by Molly Harper, Stephanie Haefner, Liora Blake, Gabra Zackman, Andrea Laurence, Colette Auclair
“No, I wouldn’t do something like that! That’s almost as creepy and ridiculous as sending an automatonophobe to a museum packed with ventriloquist dummies!”
Now it was my turn for a blank look.
“It means ‘fear of human figures.’ It’s a real thing!” he exclaimed when I started to laugh.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.” I giggled. “But I’m gonna.”
“Jerk.” He tossed a Ho Ho at me. “As far as me recovering too quickly in the hall, what was I supposed to do when Gina talked to me? Burst into tears right there in front of her? I sucked it up and put on a brave face. Maybe if your feelings were hurt or you had a question about the way I was speaking to a coworker—someone who has treated me considerably better than you have, by the way—you could have brought it up to me, instead of ignoring me and taking petty dummy-based revenge.”
“Damn it, I wish that didn’t sound so reasonable,” I grumbled, picking at my sandwich.
“And for the record, that was my ex, okay? Seeing her really did send me into a tailspin. And apparently sent her into one too, judging by the e-mails she’s been sending me. She didn’t like that you called yourself ‘my’ Sadie and keeps writing to make sure we aren’t ‘serious.’ So thanks for that. Derby Day was the first time I’d seen her since a rather unpleasant ‘No, I didn’t cheat on you, but I am breaking up with you anyway because you’re freaking crazy’ conversation in which she threw a really heavy brass paperweight at my head. And seeing her again made me realize a couple of things.”
I slid into a sitting position across from him, taking another drink from the Stoli bottle. “Wait, wait, is this going to be another woeful story that makes me feel sorry for you, and then I end up getting pissed at you, bringing out my stabby instincts?”
“First of all, ‘stabby’ isn’t a word,” he told me, pointing a finger in my face. I batted it out of the way. Why was he touching me so much? Why was I giggling so damn much? Maybe drinking the vodka wasn’t such a great idea after all.
I handed him the bottle.
“There are other things,” he said, hesitantly. “Things about you that are clearly very different from Lydia.”
I snorted. “I would hope so.”
“I misjudged you, a couple of times. When I first saw you at the McBrides’, it was like this instant recognition. I had been so closed off for such a long time, but you, you looked so open. Even if it meant showing that you were anxious to the point of throwing up. And I liked that about you, that you were willing to just let those emotions hang free and you weren’t worried who saw. Smiling and really flirting with you, instead of ‘being charming because I have to’ flirting? That was more than I’d been capable of in months, as far as talking to a woman. And then you found out who I was, and you brought those shields up so quickly. And then you were downright hostile. I guess I was tired of being jerked around by women who ran hot and cold. And I saw you as standing between me and the life I was trying to rebuild, which sort of lumped you together with my ex in my mind. And I may have taken some of that frustration out on you.”
“Your logic is very twisty.”
“I didn’t say it was healthy,” he acknowledged. “The good news is I think I’ve worked through being so angry at her. Between lashing out at you—sorry—and seeing Lydia at the Derby, I think I’ve got closure. She’s not the mythical she-beast I’d built up in my head. I mean, she’s an awful person and I don’t want to be anywhere near her. But she’s lonely and sad, and the bomb she dropped in the middle of my life didn’t exactly work the way she’d hoped. At least I can walk away from this with my head held high. Yeah, it’s embarrassing, but at least she was wrong. And she did me a favor, saving me from proposing.
“I was wrong,” he admitted. “I was wrong to judge you so quickly and to take my anger out on you.”
“I’m glad I could help, I think?” I unwrapped the Ho Ho and sank my teeth into chocolaty, spongy goodness, which had a considerably nicer aftertaste than the vodka.
“You know, it occurs to me that I don’t know anything about you,” he said, chewing on his sandwich. “I mean, you clearly looked into my background, but all I know about you is that you have a deep, almost unnatural love for your home state.”
