Mr. Big

by Delancey Stewart

  He nodded, his eyes never leaving mine.

  I was surprised at the way I felt, talking to this man. With his eyes fixed on my face, it was easy to open up to him, to talk to him about my career, what I wanted. I felt as if there was something connecting us, or surrounding us—a shell separating us from the rest of the world as we sat here in the coffeehouse, inches away from each other. It was strange, but it was nice, too.

  He turned back to my screen, pulling up my drawings again. “Mind?” he asked, taking the mouse. I shook my head.

  For the next hour, I sat back and watched as Hale modified hundreds of tiny parts of my work, moved small pieces around and redesigned the crude attachment mechanism I’d come up with to keep the device coupled with the moving arm. “It’s not one hundred percent,” he told me, swinging the screen back to me so I could see what he’d done more closely. “But the guys upstairs will know how to get it there now. If you sell it first.”

  I stared at what he’d designed. It was worlds above what I’d begun, which made sense if he was once a developer. “Wow,” I said, and turned my gaze back to him. “Thank you, that’s amazing. I could never have gotten it there myself. Now they might really believe this is possible.”

  “It is,” he said. “And it’s a really good idea.”

  I glanced at the clock hanging over the coffee counter. It was after ten. Sam sat behind the counter, reading a novel. Surprise made me close the laptop and start shuffling my papers into my messenger bag. “It’s late,” I said, feeling like I was resurfacing after being underwater for hours. “The coffeehouse usually closes at eight-thirty. I have no idea why Sam didn’t kick us out!” I pulled my things together and stood as Hale got to his feet. “Sam,” I said, “I’m so sorry. You could have told me the time, I’m sure you have other things to do.”

  Sam stood and smiled, his blond hair flopping into his eyes as he looked quickly at Hale and then back at me. “It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Looked like you were getting stuff done.”

  I grinned at him, feeling closer to my goals than I had in a long time, thanks to Hale’s help. “I was.” Hale bumped against my shoulder with his own. “We were,” I corrected. “Thanks.”

  As I got to the door of the coffeehouse, Hale held it open for me, and I walked by him, struck by a quick impression of the guy’s sheer physicality. He was tall and broad, muscles flexing beneath the dark blue Henley shirt he wore as he held the door open with one arm. It was as if my body acknowledged that he could shelter me, that this man was capable and strong on some primal protective level. I shook off the strange sensation and willed myself not to think too much about it as we walked through the lobby of the executive tower and pushed out into the cool night air.

  Without a word, Hale fell in step next to me and we walked toward the three-level parking garage at the opposite side of the pavilion.

  “So if you don’t work here now, what exactly do you do? Besides swim in whiskey?”

  He grinned down at me but didn’t say anything immediately. “I guess I’m figuring that out,” he finally said.

  I nodded. The campus was empty and quiet, our path lit by the streetlights erected along each side of the walkway. “But why do you keep coming back here?”

  A chuckle escaped his throat, a sound that was almost sad. I glanced over at him and wondered what it was he wasn’t willing to say.

  “Well, if I make this sale,” I told him, feeling optimistic, “I could probably help you get another job here. You’re clearly talented. I’m sure they were sorry to see you leave.”

  Hale’s face broke into a smile and he laughed again—a real laugh this time. “Thanks,” he said.

  We arrived at my car, sitting in the front row on the first level. I’d gotten in early enough to snag a good spot. The only other car we could see was a Mercedes, parked in the abandoned CEO spot in the executive spaces. For a brief moment I wondered who had the balls to park there, or if maybe what Trey had said earlier might be true. Was there a new CEO around somewhere?

  “This is me,” I said, waving at my car as I unlocked it and pushed the messenger bag into the passenger seat. “Thanks again for your help.”

  Hale looked down at me for a moment, the dark eyes holding mine and something heady in the air between us. I felt a familiar tension building in me, and I could tell Hale felt it, too. It had been a long time, but the air held a pulse of familiar anticipation, the kind that precedes a kiss. My body tensed. But Hale took a step back, his eyes dropping my gaze. “You’re welcome. Good luck, Holland.”

