Waking Rory

by Elizabeth Jeannel

  Nash knocked on my door an hour later. I’d apologized to Rory, she’d gone to bed, and I was deep in thought as I strummed through scales on my guitar.

  “Hey,” he said softly, letting out a sigh as I set my guitar to the side. “I wanted to check on you.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I shouldn’t have asked about the piano. I know… I know that’s hard for you.”

  “Then why do you keep bringing me around so many of them?”

  He took a shallow, audible breath before stuffing his hands in his pockets.

  “I didn’t want you to give it up.”

  “I can still love music without playing the piano.” I sighed, stuffing my music sheets back into my guitar case before slipping my guitar in, too.

  “I know.” He nodded. “You were really good, though, and I—”

  “It’s fine, Nash. Really. And it was nice… to play it again. I’m just not ready yet, okay?”

  “Alright.”

  “I told Rory she could stay again since we are headed the same place in the morning,” I said quickly before he could ask about her. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Oh, uh. Yeah.” He nodded. He wasn’t going to ask. He’d probably already forgotten she was there. “You two sure are spending a lot of time together. I know you’re kind of into… I don’t know. Did your mom and dad ever get around to having the talk—”

  “Oh, no.” I laughed. I knew where that was going. “No, she’s just helping me with work stuff, you know. It’s… it’s not like that.”

  And it couldn’t be.

  “Gal pals, then.”

  I snorted. He had absolutely no clue what gal pals actually meant.

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, I was almost late. Nash was already gone by the time I’d gotten out of bed. I had to practically chug my coffee, and I was lucky my clothes were being tackled by someone else. I was rushing all over the place. I needed to be gone already. Shit, I was going to be late.

  Then I bumped into Rory in the hallway.

  “Oh, sorry.” I laughed. “But good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “You’re in a hurry?” she asked, my joke having clearly gone over her head.

  “Yeah, I’m late for work.”

  “Oh, right. Work.” She forced a smile. “Stay away from the windows?”

  There was a look of fear in her eyes. It had only been a few days. The idea of the weekend seemed lost on her. She wasn’t ready to be alone again.

  “You can come with me, if you want,” I said without thinking.

  Her eyes met mine.

  “It’s not like my boss could possibly hate me any more.”

  She nodded, fiddling with the bottom of my t-shirt.

  “I think I have something for you to wear.” I smiled, heading to my room.

  If there were famous last words, “it’s not like my boss can hate me more” would be mine. Because the look on my Madam Caron’s face when I walked into the office, Rory in tow, told me she definitely could hate me more. I’d barely scratched the surface of just how much this woman could despise me, and just how narrow the slits in her eyes could get.

  “Marraine,” Rory whispered the moment Madam Caron came into view.

  Rory’s eyes lit up, and she practically rushed across the room to Madam Caron, her arms spread into a hug. I only just intercepted the awkward moment, which earned a handful of looks from the entire room.

  “Mon cheri,” Madam Caron called sarcastically, taking a rather large step back from Rory. “This is a place of business not… ah… social hour.”

  “She’s here to help.” I smiled.

  “I have not extra work, finding something for you is difficult enough. I do not know who told you bringing friends to work was okay, but I’ll be calling your uncle.”

  “Madam, please. She doesn’t need any credits or letters of recommendation. She’s just here to help me with my French. And there’s no need to call Nash. He already approved it.”

  I could see Rory eyeing me out of the corner of my eye. She knew that he most definitely had not. But if I could keep my boss guessing, I was at least safe for today. Besides, it wasn’t all that far-fetched given that Nash sprung my internship on her in a day. He was known for asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

  “Ah,” she sighed and grit her teeth. “But of course.”

  Madam Caron said nothing else as she made her way back to her usual spot at the center of the room. They ought to just paint a circle there so no one accidentally gets in her bubble or something.

  “Why would you try to hug my boss?” I hissed the moment she was out of earshot.

  “I… I thought I knew her.” Rory looked down.

  “I’m sorry,” I breathed, trying to place the word she’d used. I couldn’t.

  She shook her head, but kept eyeing Madam Caron.

  Rory followed me to my desk, where yet another list written in French sat atop my desk.

  “I hate this place,” I whispered as I picked it up. At the very least, my French was getting better.

  Ironically, there was a reason Nash had chosen France as our first international branch. My grandmother, his and my father’s mother, was a French-Canadian immigrant. While she’d passed when I was still pretty young, I’d heard enough of it spoken growing up that I should have known it much better than I did.

  “Why do you do it if you hate it?” Rory asked as we sat down.

  “I don’t have a choice.” I shrugged. “It’s this or boarding school.”

  “Boarding school?”

  “Yeah, it’s… where parents send their kids away to live at school. So, I’d have to leave my home behind, and my friends. And…” I sighed again. “I’d be alone.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

  I took a seat, pulling up my social media account before I even finished reading the list. No new messages from Molly. Good to know she cared. I thought maybe she’d come around. I closed the social media page. I guess I had work to do.