“Actually, I wasn’t born here. My mom died when I was ten and I moved here from Michigan to live with my grandparents.”
He winced. “See, that’s something I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t talk about it much,” I assured him. “My grandparents were really wonderful people. But they weren’t sure what to do with me when I came to live with them. I mean, they were almost sixty and raising a kid again. And I was pretty quiet and withdrawn. Gran insisted that Grandpa spend bonding time with me, like he did with my cousins. When Grandpa asked how he should arrange the tea party for my teddy bears, and she realized he wasn’t just being his usual sarcastic self, she told him to take me to the tribal burial mounds at Wickliffe.”
“Isn’t that how Stephen King stories start?” he asked, grinning cheekily.
I smacked his shoulder, making him wince. “It’s a state park near the Illinois state line. History had always been one of my best subjects in school, so I was running around this place like it was Chuck E. Cheese’s. They have all of these little buildings housing half-exposed burial mounds that ancient tribes used to bury their dead on the riverbank. It brought me right out of my shell. I came alive. I asked questions. I came up with elaborate justifications for why burial mounds should still be used today. Grandpa was a little disturbed by my being so fascinated by ancient Native American death traditions. But he was just glad I was talking. Every weekend we could get away, we would visit some museum or state park. We traded weird random facts we’d learned from Reader’s Digest or the newspaper’s ‘Did You Know?’ section. When we ran out of historical locations, we started on the odd roadside attractions—Mammoth Cave, Big Mike’s Mystery House, Tombstone Junction. Every once in a while, we let my grandma come with us.”
“And do your grandparents still live in Wickliffe?”
I chuckled, thinking of my grandparents’ snug little house on the outskirts of town. Coming from a large northern city where I didn’t know my next-door neighbors, much less the name of my mailman or the local funeral-home director, I loved the sense of community and continuity I’d found in Ballard County. It was reassuring that my high school math teacher had taught my mother in the very same classroom twenty years before. And I liked knowing that if I went to the church potluck with my grandparents, Mrs. Hopkins would provide her famous Coca-Cola fudge cake, and she would save me a corner piece because she thought I was a much nicer teenager than her “god-awful” grandkids.
Mrs. Hopkins eventually forgave me for selling my grandparents’ house to one of those god-awful grandkids, which meant she had to see him regularly.
That’s when I realized that I hadn’t answered Josh’s question and I was just staring off into space with a weird smile on my face. “Um, Gran died of breast cancer right after I graduated from college.” I tipped my head against the wall, willing myself not to sound maudlin or pathetic, but it was difficult with liquor in my system. “Grandpa retired and opened up a bait shop with a couple of his cop buddies at Lake Barkley. But he had a heart attack about two years ago and passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. And, given the soft tone of his voice, I actually believed him.
“They had a good life together, and one wouldn’t have wanted to live very long without the other.
“My cousins, Guy and Jake, are the only family I have left. They’re married and have kids of their own, so they’re pretty busy. I see them sometimes on holidays, and that’s pretty much it. It helps, having Ray and Kelsey, and the rest of my ‘office family.’ Ray’s wife makes sure I get a homemade birthday cake every year. Melody invites me to holidays with her bizarre family, which actually makes me feel a little better about not having many relatives. Our coworkers really
helped me pull through when Grandpa died.”
I sagged against the wall, feeling lighter and hollowed out from my confession. Josh wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his side and protecting my back from the unforgiving Sheetrock. It showed a level of consideration I was sure I didn’t deserve. Josh wasn’t so bad, I supposed, when it came down to it. So much of my dislike of him had boiled down to insecurities and resentment. And as far as the Lord Gel-demort thing went, well, okay, so he was well groomed. But he’d started his career in a big city where designer labels and putting the man in manicure were important. We’d started off on the wrong foot, and while his attitude hadn’t been great, the majority of the tension was the result of my antagonizing him. I pushed and he pushed back.
