Damsel Under Stress

by Shanna Swendson

  “That was a nice party,” I said at last, when I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

  “Well, aside from a few disruptions,” he replied with a crooked smile.

  “Yeah, I guess. Are our office parties always that interesting?”

  “It depends on how you define ‘interesting.’ They’re probably not anything special to us, but most people would find them a little odd.”

  “Oh yeah. I can see that if you worked for a brokerage firm you might find this party kind of different.” Argh! I was alone with Owen Palmer, and all I could do was make small talk about the office party.

  Then to make the situation even more awkward, a key turned in the front door. At least one of my roommates was home. I’d hoped I’d be able to solidify things with Owen a little bit more before subjecting him to my roommates, but I guessed I should have thought of that before inviting him up. Why, of all nights, did they have to come home early on a Friday night?

  And, just my luck, both Gemma and Marcia stepped through the door. Then they both froze, their mouths hanging open, when they saw who was sitting at the table. They didn’t have to say a word; I could read their faces quite clearly: “So, this is the guy you’ve been talking about? What took you so long to make a move?”

  I glanced at Owen, and the beet-red color of his face was a good sign that he’d read their faces as easily as I had. He stood, like a good gentleman, and I hurried to make introductions. “Gemma, Marcia, this is Owen. We work together.” I left out the “And he kissed me! He likes me!” part for decorum’s sake. Besides, I was sure we’d get to that the moment he left. “Owen, these are my roommates, Gemma and Marcia.”

  He came around the table and approached them where they still stood frozen not too far inside the doorway. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said, shaking their hands. They managed to respond, but they looked like something out of a zombie movie. I thought I detected a hint of drool on Gemma’s chin. Then he turned to me and said, “I’d better get home.”

  As I helped him collect his overcoat from where we’d draped it over one arm of the sofa, I said, “I’ll walk you out.” I went with him as far down the stairs as the first landing, then he paused.

  “Thanks again for a nice night,” he said.

  “And thank you.”

  “Do you want to get together tomorrow? Maybe for brunch, and then we can spend the day together?”

  It sounded like heaven to me. “Sure. That would be great.”

  “Okay. How about we meet at ten at that coffee shop on Irving Place near my house? I’d pick you up, but I’m not sure your roommates could deal with that right now.” Although his tone was teasing, a flush shot up from his collar to his hairline, and I suspected that he was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle my roommates.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “Great. I’ll see you then.” And then he placed his hand on my cheek and bent forward to kiss me, a soft, warm, firm, gentle kiss that somehow felt like a hug at the same time.

  Even the next day, the memory of that kiss made me almost warm enough to have to unbutton my coat, although it was a raw December day. If I thought about it, I could still feel the touch of his hand on my face.

  I doubted much had changed in those few hours. He was just being Owen, utterly dedicated to his life’s work. That was one of the things I liked about him. If he’d blown off the crisis at work because he wanted to spend the day with me, he wouldn’t be Owen and I wouldn’t have liked him nearly as much.

  I got to my apartment building, unlocked the front door, and went up the stairs, pausing only briefly on that landing where the last kiss had taken place. Then I went the rest of the way to my apartment, which was more crowded than I expected it to be. Not only were Gemma and Marcia there, but Connie, the former roommate who’d married and moved out soon before I came to New York, was there, as well. They were gathered around the kitchen table, looking like they were having a summit meeting.

  “Katie! You’re back early,” Gemma said when she noticed me. “What happened?”

  “He had an emergency at work, so we just had coffee,” I said as I took off my coat. I left out the part where we had coffee while we walked to the subway station. Gemma and Marcia, in good girlfriend form, weren’t inclined to be forgiving toward what they perceived as my dates’ missteps.

  “What did you say he did?” Marcia asked.

  I hadn’t said anything about what he did. It was kind of hard to explain without bringing up the concept of wizards, and if I said he worked in research and development, it didn’t sound important enough to warrant the kind of emergency absences I could expect from him. “He’s an executive with the company I work for,” I said. That was probably vague enough and sounded important enough to cover a lot of bases.

  Marcia nodded. “Yeah, that’s the downside of dating powerful men.” As driven and career-oriented as she was, she was the most likely to understand someone else who made work a priority. I was surprised, though, at how wistful her voice sounded.

  “When you’ve got one who looks like he does, you can make the occasional allowance, but don’t let him get away with it too often,” Gemma said. She turned to Connie and added, “You should have seen this guy. He seemed pretty nice, too, what little we saw of him. Our little Katie snagged herself a good one.”

  “What brings you down to this end of the island?” I asked Connie.

  “Minor relationship crisis,” Gemma answered before Connie could speak. “And you’re just in time.”

  “For what?”

  “Ice skating at Rockefeller Center.”

  While I was still trying to figure out what ice skating had to do with a relationship crisis, Gemma handed me a piece of paper. “What do you make of this?” she asked.