  “I cannot believe people do this every day.” Rory yawned as we were grabbing our stuff to head home. “I can barely speak.”

  “Thank you for all your help today.” I smiled as we made our way toward the elevators. “Maybe they should have hired you instead.”

  She smiled back. “I doubt that. Even French is so different now.”

  She was clutching tightly to the blazer she’d borrowed that morning.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” I said, touching her arm. “You’ll get there.”

  She shrugged. “I am out of date like your computer. No one speaks Latin anymore.”

  “Wait, you speak Latin?”

  She nodded.

  “Rory, that’s amazing! No wonder you’re picking up modern English so well.”

  “But not modern French.”

  “You’ll get it. We can even practice it together if you want.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded as the elevator dinged. “What do you say we get some food and head home?”

  She smiled and wordlessly followed me to where Henry was waiting for us.

  “Girls.” He nodded.

  “Hello, Henry.” I smiled.

  Henry took us by a café where we grabbed dinner to go, and then straight home.

  I went to my room and slipped into something more comfortable. Rory seemed to like being all dolled up, but I had a feeling this was dressed down from what she was used to. I didn’t think it was smart to ask. The last thing I wanted after we’d had a decent day was to ruin it with my stupid mouth.

  When I got back to the kitchen, Rory had our dinner all set out on plates. “You didn’t have to do all that. I could have helped.”

  “I wanted to.” She smiled.

  Dinner was peaceful. Rory seemed to be much more comfortable while we sat with my French translation book, trying to make all our dinner conversations in French. It was good for me, but she was obviously much better at it than I was
. In fact, she made a game out of learning new words quicker than I could. It would have felt unfair had it not been for the wide smile on her face.

  “Okay, okay, you win.” I laughed, closing the book. “My brain hurts.”

  “That is how I felt using the… computer.” Her eyes were wide, like doing searches on the Internet had changed her outlook on life.

  I got up and grabbed our long-empty plates and rinsed them off in the sink. “Well, you don’t have to use it.”

  Behind me, Rory was cleaning the trash off the table, and by the time I’d finished with the plates, I had no clue what we were going to do with the rest of the evening. We probably still had at least another hour before Nash would even leave the office, and he was likely to grab his own dinner on the way home.

  We’d only just settled down for a movie when Autumn walked in. She was on the phone, chatting it up, take-out food in one hand and Nash’s dry-cleaning in the other. It was the most like his assistant I’d seen her look since we’d gotten off the McCoy plane.

  When she saw us, she stopped short. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  “Hi, Autumn.” I smiled.

  “Even…Rory. Long day today?”

  I nodded. “Mostly because I’m not used to it.”

  She took the food into the kitchen and set it down, still clinging to the dry-cleaning.

  “Even, do you think I could talk to you for a second?” She sighed as she turned around.

  “Uh, yeah, sure.” I nodded.

  I followed her into the hallway, all the way to Nash’s room. I lingered in the doorway while she hung up the dry-cleaning. I found it odd how well she knew the house. She adjusted her blazer as she came back toward me.

  “I need you to be honest with me. Who is your friend?” she asked.

  “She’s an in—”

  “Not an intern?”

  I felt all the blood drain from my face. My throat got very dry.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Please don’t tell Nash!” My eyes were already beginning to swell. “You know I can’t get in trouble, and Rory—”

  “Who is she?”

  “I found her.”

  “You found her?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, she… she lost her parents… and I—”

  Autumn sighed. She was buying it. It wasn’t like it was a huge lie. I had found Rory.

  “You’re trying to help her?” Autumn asked.

  I nodded.

  “I’m not going to tell Nash—” she raised a hand up to stop me from thanking her. “But I think you should. He could help, you know he could. Especially if he knows the truth. And I don’t think you should wait on it. Some of these custody situations take time, and you don’t want to make things harder for her because of your own fear.”

  Chapter 14

  The next day, Nash insisted we all get dinner after work. I wasn’t sure if it was really Nash, or if it was Autumn. She had been spending more time with him lately, and from the moment he’d hired her, she’d been pushing him to spend less time at the office. I considered her on my side, at least on that front.

  Even if she did want me to reveal the biggest secret of my life to him.

  Regardless, Nash liked fancy things, so every time I’d been out to dinner with him, it was a dress-up affair. And let me tell you, if I’d been brave enough to wear jeans to a restaurant where his colleagues were wearing tuxes, it would be worse for him than underage drinking. At least my criminal record he could keep under wraps.

  The moment we stepped out of the office, Henry took us back to the shopping mall. We spent the next hour there, because if Rory took forever picking out shoes, it should have been no surprise she took even longer picking out clothes. She loved getting to try them on rather than having them made.

  Meanwhile, I literally settled on the first nicer-than-work outfit I could find.

  “What do you think of this one?” I heard Rory’s voice call, and I turned.

