Lucky Neighbor: A Second Chance Secret Baby Romance

by Gage Grayson

  I’m not dealing with Maddie here. She’s there, in the same suit from this morning, she still looks amazing, and I saw just a tiny bit of that spark when she was talking to Stacia—but with me she’s investigating for the SEC.

  I realize, not for the first time, that it’s time to start acting like it.

  “Does that have anything to do with securities?” I ask, trying to start over.

  Madeline smiles again. It’s even more low key this time, but there’s something to it beyond just Don’t worry, although I could be imagining that.

  “What line of work are you in again, Ethan?”

  I laugh. I’m not sure if it’s polite, I’m not even sure if it’s genuine on my part, but I find myself laughing slightly—and I make myself stop. Madeline’s smile stays fixed where it is.

  “I get it, but what about the scope of the investigation?”

  “Oh, I’m getting to that. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not used to jumping from one thing to another so quickly.”

  “I don’t mean to rush you. I’m sure we’ll get on the same page soon enough.”

  “I hope so, Mister Barrett. We’re on the same page about that, at least. Now, I assume your firm is sufficient in self-scrutiny...” This is the last moment that I expect a spark from Madeline’s eyes, but the realization of who I’m actually talking to distracts me just a tad from the meeting.

  “But, there are a number of red flags,” Madeline resumes assuredly. “Although none of them are very obvious, yes, but that’s one of the reasons it takes time. I hope you’re ready to take some time, Ethan.”

  “Take some time,” I echo the incomplete yet meaningful sounding phrase. “I think I’m ready to take some time. With you, right?”

  Madeline’s smile grows, making her whole face appear subtly luminous. I’ve never seen her look quite the way she does now—not on this continent, at least.

  “I hope you know the answer to that,” she answers, thoughtfully pulling the cocktail pick out of her glass, “but if not, you’ll find out soon enough.”

  Madeline methodically frees one of the olives from the pick and devours it before getting up to disappear through the growing crowd and making her exit.

  Ethan

  I spend the first forty minutes of my Saturday walking up Broadway until the street stops at Union Square Park. Part of me wants to walk around the park and pick up Broadway where it continues, so I can keep walking uptown until I have some of this shit figured out.

  I don’t, though, because the last remnants of winter are still chilling the midday air, and Carina’s already spotted me from the north side of 14th Street. She’s waving me over like I need some last-minute encouragement to interact with my sister. As usual, she’s uncomfortably close to the truth.

  I walk straight across the two-way street in the middle of the block. Carina shakes her head maternally, which makes me think about the other sea of bullshit weighing on me this week.

  “What is wrong with you?” Carina huffs at me when I join her at the southern edge of the park.

  “I know you’re from here, Carina. How do you get around without being able to walk?”

  “I cross at the crosswalk, like...”

  “Like a tourist?”

  “Like a normal human being, I guess.”

  “Yep.” I absentmindedly start scrolling through my business phone, which is becoming more and more entangled with personal contacts. “Speaking of which, Ryan’s going to meet us.”

  “Ha! Speaking of normal human beings, this a different Ryan?”

  I put my phone away.

  “You know what it’s like for people like me, sis, in demand even on the weekends.”

  “Blech! Keep telling yourself that.”

  “It’ll be fun, we can get lunch at Max Brenner.”

  Carina looks in the direction of the restaurant. “That amount of chocolate might make the whole thing tolerable. I might just skip straight to dessert.”

  Maddie would love Max Brenner. I’m sure she’s been there, though. Who did she go with? Some bookish government employee dude with a massive crush who eventually worked up the courage to ask her out?

  I wave over at Ryan, who’s walking towards us from the uptown side of the park, carrying a giant fucking tray for some reason. I don’t have the energy to speculate further.

  I hope that shy, smitten coworker of Maddie’s, whoever he is, realizes what a rare gem of a person he’s been goddamn lucky to find. It’s small comfort that he surely realizes that. It would be a fucking travesty otherwise.