  The paper was stiff and heavy, the kind used for formal correspondence. I unfolded it to see a handwritten note in a flowing script. The note invited Gemma and her friends to go ice-skating this morning at Rockefeller Center, and specified a time that Philip would call for us. “It looks like an invitation to me,” I said with a shrug.

  “You don’t think it’s odd?”

  I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Saying there was something odd about Philip, Gemma’s boyfriend, was putting it mildly. Although she didn’t know it, he was a magical person who’d been living under a frog enchantment for decades before he was freed a month or so earlier. You couldn’t expect a guy who’d been living near a pond in Central Park and existing on flies to be anything approaching normal. I thought he was coping pretty well with adapting to modern times and readapting to life as a human, but it wasn’t as though I could tell Gemma all that. She didn’t know anything about magic, and there’s no way to explain the frog thing without getting into magic.

  “A handwritten note is unusual,” I admitted. “It is kind of charming, though. It’s sweet.”

  “It was hand-delivered, by someone else. It’s like he’s avoiding me, or something. Hasn’t he heard of text messaging? Or maybe this nifty new invention called the telephone? I always have my cell with me, so he has no excuse for not being able to reach me directly. And what’s with inviting all my friends? What kind of date is that?”

  “It’s a date where you’re getting no action,” Marcia said drily. “And let’s face it, that’s the real problem. He hasn’t slept with you yet.”

  Gemma actually blushed, which may have been a first. “Well, there is that. But it’s not the only issue. He’s started to be ‘busy.’” She made air quotes with her fingers.

  In adherence to the universal law that the person you’re talking about will show up while you’re talking about him, the buzzer from downstairs sounded. Gemma got up and ran to the intercom. I felt that Philip was lucky the intercom only worked from our end when someone pushed the button. He’d have probably keeled over if he’d heard this conversation. Gemma pushed the intercom button and said, “We’ll be right down.”

  “I’ll come up to meet you,”
Philip’s voice replied, scratchy over the speaker.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Gemma insisted, then released the button and turned to us. “Well, come on. If I have to have chaperones for my date, you may as well be the ones. Then you can tell me if I’m imagining things.”

  We all collected purses and coats and trooped downstairs. I had to admit that this arrangement was a little odd. Even Owen, as shy as he was, hadn’t come up with anything like this for a date. Though, come to think of it, we hadn’t yet had a real date, so I couldn’t compare.

  When we got downstairs, Philip presented a red rose to Gemma with a bow. Then he bowed to the rest of us. “Ladies, thank you for joining us today. Now, I believe public transportation will be the most effective way of reaching our destination.” He offered his arm gallantly to Gemma, and the rest of us fell in behind them as we walked to the subway station.

  We hung back just enough to be able to talk about them. “Okay, I’ve gotta admit, this is kind of on the weird side,” Marcia said. “The note was one thing, but bringing us along?”

  “Maybe you were onto something when you said she wasn’t going to get any action on this date,” Connie mused. “It’s like we’re chaperoning them.”

  I almost shouted, “That’s it!” before I turned it into a cough. Depending on how long he’d been a frog, he may have come from a time when men and women were seldom allowed to be alone together before they were married. I couldn’t recall if he’d ever let himself be alone with Gemma when they weren’t out in public. But that would have been hard to explain without getting into the magic thing. Instead, I said, “Well, he is kind of old-fashioned. If he’s not ready to get that involved, then he might be coming up with ways to put the brakes on while still seeing her.”

  “That makes sense,” Marcia said, but then we had to stop talking about Gemma and Philip because we were almost at the subway station and too close to them to take the risk of them overhearing us.

  I tried to watch Philip and Gemma for clues, but I didn’t notice anything particularly odd, other than the fact that Philip probably would have looked more at home wearing an Ascot tie and spats. Gap khakis were just wrong on him. He definitely acted interested in Gemma. He never took his eyes off her, he appeared to listen to everything she said, and he was incredibly attentive in every little gesture toward her. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to notice that and acted more and more put out toward him. It looked like she was in danger of losing a great guy simply because they were from different eras and had different ideas of what made a good courtship. If anyone needed the help of a fairy godmother, it was them.

  But if I protested the interference of a fairy godmother, I knew Gemma would reject it outright, if she even let herself believe in such a thing. Meanwhile, I didn’t exactly have a lot of time to be meddling in my friends’ relationships, not when my enemies were at large and, come to think of it, I had the distinct impression that I was being watched.

  Two

  I f it had been summertime, I’d have suspected that a bumblebee was hovering nearby. There was definitely a buzzing sound, like tiny wings flapping at high speed. Since it was below freezing, I could be fairly certain that it wasn’t any kind of insect that was stalking me. I immediately went through my mental catalog of magical creatures. The problem was that my exposure to magical creatures was still pretty limited, and besides, Idris seemed to have a fondness for creating new ones.