  I stood there one beat longer, acutely aware of something passing between us, the connection broken when Hale had stepped away. It was for the best, I thought, as I walked around and climbed in. I didn’t need any further complications. My life was complicated enough. I backed out and pulled around, Hale watching from behind me as I went.

  The LA freeway enveloped me as I drove home, the lights of the city streaming around me. I was afraid to be optimistic, but I let myself consider the positive things happening in my life. My presentation was miles better than it had been before I’d met Hale, and there was a real chance I could finally get the job I deserved. I told myself the giddy happiness that danced within me was related to the progress I was making at work. It had nothing to do with Hale.

  Chapter 7

  Oliver

  I watched Holland go, the night draining of color as her car rolled out the exit ramp, leaving me standing alone in a darkened parking garage. If I let myself get all metaphysical, I could compare the vast empty concrete space and the cool empty night around me to the state of my soul. A week ago, I might have let myself wallow in that for a bit, but right now I actually didn’t want to. I wanted to hold on to the glimmer of life I’d felt sitting at Holland’s side, watching her face light up as she saw the possibilities in her own design, as she understood how fucking brilliant her idea truly was. Seeing that light come into her had done something to me, made me want something I hadn’t wanted in almost a year—to connect. To actually feel a connection to another person, to share an experience, to know you’re sitting next to someone who understands exactly the same thing you do in a particular moment, even if the moment is fleeting.

  Turning to approach my own car, I felt the darkness creeping back in around the edges of Holland’s momentary flash. I pulled open the driver’s door and sat for a long minute, shaking my head as I realized the truth. Wanting that connection was ridiculous. For one thing, she clearly wanted little to do with me, and I couldn’t blame her. I’d spent most of the past week in a bar trying to talk myself out of coming here, looking for her. That was a battle I’d obviously lost. For another thing, I already knew exactly how it would turn out. It had taken me twenty-six years to learn that humans were meant to be solitary creatures. We come into the world alone and vulnerable, and if we don’t learn to understand that fact as kids, then we’ve got painful lessons ahead. I’d spent most of my life completely sheltered from that truth, and I didn’t feel gratitude toward those who had kept it from me. We’re all alone, and finding strength and comfort in solitude might not make you happy, but at least you couldn’t get hurt. I was getting good at solitude. Or I had been. Until I’d met Holland.

  The 405 freeway was as irritatingly packed as ever through West LA, people lighting up their brakes for no apparent reason around almost every curve. I took the inside lane and found my way through, swerving as necessary between other cars and finally pulling off the exit at Mulholland Drive and slowing around the curves on Nichols Canyon. When the gates to my driveway opened, I pulled through and sat in the Mercedes for a few minutes, staring up at the house in front of me. The house I’d inherited ten weeks ago. From people I thought were my parents. Now it felt odd, living in a house at once so familiar and suddenly so foreign.

  The house was lit up as always, the solar torches lining the walkway to the front door glowing above creeping flowers and casting shadows on the roses that lined the walls of the prop
erty against the street. I closed my eyes hard. I didn’t want to look at the roses. I could hardly see them without seeing Sonja out there, sun visor over her thick hair, her hands gloved as she tended to her favorite plants.

  Dammit. I sucked in a ragged breath, putting the key into the door and punching in the alarm code. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to feel any of this. I didn’t want to miss them. And more than that, I didn’t want to hate them. But I didn’t know how to stop doing either one. I leaned, or maybe fell, against the door as it shut behind me, and I stared around the foyer with its soaring ceiling and Spanish tile. I was trapped between worlds. Every aspect of my life was at once false and way too comfortable.