  Carina reluctantly turns around partway to see Ryan. I think she was planning to just take a quick glance, but when she spots him carrying his enormous round tray covered in paper and Styrofoam takeout containers, she turns around to face him completely and take in the presentation.

  “Dude, what are you doing?” Carina yells loud enough for half the neighborhood to hear.

  That doesn’t make me laugh, and I hate that it doesn’t. I’m feeling strangely sad for Carina.

  Why are both of us where we are in our lives now? What kind of patterns are we following that we don’t even understand?

  I hear Carina, her back to me now, actually let out a couple of disbelieving laughs. I guess she can pick up the slack for both of us right now.

  “I’ve got lunch right here,” Ryan announces loudly, since he’s still too far to talk like a normal person.

  I’m a bit impressed with the way he moves one hand out from under the tray while sliding the other into position to support it entirely. After all that work, he uses his free hand to bafflingly point to the top of the tray.

  “We see it, Ryan,” I shout at him over Carina. She turns around to give me a requisite look of embarrassment, but she doesn’t care enough for it to last more than a fraction of a second before we’re both watching Ryan balance the tray on one arm like he’s a busboy who got lost and wandered from a diner ten blocks away.

  This is what it must’ve looked like to Maddie and Lauren when I carried those two armfuls of hastily purchased souvenirs across the nightclub five years ago—except Ryan’s much more graceful, probably thanks to his post-college years in the restaurant game.

  I wonder what happened to all those gifts. I hope somebody at least ate those pounds of chocolate.

  Ryan makes, as far as I can tell, his first sensible decision all day by stopping at the two long, empty benches next to him and placing the tray down cautiously. Carina and I take the prompt to start walking over as Ryan sits down and examines his haul.

  “You’re not dumpster diving again, are you, Ry?” I ask when I get to a conversational distance.

  “Again? Have I ever?”

  I can’t accuse Ryan of not having a sense of humor, since mine’s probably off today.

  I take a spot on the bench next to Ryan, realizing that I’m even more tired than usual this weekend. I leave space for Carina to sit next to me, farther from Ryan, but she chooses to settle down on the other side of his gigantic tray.

  “Wherever you got it, I’m frigging starving.” Carina’s not shy about poking at the cardboard takeout box closest to her, although she’s still not opening it.

  “I spent the last twenty minutes building a smorgasbord of the best the Greenmarket has to offer. Although there are people who make a point of not letting food go to waste, and they know what they’re doing...Ethan.” Ryan glares at me with mock anger.

  “Freegans,” Carina comments. She’s opened the takeout box, at last, to reveal half a dozen deep-fried rice balls, and she probably missed Ryan’s sarcasm. No, she’s giving me her own mock-angry stare-down. “Ethan.”

  Well, I guess she’s in an okay mood, considering.

  “Those are from this place on Essex. They’re all different flavors. I’ve got spinach ricotta, Philly cheesesteak, roasted beets with goat cheese...most of them don’t have rice. I think that’s actually the Thanksgiving one you’re eating now.”

  As Ryan rambles about
his rice balls and Carina digs in, I stare absently at the Metronome, a public art installation on the building across 14th, essentially a giant digital timepiece.

  “Oh, it’s delicious,” I hear Carina exclaim with her mouth full, which is strange for her. “That’s real cranberry sauce. Ethan’s always liked the canned stuff.”

  One-half of the display on the metronome—the clock—is counting upwards into the microseconds as the day wears on, while the other half is counting down, backwards, the time left in the day until midnight.

  “I find that hard to believe,” Ryan blathers on with his own mouth full. “You should try this pizza from Artichoke. Quick, before I eat both slices.”

  Is the countdown feeding into the clock as it greedily drains the time away from everything? Or is it feeding from the clock, a reminder of what those hours, minutes, and seconds actually mean?

  “You don’t really prefer that canned crap, do you, Ethan? Because I may prefer it myself.”