Now if we could just push the damn closet door open and get out of here, I could tell Kelsey I’d learned my lesson. And then beat her, severely.
“So this whole rabid devotion for all things Kentucky isn’t an act, is it?” he asked.
“I think ‘rabid’ is a bit unfair,” I retorted. “But yeah. When you don’t know what it’s like to have a home and you find one, you get a little enthusiastic.”
“But there have to be things about living here that even you don’t like, like bluegrass music. You can’t possibly like bluegrass music, right? Or when you drive home from work, are you cranking up the Jean Ritchie and rocking it out?”
“No,” I scoffed. “I really, really dislike it. Okay? But I don’t have to like everything about my state. For instance, I’m not a big fan of KFC, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to smile and sing the extra-crispy recipe’s praises should it ever come up in conversation while we’re promoting what’s great about Kentucky.”
He grinned broadly, cursed blue eyes all a-twinkle. “Oh my God, are you recording me right now?” I demanded, scooching away into a kneeling position and jabbing him in the chest with my finger. “Are you going to use this rant as blackmail material when selling me out to the fast-food cartels?”
He grabbed my hand to prevent further poking. “No, you paranoid freak, I just love watching you get all passionate in your defense of fried chicken. Isn’t it exhausting, being this wound up over everything?”
“A little,” I admitted. “Isn’t it boring not getting wound up about anything? That’s what scares me about you. You don’t even care! You don’t care about this job. You’re going to take the contacts you make here with companies like Delacour and use them to open some soulless marketing temple to your alpha-male awesomeness.”
God. Damn. Vodka. And its ability to melt my already compromised verbal filters.
“Oh, come on.” He pulled on my wrist, dragging me toward him in an off-balance crouch. “You’re always saying crap like that about my work. Why don’t you take me seriously? I had to have some skills for the commissioner to bring me in to take over your job.”
I glared down at him, more than a little irritated that the conversation had taken this turn after we seemed to be making some progress. “I don’t take you seriously because you say things like that. Oh, and because you shoot me ‘Blue Steel’ every time you think I’m looking at you.”
“I do not do ‘Blue Steel’!” he exclaimed, the slightest tint of red creeping into his cheeks, as I had basically accused him of unironic Derek Zoolander impersonations. I gave him my best skeptical “nonmodel” expression. “Okay, it’s a little bit of a pose. But you don’t make it easy on me, you know. Do you know what it’s like coming into an office where you’re supposed to be replacing someone that nearly everybody loves?”
“Nearly everybody?”
“Theresa,” he noted. “And Gina.”
“Dang it,” I groused.
“The secretarial pool hates me and I think Melody may be misdirecting my faxes to Bangladesh. I’m still not entirely sure that Kelsey isn’t the one removing the screws from my office furniture. Every time I sit down, my chair falls apart in a different way.”
I stretched my legs out and bit down on my lip to prevent a laugh from escaping. I’d seen Kelsey carrying an Allen wrench into Josh’s office a few times before her declaration of ceasefire, but I’d had no clue what she was up to.
“You do good work,” he told me. “It’s visually interesting and funny and memorable. We have different styles, that’s all. And mine happens to appeal to a broader audience.”
“Thanks.” I sighed. “And your work is . . . classically beautiful. And if I were interested in taking a tour of every distillery and winery in Kentucky, I’m sure your campaign would be what convinced me to do it.”
Josh snickered. “That was physically painful for you, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, pressing my lips together. “Yes, it was.”
“So you think I’m an alpha male?” He nudged me in the ribs, smirking at me.
“You have your Greek letters tattooed somewhere on your body, don’t you?”
He grinned and rolled down his sock to show me his frat’s insignia on his ankle. “I knew it!” I cried.
“I was young and stupid . . . and drunk. So drunk.”
“Was the butterfly tramp stamp unavailable?”
“Hey! I thought we were playing nice,” he said, nudging me again.