  When everything around you is as reliable as sand shifting beneath your feet, what the hell do you have to hold on to? I stalked down the long hallway, ignoring the photographs of myself staring out from the wall, the team pictures, the family portraits, the graduation photos. All pictures of a guy who had no fucking idea about anything. Glaring at the closed doors to the master bedroom, I turned and fell onto the bed in my own room. In my old room. The room that had belonged to someone else. I drifted to sleep with an old familiar image in my mind—a hand on my cheek, a bear in my hands. And a car door slamming as someone left. I’d had this floating fragment of memory—was it a memory?—for as long as I could remember. Someone leaving. Always leaving.

  —

  For the week after I’d seen Holland again, I stayed in the house, wallowing in my confusion like a hermit, draining Adam’s liquor cabinet and sleeping next to the pool in the backyard as I had in the days immediately after the funeral. After learning the truth. I hadn’t answered the phone—not that it rang often, and I didn’t go anywhere. Mindless European soccer games blared at me from the massive flat screen in the front room, and the Bluetooth speakers by the pool shot out beats much more jovial and giddy than I ever remembered feeling. Had I been a part of all this at some time? The longer I stayed here, inert, letting the world move forward without me, the harder it was to believe I’d ever done anything else.

  Adam’s and Sonja’s relatives had stopped coming by weeks ago, and the freezer was still full of frozen casseroles. The neighbors, who weren’t that neighborly, anyway, quit checking in. Everyone who’d been part of the false life Adam and Sonja had constructed had finally gotten the idea that I wasn’t going to just put the mask back on and continue blundering blindly through a world that didn’t even really exist. And they’d given up. Thankfully.

  Holland’s face danced behind my eyes sometimes as I let the sun blast down on me, and I batted it mentally away. Pretty unsuccessfully, if you wanted the truth. She didn’t need to know how often I actually called her image up on purpose; that I’d spent hours obsessing about the way her shirt had pulled across her breasts that first time we’d met. She definitely didn’t need to know I’d read her personnel file like it was the next Patterson bestseller, or that her image was particularly hard to defeat when I was in the shower, or in bed. I couldn’t explain the fascination to myself, just allowed the idea of her to keep me company. Ideas didn’t take back every promise they’d ever made or suddenly pull your world out from beneath your feet.

  And ideas didn’t call. Which was why I thought I might be hallucinating when she actually did.

  Chapter 8

  Holland

  Getting a meeting with Major League Baseball was supposed to be difficult. It was supposed to be a process that took weeks to work into, it wasn’t supposed to happen overnight, and it wasn’t supposed to result in a meeting scheduled for the very next week. I was supposed to have time to prepare, time to practice my brief, time to actually understand the changes Hale had made to the designs I’d struggled with for so long. I was supposed to have time to pull in someone from development. But few things in my life went the way they were supposed to.

  “I told you about Chelsea Putnam,” Delia said when I had told her about my brainstorming session with Hale and whined about how difficult getting an MLB meeting would be.

  “Who is Chelsea Putnam?” The name was familiar, had she told me this? I realized I’d been a little self-absorbed.

  “We ran together.” Delia had this habit of downplaying her accomplishments. One of the ways she did this was by talking about running as if she sometimes went out for a jog—you know, to keep in shape. In truth, Delia had been plucked from her college track and field team to compete in the Olympic Trials and the subsequent Games in Beijing. She’d come close to medaling in the four hundred meter. In other words, she was kind of a big deal. That was why she was heavily recruited to coach, and why she had the somewhat cushy job at Collin University, coaching women’s track.

  “Still not following you, Deel.”

  “Sorry. We were in Beijing together. When she got back, she took a job with MLB.”

  “What does she do there?” I’d put down the schematics I’d been scanning again, focusing on Delia’s voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Not sure. I can give her a call for you, though. I bet she’d hook you up.”

  “Seriously? That would be amazing.” I briefed Delia on what to tell Chelsea about why I hoped for a meeting, and dropped a couple names of the guys I’d love to meet with. I figured it would be weeks before I could get on their schedule, and that I’d probably have to present to a few different levels of management before I could get in front of any decision makers. And since corporate offices for MLB were in New York, all of this would mean a ton of travel that I’d somehow have to keep quiet.

