“Well,” Leila said slowly, “I’ll guess I’ll have to compromise a little. Some of the things he likes to do I could theoretically talk myself into trying, and when he wants to do something I’m really not comfortable with I’ll just have to be honest.”
“Which you’ve previously pointed out isn’t that easy.”
Sighing, Leila watched her shoes as they plodded along the path. “I know, but I’m getting better at it thanks to you. I was honest with Luke last night.”
“Really?”
“Try not to sound too shocked,” Leila said drily. “We saw a movie after dinner, and when he asked me what I thought about it, I told him the truth. I told him that while it was beautifully done, I’d rather watch Audrey Hepburn throw slippers at Professor Higgins.”
“My Fair Lady,” Eli said with a chuckle. “I’m more partial to Charade, personally.”
“Oh, I love Charade, and Sabrina.”
“What did Luke say about your movie preferences?”
Leila ducked her head to hide a girlish blush. She wasn’t totally sure why, but she didn’t want Eli to see how much Luke’s consideration had touched her. “He said he knew of a theater that showed black and whites on Sunday mornings.”
“How nice,” Eli said. The way he said it sounded like he didn’t actually think it was all that nice. That made Leila wonder, but Eli shook it off quickly. “So, are you going to see him again?”
“Tuesday before he leaves.”
“Leaves?”
“The paper is sending him on assignment for a few weeks.”
Eli grinned. “Good.”
“Huh?”
“How’s your side feeling?” he asked.
“Fine, I guess.”
Motioning for her to pick up the pace, Eli broke back into a jog. Not wanting to be left behind, not to mention curious, Leila joined him. Her muscles didn’t appreciate her curiosity very much. She ignored them and pushed forward.
“Look, Leila, I’m glad you had a good time with Luke, but I’ve been thinking. You need to get out more.”
Leila’s nose crinkled. “Luke said the same thing.”
“Well, he’s right. You can’t settle for the first person you meet after revamping your dating techniques. You need to meet more people, people you don’t work with.”
“When? Where?” she demanded. “I don’t have a lot of time to socialize, especially lately. The show’s over, but now I’m up to my eyeballs in marketing the new line, pushing extra hard since Ana was forced to reveal so late in the season. And I have even less desire than time to waste time hanging out in bars with sleazy guys looking for a one night stand.”
Now Eli was the one scowling. “I was not suggesting you troll bars or indulge in meaningless sex. When I say meet people, I mean quality people. People you actually have a chance of having a meaningful relationship with.”
Having lived in the city for three years, Leila should have known where to go to meet the kind of people Eli was talking about. But if it didn’t have something to do with work, there wasn’t much of a chance Leila knew about it. It was more fear, but she felt like this time, at least, it was legitimate fear. Jaunting off to places she didn’t know well all by herself did not sound like a good idea.
“Eli, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Why can’t I just go out with Luke again?”
“Because Luke is not the only man in this city who thinks you are gorgeous and intelligent and worthwhile. You need to experience life and love, Leila, and not on a small scale. You deserve better than that.”
Did he really mean that? Leila wondered. Did he think she was gorgeous and smart and worth a man’s time? She hoped he did. She wasn’t sure she believed him, but she really, really hoped he saw her as more than a shrewish marketing manager whose most notable accomplishment outside of school or career was keeping the same two goldfish alive since her senior year in high school.
“I will teach you how to meet people, how about that?” Eli said.
“What?”
“I’m going out with some friends this week. Why don’t you come along? You’ll get a chance to see some of Chicago’s nicer clubs, and meet some people who aren’t going to try and buy you too many drinks in the hopes that you’ll be too drunk to say no.”
“You want me to go out with you and your friends?” Leila asked.
“Sure. Luke’s out of town anyway, and it’s not like you’re an exclusive couple after one date, so why not? It’ll give you a chance to see if Luke is really what you’re looking for, too.”
Leila considered what he was suggesting. It was more than a little intimidating to think of hanging out with people in Eli’s circle. No doubt they were all sophisticated and charming like he was. She would stand out like plaid at a black tie event. But as much as Leila liked Luke, she knew it was a bit foolish to dive into a relationship with him at this point. Besides, it might give her the chance to learn a little more about Eli.
“Um, okay, but only if you’re sure. I don’t want to crash a night out with your friends.”
“Not at all.”
Eli took a right, and Leila prayed that meant they were heading back to the park. The rest of their run was relatively quiet. Eli kept the pace at a manageable level, but Leila was still panting and feeling generally miserable by the time they made it back to where they had started. She tried to puddle on the bench, but again Eli yanked her up to stretch out. The stretching eased a few of her most immediate aches. The majority of her muscles were still pretty upset with her. She was going to feel their agony tomorrow.
“Well, thanks for the advice, and the torture,” Leila said. “I think I’m going to go take a bath, a long hot bath.”
“That would probably be a good idea.”
A short, listless wave was her goodbye. Leila turned in the direction of her apartment, but Eli caught her arm. “I think you’re forgetting something, Leila.”