  I lagged behind the others at the entrance to the subway station, pretending to have to search for my MetroCard, so I could get a better look at something I was sure they couldn’t see without being too obvious about it. It took me a moment or two to spot the tiny thing hovering over my shoulder, and when I did, I relaxed considerably. It was a male fairy—or sprite, as they preferred to be called, as they had issues with being called “fairies.” Go figure. I hadn’t realized they could shrink that small, but then I remembered Tinkerbell. Yeah, that’s fiction, but I was learning that a lot of things I thought were just stories were real, so why not that, too? The sprite saluted me, and I figured he must have been my current magical bodyguard. With the threat from Idris and his people, I was almost always tailed by someone in the MSI security force.

  That made me hesitate about going out with my friends. With my enemies on the loose, did I really want to put myself out there in public around my friends? I didn’t think Idris or Ari would hesitate to try to at least embarrass me, if not outright harm me or them. In the middle of Rockefeller Center, there were all sorts of magical disasters that could happen. “I just remembered something I need to do,” I said. “Y’all go on and have a good time. I probably wouldn’t have skated anyway. I’ve never been on skates before in my life, since we don’t have a lot of ice in Texas that’s not in drinks, and I’d rather not spend Christmas in traction.”

  “I bet I know what you have to do,” Connie said. “You have to find a gift for the new boyfriend. That’s the problem with starting to date someone so close to a major holiday. You suddenly have to come up with a gift that’s meaningful as well as appropriate for where you are in the relationship.”

  I was perfectly willing to use the excuse to get away from them, but thinking about what Connie said set off a panic attack. I’d already given Owen a gift, but that was only because I was his secret Santa at work. I hadn’t considered that I’d now need to come up with a gift for him on a personal level. “What is appropriate this early in a relationship?” I asked.

  “Well, it needs to be personal enough to show your feelings, but not so personal that it presumes something that may not be there yet. Nothing too expensive, but possibly something that will go on to be meaningful if the relationship lasts.”

  “No pressure there,” I said with a snort. “I guess this is where you’d give a girl a cute stuffed animal or a pretty candle set. But what do you give a guy?” I thought I heard a high-pitched, faint burst of laughter and turned to shoot my sprite bodyguard a glare. He immediately moved out of range, hovering somewhere I couldn’t see him anymore.

  “That’s one of the great mysteries of life,” Marcia said. “Everything they like is expensive and, therefore, inappropriate this early in a relationship. Maybe you should have waited until after Christmas to hook up.”

  “What kind of music does he like?” Connie asked. “You could get him a CD.”

  I hadn’t noticed any CDs or even a CD player in the one time I’d been in Owen’s house. All I could remember seeing was books everywhere. If he had a stereo, it was probably buried under piles of books. And when someone had that many books, it was hard to find a book you could be sure he’d like that he didn’t already have. Besides, that’s what I’d given him as a secret Santa gift. With a groan I said, “I’d better get going. I have my work cut out for me.”

  I did a little window-shopping in the general area around Union Square, but no modest yet meaningful—but not too meaningful—gifts perfect for a man I was just getting to know jumped out at me. No enemies popped by to make veiled threats or cause magical havoc, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. It would have been really nice if I could have tackled Ari, turned her in, and ended this whole thing. After a while, I gave up on either finding the perfect gift or having the bad guys show themselves. Instead of doing more intense shopping, I went home, hoping I’d have word from Owen about how things were going. Alas, the “message waiting” light on the answering machine remained unblinking and unlit.

  I’d underestimated Owen’s abilities, for I’d barely hung up my coat when the phone rang. The timing was too perfect for it to be a coincidence. “Katie?” a voice on the other end said when I answered. “It’s Owen.”

  Like I didn’t recognize his voice almost instantly, even though we’d only ever spoken on the phone at work. “How are things going?” I asked, grateful that he’d called when I was at home alone, so I could talk freely.

  “It’s tedious,” he said, but I could tell from his tone that it was the kind of methodica
l, painstaking, analytical work he enjoyed. “She definitely had help, but I’m not recognizing the fingerprints. Something’s odd about it all. We’ve got the security team searching the city, and I’ll probably be here all day. How’s your Saturday going?”

  “Not bad. One of my friends dropped by, and I did some shopping, so it all worked out.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Do you have dinner plans tomorrow night?”

  “Not at all.”

  “How does six sound?”

  “Works for me.”

  “Good, then I’ll come by and get you. I told you I’d make it up to you.”

  “I believed you,” I hurried to assure him.

  “I just hate to start on the wrong foot.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Well, I’d better get back to work,” he said, and I could practically hear him blushing over the phone.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night. Don’t work too hard today.”

  “I won’t.” But if I knew him, he would. I’d have bet money that he’d have dark circles under his eyes when he came to pick me up for our date.

  By the middle of the next afternoon, I was in serious danger of having some dark circles, myself. I hadn’t slept much as I’d continued to worry about what to give Owen for Christmas—if I should give him anything at all so soon after starting to date him—and, of course, what I should wear to go to dinner with him.

  After church and a quick lunch, I’d headed out shopping, presumably to consider gifts, but in large part to look for ideas of something to wear. I’d lectured Owen on not worrying about making a good first impression on me, but I was doing the same thing as I fretted about this first real date.