  “What would Thanksgiving be without it? Hey, I think this is the spinach one.” Carina’s still eating ravenously.

  Whatever. I have no clue what I’m talking about with this shit. All I know is that right now, it doesn’t seem to be getting easier for anyone as the Metronome ticks on.

  “Come on, Ethan, I’m buying lunch for once. If you’re too good for this stuff, could you at least stop staring and tell us what kind of fucking cranberry sauce you like?”

  “Oh,” I say, looking back at Ryan slowly, acting like he just snapped me out of some spacey meditation, which I guess is close to the truth. “Look...I’ve got a lot on my figurative plate, so I’m not that hungry. Jeanette’s wedding is coming up soon.”

  I make eye contact with Carina, who stops chewing for a moment to give me an empathetic look.

  “You mean, your mother?” Ryan grabs one of the rice balls and eats half of it in one bite.

  “Yeah...our mom. She’s marrying again, now.”

  “So fucking what?” Ryan pulls a bottle of water from his jacket pocket and takes a gulp. “She’s an adult, and she’s happy, right?”

  I can’t help but look at Carina again. She’s suddenly lost her interest in lunch.

  “I hope so. I don’t know.” Carina’s voice is cracking a little. She’s carrying the full weight of this, and I can see how heavy it is for her.

  Ryan shakes his head. This subject is messier than he thought it would be.

  “It’s her decision, though. Isn’t it?” Ryan looks questioningly at Carina, then at me, as if he won an argument and we should realize that everything is fine now.

  I change my posture on the bench to address both my best friend and my sister more directly. Just like Carina, its weight is holding me down today, and I need to express why for them and for me.

  “I always thought that getting older, problematic as it is, would also make things easier—that it would bring rationality and wisdom—that you could break out of your patterns. Now that I’m feeling...I don’t know…I just don’t see it happening.”

  “Is your mom not acting wise?”

  “It doesn’t seem that way,” Carina answers, prompting Ryan to turn towards her. “I don’t think I’ve seen her make a decision like this. I mean...Gerald. Jesus.”

  Ryan looks to me for confirmation.

  “Is it really that bad?” he asks.

  “Gerald is...it could be worse, always. But...”

  “He’s kind of a prick.” Carina snatches the other slice of pizza after finishing my thought.

  Ethan

  I swear I feel the air conditioning kick on for a few seconds while walking down the Monday morning corridor to my office.

  “Are you fucking serious?” Phil, one of the senior partners, is audibly complaining from behind his office door. “It’s still, like, sixty fucking degrees outside.”

  Yeah, not my imagination, I guess.

  Things are back to normal, as they’re inclined to be, at the start of another week. Most people at the firm had the weekend off from working, and even I took most of it off to catch up on sleep and think about my lunch with Ryan and Carina—plus all the rubbish that’s coming with the persistence of days marching by and life continuing.

  People want for things to be normal, to have a comfortable routine to come back to—so naturally the SEC investigation is on the back burner of most people’s minds at this point, even mine.

  It feels like old times—as in a couple weeks ago—as I walk into my empty office, retrieve my tablet from the corner of my desk, and ready my work phone for the day/week/eternity ahead.

  I think about staying in the office for the next twelve, fourteen hours or longer, about basically living here again for a few days. I notice how comforting that plan feels.

  I don’t when or how this happened, but I realize it’s been this way for a while. It’s nice to have something, at least.

  Maybe one day I’ll buy one of those condos at the top of the Woolworth and just move my office up there. I can charge tourists thirty bucks a pop to look at the view—that’ll take care of the property taxes and the loneliness.

  My tablet’s taking forever to boot up, that’s not helping, and there goes my damn desk phone with another intraoffice ring. This is it—it’s happening like it’s supposed to. Because nothing’s going exactly like it’s supposed to.

  The fucking phone stops before I have a chance to pick it up. Damn it. I get it, though: no matter how low-key I am with everyone here, people are still going to be afraid of me.