She looked around, confused. Eli grinned.
“I kept my part of the bargain last night. I want the Mary Poppins purse.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! Are you serious? What on earth are you going to do with a sequin purse?”
“Hey, a deal is a deal. I at least want to see it, make sure you aren’t suffocating any small reptiles.”
“Are turtles reptiles? I thought they were amphibians or something.”
“Turtle biology wasn’t covered in your marketing degree?” Eli shook his head. “Disgraceful. Turtles are indeed reptiles, I had one when I was six.”
Leila started walking away from her running partner-slash-encyclopedia. Over her shoulder she called, “Well, you better come with me, then, because I’m not walking all the back to my apartment then all the way back out here just to prove I’m not hiding lamps or animals in my purse.”
Leila was attempting to give him a little taste of the medicine he doled out to her this morning. Like her, Eli followed because he had no choice. Unlike Leila, Eli’s triumphant smile said he had gotten exactly what he’d wanted.
Chapter 10
Jealousy
Eli waited a few seconds before catching up with Leila. He couldn’t help it. Watching her walk away from him in her running clothes was too tempting of a sight to pass up. Even though she was walking proof that a trim, attractive body did not equate good fitness, Eli thought she was amazingly beautiful. Not even her exhausted droop took away from her appeal. When Eli caught up with her, he slung his arm around her shoulder. He thought she might need a little support.
“You did pretty good today.”
“Ha!”
“No, I mean it. When you told me you didn’t work out I thought we’d be turning back a lot sooner. Do you know how far you ran today?”
“It felt like a thousand miles,” Leila said as she opened her apartment complex door, “but it was probably a lot less. Half a mile?”
“Mile and a half, actually.”
Leila paused and
looked back at him. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. I said you did pretty well.”
“Huh,” Leila said.
Going up the stairs with his arm around Leila was going to be awkward, in more ways than one most likely, so he let his arm fall away as they approached the stairs. He thought Leila paused for a moment when their contact ended, but he wasn’t sure. She was probably just tired. The climb up the three flights to Leila’s apartment probably only took her a few minutes usually, but after the workout Eli had put her through, she took her time. When they finally made it up the stairs, Leila walked in, leaving the door open for Eli to close behind him.
He walked in and closed the door as he watched Leila rummage around in her living room. As cute as she was crawling around between her couch and coffee table, Eli was more interested in his surroundings. The questionnaire he’d had her fill out before their first date held a lot of clues about who she was and how she lived, but it gave him nothing compared being in her home.
It was so different from what he had expected. Leila was adorable, but often negative and borderline depressing. One of the questions asked what the most useful invention in the last decade was. Her answer had been technology that let her keep up with people’s lives without actually having to see or talk to them. She seemed capable of finding the dark side to every situation. So the bright yellow walls of her apartment paired with a variety of fresh, silk, and painted flowers seemed a strange sight to Eli. Even though Leila had mentioned her love of old movies, the full-size movie posters featuring Grace Kelly, Humphrey Bogart, and all her other favorites posed in classic coy or romantic postures seemed contradictory to much of what he knew of Leila.
Eli had believed the answers to his carefully thought out questions would reveal the most basic inner workings of a person’s relationship troubles. His first date with her had shown him how conceited his beliefs were for the first time. Stepping into her apartment had somehow done it all over again. Leila was more complicated than a two page questionnaire could handle.
Leila was still searching her apartment for the purse, so Eli took advantage of her preoccupied state to investigate who exactly Leila Sparro was. He started at the photographs on the wall opposite the front door. A man who looked to be in his early thirties sat posed with a lovely woman and two small children. His resemblance to Leila marked him as her only brother. Their smiling faces were the center of the display. Around her brother’s picture were smaller frames that held pictures of Leila with her nieces, her father, her mother who had died when Leila was sixteen, and Leila and her brother at a baseball game with their father.
Thinking like a psychiatrist, Eli could say that Leila’s placement of the photos so they were the first thing anyone saw when they came into her room showed the importance of family to her. The brother’s family taking center place was an example of what she wanted: a happy marriage with smiling children. The picture of a teenage Leila with her mother placed below eye level didn’t mean she wasn’t close with her mother, but that thinking of her death was still painful. He could see things he had been trained to pick out. Did that make them true, though? Leila was hardly a textbook case.
He moved on to the living room. Leila had disappeared somewhere else, so he browsed the bookshelves on either side of her mounted plasma TV. Dozens of classic movies adorned the first two shelves, followed by CDs, and then books. Leila’s music collection was as paradoxical as she was. Everything from Michael Franti singing “The Sound of Sunshine” to Enya’s soulful celtic voice adorned her bookcase with a sprinkling of artists like the Beastie Boys and Airborne Toxic Event thrown in as well. Her choices in books were interesting as well. College textbooks that looked very well used were on the bottom shelves, while classic literature was mixed in with an impressive collection of fantasy novels.