  So when my phone rang one morning, and the voice on the other end said she was Anton Mitchell’s secretary and asked if I would have time to come in and pitch first thing Monday, I was stunned. Mitchell worked in the commissioner’s office, and he was going to be in LA, meeting with Dodgers management. The meeting would be in the Dodgers’ front office.

  I agreed, made note of the time and address, thanked the secretary profusely and then sat down at my desk to freak out, hopefully without anyone at work noticing.

  My brain was spinning as I tried to fathom how I might possibly be prepared in time, and I kept coming back to a single solution, one thing that might allow me to get through this meeting successfully. But it seemed almost as crazy as the fact that the meeting was even happening.

  I left the office at the earliest acceptable hour and pulled the scrawled phone number from my corkboard. Then, before I could think too much about it, I dialed.

  “Hello?” The voice was angry, rough.

  I almost hung up. “Hale?” I hated that I sounded uncertain, afraid, but his greeting had me rattled. “It’s Holland. From the coffeehouse?”

  “Holland.” His voice softened as he said my name. He sounded almost relieved.

  I paced back and forth in my small kitchen, pressing the phone to my ear. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said.

  “You’re not bothering me.”

  “Well, I’m about to.” I took a breath. Might as well just ask. “I need your help.”

  I told him about the meeting Monday, that I didn’t think I could brief the tech side as well as I could handle the potential applications for the technology. I asked him if we could meet; if he would be willing to help me prepare for the meeting, maybe get together for an hour or so.

  “Of course,” he said. “When?”

  “The meeting’s Monday. Maybe tomorrow?” As soon as the words were out, I felt like an idiot. He was a good-looking guy; he certainly had plans for the weekend. Just because I had no life didn’t mean he was sitting around alone, too.

  “Tomorrow is good. What time are you off?”

  “I was thinking about taking the day to work on it.” I couldn’t imagine sitting at the office, pretending to work on account management when the biggest opportunity of my life was looming ahead of me, demanding focus.

  “There’s a quiet coffee shop on 2nd, off Wilshire. Do you know it?”

  I did—it was in my neighborhood. We arranged to
meet there at ten the following morning. When I hung up, a strange twinge of excitement fluttered through me. “It’s not a date, Holland,” I told myself. I shook my head, trying to clear Hale’s dark eyes from my mind, and forced myself to stop thinking about how the single most arrogant—and most attractive—man I’d ever met might just be about to save my ass.

  In a small way, I felt like I was being rescued. I’d always told myself I didn’t want a fairy tale; I wasn’t a princess and I’d never need to be saved. Fairy tales were pretty hard to believe in when you were a foster kid. Though, on second thought, princes were rarely alcoholic and unemployed. I decided we were safely out of fairy-tale territory.

  —

  On Friday morning, I walked to the coffee shop Hale had mentioned before I could talk myself out of it. Just as I was arriving, my phone buzzed in the side of my bag and I stopped against a building to check it. I anticipated it being Hale, telling me he had better things to do after all. In some way, as I pulled out my phone, I realized I’d been expecting him to let me down.

  I steeled myself for the disappointment, but it was unnecessary. The text was from Pamela.

  Pamela: You’re not here. Where are you? I need you.

  Me: What’s wrong? I’m taking a day off.

  Pamela: Oh no, are you sick? I’m sorry to bother you!

  Me: What’s wrong?

  Pamela: Nothing really. I’m freaking out. I took Kenner to preschool this morning and it was SO hard. He wrapped himself around my leg and cried. And then I came to work and cried.

  My heart twisted, thinking of Pamela having to leave her son crying in an unfamiliar place. I thought being a parent had to be one of the hardest things in the world.

  Me: He started on a Friday?

  Pamela: He goes for a half-day today and then starts full time next week. It’s supposed to make it easier on both of us.