  She was beaming in the doorway, giving a little twirl for probably the thirtieth time. I shouldn’t have been awestruck, but I was. The dress was blue, a deep shade of blue that brought out her eyes. It fell just above the knee, showing enough thigh that they caught the eye. With a cinched waist and a chiffon fabric that draped over her chest, falling in a perfect sweetheart, I felt my cheeks grow hot.

  “It’s perfect.” I smiled, looking down. I wish I had the ability to tell her to try on a different dress though. If she wore this one, I wouldn’t be able to focus on dinner.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded, forcing myself to look back up. She was fiddling with the hem of her dress again.

  “You look great,” I insisted. “Now can we go? We’re going to be late.”

  She sighed, rushed back into the fitting room to grab her clothes, and we were off to the register.

  The restaurant was nearly across town. We were late, but when we walked in to join Nash and Autumn, Nash didn’t seem angry. I assumed his calm had to do with the fact that Rory and I both dressed up, or maybe it was because Autumn was making him laugh. He laughed so rarely I’d forgotten what it even sounded like.

  It sounded so much like my dad’s it hurt.

  “Are you okay?” Rory asked as we sat down.

  I nodded.

  “How was work, girls?” Nash asked, having not noticed my entire mood change, and it was Rory who answered.

  “Good. Even’s French is really improving.”

  “I’m hearing good things. Ev, how are you liking it at the office?”

  “I wouldn’t say it’s my cup of tea.” I shrugged. “But there are worse places to spend my summer.”

  “Oh, just tell her,” Autumn said suddenly.

  “What?” I asked, looking between them both.

  “Okay, okay.” Nash sighed. “You remember the planner for the summer gala? Elaine?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I did some work for her last week.”

  “Well, she’s asked for you specifically to help her with the last-minute details.”

  “What? Me? But Madam Caron said—”

  “Oh, never mind that.” Nash shook his head. “Autumn was talking you up about the party you threw for me last year, and—”

  “I just said you did most of the planning,” Autumn corrected.

  “Well, she was impressed with what you did, and she thinks you have a good eye for PR,” Nash finished. “Which we will need at the gala. We have a lot of American-industry types coming this year, and she thinks maybe you can help her better connect with them.”

  “But I don’t know anything about the American business industry.” This was pressure. I didn’t handle pressure. Planning a birthday party for Nash, one he didn’t even show up for might I add, was one thing. Planning a major party like this, and we only had six weeks?

  “Then you’re lucky you aren’t dealing with a lot of business people. You’ve been to our Christmas gala several times, it’ll be fine.”

  Easy for him to say. It was hot in here, wasn’t it?

  Rory reached her hand over to mine, and I felt a lot of my anxiety melt away at the feel of her touch. I let out a breath and nodded to her, before I looked up to find Autumn watching us.

  Autumn smiled at me, then went back to looking over Nash’s shoulder at the menu. He was reading it for her. She apparently spoke just as much French as I had.

  “Not sure if I’m even hungry anymore,” I whispered to Rory as we opened our menus.

  “You will do great,” she said, squeezing my knee under the table.

  “So,” Autumn chimed in once we’d decided on our orders. “How did you two meet again? I don’t think Nash has told me.”

  She was calling him Nash now, not Mr. McCoy like I’d always heard her do before. All his employees called him Mr. McCoy. The housekeeper, the drivers, the people at the office, and yes, even his beloved assistant. It was weird, but for some reason, it made me smile.

  Then I pick
ed up on what she was doing. She was trying to get me to tell him. Smart. Public setting, less chance of him making a scene. If nothing else, she knew my uncle better than anyone.

  “Oh, Rory’s an intern,” Nash responded before I could even think about it.

  Just then, the waiter came by, and I felt like I’d missed my chance. Next to me Rory had gone stiff as a board. She was so quiet, I wasn’t sure she was even breathing.

  “You okay?” I asked while Nash and Autumn were distracted by the waiter.

  She shook her head slowly. “I’m scared.”

  “It’ll be okay. I won’t let anything bad happen, I promise.”

  I only hope I can keep that promise.

  Chapter 15

  I was going to tell Nash. I mean, I had to. It wasn’t like I had a lot of options for Rory, anyway. There was no way I was brave enough to take her to another one of those shelters. She deserved better. I knew, even if it was deep down, I would have to tell him eventually.

  I was going to do it the next day. Before work. He was always in the best mood first thing in the morning. After a long day, he was normally just tired and grumpy.

  I woke up early, rehearsed what I was going to say, and waited until I heard him shuffling around. Then I took a deep breath and headed in to his room.

  “Hey, Nash,” I said a little too quickly. “I need to tell you… something.”

  He had a suitcase on his bed. His closet was open; his dry-cleaning, which Autumn had hung two days before, was hanging in his garment bag. His entire room was made up.

  “Are you leaving?”

  He let out a long sigh. “I’m afraid so. There’s a situation back in Seattle I have to see to.”

  “Wh—what about me?” I breathed. It was barely over a whisper.

  “Well, Henry will still be taking you to work, and Autumn will be checking in on things a bit more—”