“Sorry,” I said, hastily adding, “dude.”
A lovely, silent moment passed, allowing me to close my eyes and appreciate the warmth radiating from Josh’s body and the swimmy vodka-soaked feeling in my head.
“Can I ask you a serious question?” I asked.
He snorted. “Are we asking any other kind tonight?”
“Why did you move back here when your life imploded?”
“It’s a fair question.” He shrugged. “I wanted to come back to what was familiar. I wanted to be near my family, and away from all of my business contacts that had received that damn e-mail. It’s a lot cheaper to live here than in a major city. Even in a place like Louisville, the cost of living is a lot more reasonable. I could buy a house here for what would maybe get me a room in a nice duplex in Atlanta . . . with four roommates.”
“Got it.”
“And a shared bathroom,” he added.
“I got it,” I said again.
“Do you have any idea what a bunch of guys can do to a shared bathroom?”
“I got it,” I repeated, smacking his arm.
“Ow,” he grumbled. “I don’t know what hurts more, your fists or your firm grasp of sarcasm.”
I frowned, feeling more than a little guilty for how I’d been treating Josh. Yes, I’d been angry about his being hired, but it wasn’t his fault that he’d derailed me. It hadn’t been intentional, at first. There was plenty to like about him. He was an interesting guy. He was a good listener. He made me laugh, sometimes with him, sometimes at him. Now that I could see something beyond the slick, irritating exterior, I was much more comfortable talking to him. And despite said slick, irritating exterior, there was something very decent about him. When he wasn’t trying to annoy the living hell out of me. Which wasn’t often.
I had to stop thinking in sentence fragments.
“I’m sorry. I’m so tired of this,” I said, sighing and laying my head on his shoulder. “I can’t keep up. I mean, we’re both working toward the same thing, right? At this point, I’m more concerned about losing the job I have than about not getting the promotion. I mean, this is not the way grown-up professional people behave.”
“You mean you give up? We’re calling a truce?”
“Not on the competition,” I insisted. “Just the sabotage. I think we can both admit that it’s not exactly inspiring us to do our best work when we’re so worried about what the other is doing that we’re not concentrating. Just imagine what we could come up with if we were actually doing our jobs.”
“It’s a crazy theory, but it just might work,” he said, stretching his hand out to me. “Normal, professional interactions from here on out, I promise.”
His hand felt so warm and pleasantly heavy a
gainst my own. I could practically feel the ridges of his fingerprints against my skin. “Same here. And don’t worry, I’m pretty sure Kelsey stopped unscrewing your furniture a while ago.”
“I knew it!”
In Which I Learn New and Disturbing Acronyms
6
After outlining some basic tenets of our treaty—no more insults at meetings; try to heal the rift in the office; use words, not psychological violence—we abandoned the angsty background conversations in favor of small talk. Favorite restaurants, college stories, worst jobs. (Josh worked maintenance at an indoor flea market. I waitressed the late shift at an off-brand Waffle House.) And of course, we debated the merits of the Cardinals’ versus the Wildcats’ offensive lineups, but we managed to keep it surprisingly civil.
We ate the Ho Hos and the sandwiches, drained both bottles of water. We rejected more vodka for fear that our coworkers would find us passed out drunk in the supply closet the next morning. I rummaged through the other drawers in the filing cabinet to see if Kelsey had left us additional goodies. But the remaining drawers were filled to the brim with heavy reams of paper.
“What the . . . ?” There was no reason for the paper to be stored in the filing cabinet. We stored paper on the shelves against the wall. I opened the bottom drawer and found a note in Kelsey’s bold block print. Everything you need to get out is in this room.
“I’m going to fricking kill Kelsey,” I said with a sigh, thunking my head against the side of the cabinet. “Ow.”
Her wording sounded familiar, even through the slightly muddled, vodka-damp workings of my brain. I swiped my hand over my face and tried to remember where I’d heard it before.