Eli refrained from making any analysis of her entertainment preferences, but when he noticed several thick, colorful binders stacked under the coffee table, his curiosity was too much to ignore. He glanced around the apartment, and after not seeing Leila anywhere in the vicinity, he pulled out the top folder. Bright blue with white flowers, it had caught his eye immediately. The binder was an odd size, large and perfectly square. He didn’t realize until he opened it that it was a special type of binder. It was a scrapbook.
On their date, Leila had been very critical of her own artistic abilities. Either she had been lying—which he doubted—or she didn’t consider what filled the notebook to be art. Eli stared at the page. Pictures of what looked to be one of her nieces’ birthday parties were expertly arranged on the page. Party themed paper lay beneath the pictures with accents of birthday cakes, party hats, and streamers decorating the pages. The edges of each element had no trace of being stamped out by a machine. Leila had crafted each one by hand.
As much as he wanted to, Eli didn’t look through the rest of the scrapbook. He did, however, open the other scrapbooks just to make sure that was what they all were. He had looked at two others, picked up a third one, and realized it was different from the first three. There were no photographs in this binder, only clothes. Different types of papers with a variety of textures and patterns had been cut up into pieces and fit together to make fascinating clothing designs. They were beautiful.
“What are you doing?” Leila demanded.
The binder slapped against the coffee table when Eli dropped it. He stared back at her, fumbling for something to say. “Sorry, I … I didn’t mean … I just noticed …”
His complete inability to speak softened Leila’s irritation. Somewhat. His blundering surprised Eli completely. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been so off balance. He couldn’t come up with a single time he had gotten so flustered by a woman. All he could do was stare at her, knowing his face was slowly going red. Even worse was that she seemed to be enjoying his discomfort.
Blue sequin flew at his chest. Only reflex brought his hands up in time to keep it from falling to the floor. It was enough to let him break eye contact with Leila. He sighed in relief.
“That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? Not to snoop through my things?” Leila’s voice had an edge to it that finally broke through Eli’s muddled brain. He stood up and faced her.
“Leila, I’m sorry. I was curious why you had so many binders under your coffee table. I picked on up just to see what they were. I promise I didn’t snoop through them.”
Leila eyed the one on the coffee that he had dropped. It was clearly open to the middle of the notebook. Eli cringed. “Except that one. I couldn’t help looking through it.”
“Why? Those are private, Eli. I didn’t think I’d have to worry about that with you, given all your oaths to secrecy with your work and patients. Why did you even pick one up? You had no right to look through my things.” The pink in her cheeks rose with every sentence.
Eli was itching to pull her into his arms, hold her until she forgave him. He shoved his hands in his pockets instead and stared at his feet. “I’m so sorry, Leila. I wasn’t trying to be a creep. I’m just so curious about you. I can’t figure you out.”
Leila took a step back, turning away as she did. When she spoke, Eli had never heard such a bitter edge to her voice before. “You mean you can’t figure out what’s wrong with me.”
She turned toward him, but not enough to actually face him. “Is that why you’ve let me call you, why you want to hang out with me? It bugs you that you couldn’t pinpoint my problem and you want to keep poking at me until you figure it out?”
“What?”
“It’s okay if it is,” Leila said quietly. Her sudden change in tone startled him, but she didn’t give him a chance to jump in.
“I get like that about things sometimes,” she said. “I always have. But I don’t appreciate being your science project, Eli. I’m sorry if I’ve thrown a wrench in your batting average, but if that’s the only reason you’ve been hanging around, I don’t think we should be … whatever we are, anymore. Y
ou should probably just leave.”
Her hand moved—most of the gesture was blocked because she was facing away from him—but Eli recognized wiping away tears when he saw it. The purse slipped out of his hand. Where it landed, he had no idea. When his fingers lighted on her shoulder, she flinched. That simple movement killed him. He removed his hand slowly and sank down to her couch.
For once I felt like I was the reason instead of the excuse.
That was what Leila had said to him, the reason she enjoyed her date with Luke so much. The other men she had dated had only used her as a means to an end. That was exactly how she saw Eli now. He was just another man too self-absorbed to see her real worth in her eyes. Eli had his reasons for wanting to be with Leila, but using her wasn’t one of them. That had never once been motivation for him to see her. Eli had never felt like a bigger jerk in his life.
“Leila,” he said softly, “can I admit something to you?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t tell him to get out again, either, though. Eli took a chance and kept talking.
“I have treated you differently than my other clients. I never give the women who hire me my personal phone number. I never have coffee with them after our final meeting or ask them to come and hang out with me and my friends. I give them the best advice I can, and I send them on their way.”
Eli took a deep breath. He wanted some indication from Leila that she was listening, that she didn’t hate him, or did. He begged for something from her, but she stood perfectly still. Not a muscle moved. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing. Eli scrubbed his hand through his hair. He knew telling her how he really felt wasn’t an option, but he had to tell her something that would make her forgive him. He couldn’t bear the thought of her shutting him out of her life.
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