  Then my door starts opening. I didn’t see that coming. It was closed, but I do make a point of telling people they can just come in if they need anything.

  “What is it, Greg?” The heavy door is slow to open, but it must be Greg. Anybody else here who interacts with me has a preternatural feel for the best times to talk. Greg hasn’t developed that yet.

  “Not Greg, I’m afraid. He’s been very nice to me, though.”

  Oh, fuck.

  Okay, another unexpected direction, albeit one I should absolutely be expecting at this point.

  Before I even see her face, Maddie’s voice has a way of collaborating with the room’s acoustics like nobody else’s I’ve talked to in here. I here every word in high resolution Surround Sound.

  “You have better elocution than possibly anyone I’ve ever met.” That’s all I can think to say as Maddie emerges from behind the door.

  She’s not donning her usual business suits. She’s wearing a pale blue cardigan over a light pink top...and a pencil skirt. She sure pulls it off well.

  “I’ve long had a knack for diction.”

  Maddie’s wearing her hair partially up, letting it fall just to her shoulders. She’s wearing some sort of formal Mary Jane black leather pumps, which echo as she walks with the same Surround Sound fidelity.

  “That’s a fantastic asset to have.” I regret that comment immediately, nearly cringing in my chair, but Maddie doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t waver even slightly as she pulls an old-school wooden office chair sitting off to the side of the room—which is pretty much a decoration—and wheels it over on her way to my desk.

  Now she’s sitting across from me like she’s done this a million times.

  “Please, take a seat.” I have no idea if I’m joking.

  “Thank you.” I don’t know if she is, either.

  “I suppose I should’ve been expecting you this morning.”

  I think I’m getting used to Madeline’s eyes now. Or at least their power doesn’t seem to hit me out of nowhere anymore.

  Yeah, I’m not fooling anyone with that. I’m still blindsided by it, but it’s not a terrible feeling, and I can’t let it distract me with so much at stake.

  “Greg was about to call you. I asked if I could just go in...” Maddie leans slightly over the desk, her sweater brushing up against the solid oak. “I don’t think he’d even know how to say no,” she whispers, immediately followed by an adorable, comical cringe.

  Equal
parts goofy and sexy, with the sexiness soon overtaking everything. It’s inimitable, something that I’m convinced only Maddie can do, and it used to drive me fucking crazy. I thought my memories of that feeling were gone, faded with time to nothing, but now I know I’ve been carrying every part of them in brilliant detail.

  But for Maddie, it passes in almost the literal blink of an eye. I feel like she’s doing me a service by snapping back into business just as the trickle of memories is about to become a flood.

  “I’ll instruct him not to bother you from now on. He’s not technically a receptionist, anyway. He’s...”

  “I get it, Mister Barrett. And that’s the last time I’ll call you that, Ethan.”

  I watch for what’s becoming Madeline’s famous hint of a smile, but her face stays sober. The only thing slightly off is that her eyes seem just the tiniest bit too wide, as if she just made a point and her face froze.

  She’s maintaining the expression very well as she stares at me, and I quickly spin in my chair to look out the window—this time, I need to look away to keep from laughing.

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to rain today. I forgot to bring an umbrella.” That’s my lame comment, looking out at the partially cloudy sky and the hint of Madeline’s reflection, which I see now has more than the hint of a smile.

  The smile’s gone by the time I spin back, and so is her staring-contest face.

  “Do you expect me to believe that you couldn’t get an umbrella if you needed one? Do you want me to get one from Postmates for you? Or we could send Greg...”

  “Ah, you got me. I just like showing off my view. I worked hard for this office.”

  “Hey, I understand, I wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t point it out to me like that.” There’s a flash of a hint of a smirk, followed by Madeline’s face dropping instantly into an incontestable professional-mode.

  “How good is your record keeping?” She throws the question out with perfect timing, and just the right near-subliminal suggestion of menace.

  “I don’t know how to answer that.” I also don’t know if I’m playing along, or what I’m doing.