, burying her face in her hands.
“Oh, wow,” she heard from the desk behind her.
The clown delivered the balloons and the package without a word and left the office. Summer tied the balloons to the back of her chair, carefully avoiding Mr. Gleason’s eyes, and untied the ribbon on the package. No one in the room made any pretense of looking anywhere but at the package as Summer ripped into it. Inside the paper was a small cardboard box, about the size of a small square tissue box. Summer pulled off the tape that sealed it shut.
Squeals and laughter echoed around the room as the box seemed to explode in Summer’s hands. It had been filled with the leaping snakes that are normally found in trick peanut cans. Summer wondered for a moment if anyone in the room knew how to administer CPR and was greatly relieved when her heart started beating again on its own. Her fingers were shaking when she lifted out the card in the bottom of the box. Derek’s handwriting proclaimed:
Yes, love, I know how to have fun. I only needed you to remind me. I love you.
“Miss Reed.”
Summer dropped her hand from her still pounding heart. “Yes, Mr. Gleason?”
“For how much longer can we expect to be entertained by this continuous soap opera?”
Summer tried to ignore Connie’s muffled giggle. “I have a strong feeling that it will end tomorrow, Mr. Gleason.”
“Good. See that it does.”
“Yes, sir.”
Summer sat back down and dropped her forehead onto her desk, dislodging a paper snake from the top of a pile of invoices.
“Oh, wow.”
DEREK HOPED the clown hadn’t gotten Summer fired, though he was at the point where he honestly didn’t care. She didn’t much like the job, anyway. If she lost it, he’d find something else for her. She could work for him, for that matter. He’d like to see her go back to school. She was too good to waste her talent when she could be sharing it with aspiring young performers.
Instinct told him that his determined campaign was serving its intended purpose. Summer had looked so delightfully bemused when he had left her in her bedroom the night before. God knew that leaving her at that moment had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He allowed his mind to dwell for a moment on exactly what he’d have liked to have done with Summer last night, but that train of thought proved entirely too painful.
Instead, he concentrated on the future.
SUMMER SIPPED her coffee very slowly Friday morning, delaying the time when she would have to leave for work. She could not help but wonder what would make its way to her desk that morning.
Connie was so excited that she could hardly contain herself. “I love this, Summer. I really love this,” she told her friend. “This is the Derek I knew fifteen years ago, and then some. It’s amazing.”
“I think I’ve created a monster.”
“Yes, but don’t you love it? Really?”
“Fact?”
“Fact.”
“I adore it.”
Connie sighed deliriously. “Thank God.”
“It’s driving me crazy, but I do adore it,” Summer elaborated.
Connie giggled. “I knew you would keep him too busy to worry about me, but I had no idea he’d get this carried away. I should have introduced you to him six months ago.”
Summer thought rather wistfully of the six months that Derek had lived only a few miles away from her and she hadn’t even known him. “Yes,” she murmured. “Perhaps you should have.”
“It’s fate,” Connie decided abruptly. “Definitely. That you and I met and liked each other so much right away, and then that you met Derek and the two of you tumbled right into love. It must be fate.”
Summer smiled indulgently. “And Joel? Did fate have something to do with you meeting him?”
“Of course. It’s all part of the same plan. If it hadn’t been for you, Derek wouldn’t have asked me to serve as his hostess, or even if he had, I wouldn’t have accepted. So my meeting Joel at the party is all wrapped up in this. Awesome, isn’t it?”
“Totally,” Summer agreed gravely, pleased that Connie was so smitten with Joel. Summer liked the quiet, personable man. When she’d first met him, she’d worried a little that Joel was too gentle for Connie, that Connie would tire of him too quickly. But now she thought that perhaps Joel was just what Connie needed to rebuild her self-image and put some stability into her haphazard life without subduing her irrepressible spirit.
Perhaps it was fate, she mused as she washed her coffee cup and prepared to leave for work. Already she was anticipating the delivery she knew would arrive that morning.
THE HOURS PASSED with painful slowness. Even Mr. Gleason looked mildly surprised when no oddly garbed messenger had arrived with a delivery by late morning. Summer and Connie were both disappointed. They had been so sure that Derek would send one last message.
“I knew it,” Summer muttered at one point. “He is trying to drive me crazy.” He would have known, of course, that she was expecting something from him. Trust Derek not to do the expected.
At eleven Connie walked up to Summer’s desk with a comical frown. “What do you suppose he’s up to?” she demanded.
“I have no idea,” Summer replied with complete honesty.
Connie sighed. “Oh, well. We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose. By the way, Joel’s picking me up for lunch and he wants you to join us. Interested?”
“Sure, I’d love to. Unless you want me to politely decline,” Summer teased, grateful for the distraction.
“No. I want you to get to know Joel. And he you.”
“Then it’s a date.”
Summer enjoyed lunch very much. Joel was charming. He was thirty-five, never married, serious, but not too much so, and quite handsome with his black hair and mustache and smiling blue eyes. He was also visibly infatuated with Summer’s vivacious roommate. He didn’t seem at all disturbed by Connie’s less-than-circumspect past, but rather seemed to admire her for her unapologetic individuality. He made a very good foil for Connie, and Summer found herself crossing her fingers under the table, hoping that the budding relationship would flower into a serious romance.
Joel was vastly amused by Connie’s tale of Derek’s unusual courtship of Summer. In fact, something about his amusement puzzled Summer. She had understood that Derek and Joel did not know each other very well, but now she was beginning to think that they knew each other quite well, indeed. She studied Joel more closely throughout the remainder of the meal, wonderin
g if he were quite as mild-mannered and innocuous as he first appeared to be. There was something about him that reminded her faintly of Derek, though she knew better than to mention that fact to Connie.
The thought of Derek distracted her, making her forget her curiosity about Connie’s newest friend. Summer couldn’t quite believe that the series of deliveries was over. She continued to wonder about the delivery that had not yet been made.
Promptly at three o’clock two packages arrived. Summer grinned when Connie gave a low cheer. Derek hadn’t let them down. He’d just wanted to keep them on their toes. Mr. Gleason didn’t even bother to scowl. He simply waited for Summer to open the packages with almost the same overt curiosity as the rest of the gaping spectators.
The larger of the two boxes was neatly marked Open First. Summer obediently opened it first. Inside was nestled a somewhat smaller box marked Weekend Survival Kit. She swallowed and tore open the taped lid. She blinked back tears as she silently examined the contents—a small alarm clock with a smashed front and a shredded calendar.
The contents needed no further explanation to Summer or to Connie, though the rest of the observers looked somewhat bewildered. Summer and Connie knew that Derek was offering his weekends to Summer to fill any way she wanted, no schedules, no itineraries.
The smaller box contained a delicate gold chain on which dangled a gold, heart-shaped pendant. Inscribed on the charm were the words I love you.
“Now I am going to cry,” Connie announced thickly.
“Good. I’ll join you,” Summer replied. And did. So did half the women in the accounting department.
Mr. Gleason got up and left the room.
11
THE TALENT SHOW was going even better than Summer had anticipated. Crowded into the hallway that opened off the old ballroom, she had a clear view of the stage. In lieu of curtains, sheets had been hung between the stage and the opening to the hallway, which served as the backstage area. The young performers of Halloran House waited restlessly in the hallway for their turn on stage, at which time Summer motioned them to walk behind the sheets and onto the plywood platform. To her relief and that of the director and staff of Halloran House, the troubled youths were exceptionally well behaved that evening, with only one fight backstage during the show and a minimum of clowning onstage.
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