Rocket Man

by Melanie Greene

  She laughed. He felt it down deep. “I grow what I can at home, but veggies don’t do that well indoors. I’m dying to get into my house and figure out what I can grow in the beds, besides carrots. I used to have a real orange thumb with carrots.”

  Dillon may have zoned out a little when she started talking about beds—he wasn't an idiot, he knew she meant planting beds—but he recognized an opportunity when he saw one. “You should come by on Saturday and drag me to meet these farmer friends of yours. Maybe I'll surprise you and go all organic all of the sudden.”

  She grinned at him as she pulled into the arena's parking garage. “Stick with me, babe, and I'll have you all organic in no time.” It wasn't the words themselves that had him just about ready to convert to vegetarianism if she asked, but the combination of her tone and the sparkle in her eyes. Dillon was beginning to think this was all going to work out very, very well for him indeed. And then they parked and got out of the car and he finally got a good look at Serena's outfit, and his mouth went dry.

  Serena kept flea-jumping between edginess and relaxation. It was refreshing to get almost entirely away from work with Dillon, and she was pleased that being with him after-hours without the gang was as easy as when they were buffered by Jorge and Janice and everyone. Friendly. But there was a vibe there—or was she inventing the vibe? Or was her recalcitrant libido just inventing a one-sided vibe? After twenty minutes in the car together she was still breathing just about normally, with no signs of splotchy red patches anywhere, so on the up side, yay, she didn't look like a troll. And Dillon was maybe probably being a little flirty with her, right? And the farmers market on Saturday, that was—well, it wasn't a date, but it was an assignation. And one he instigated. Going to this game was great, but it was Anica who'd set it up. Saturday was the first time they'd ever discussed doing something, just the two of them, outside of work. So until she knew differently, it was going to be an assignation, and she was going to look forward to it.

  Unless he meant it completely as a date? When she wasn’t looking for dating, she didn’t want to date. So why did it deflate her that maybe Dillon didn't mean it as a date?

  Disgusted with her inner ramblings, she yanked up the parking brake and checked the garage pass was hanging on her rearview before hopping out of the car and shaking out her jersey. She looked up to find Dillon just a step from her, and the lights in the garage weren't the brightest, but it seemed to Serena that he was definitely on the staring side of the expressions spectrum. So...that was interesting. Watching him, she slowly reached up to pull her hair into a ponytail and twist the band from her wrist around it, and, yeah. He noticed. And despite the way he forced his eyes up to meet hers and grin as he said, “Old school. I like it,” she knew he was appreciating the red baby-doll tee and low-rise jeans under her Olajuwon #34 jersey as much as the homage to the Rockets' former star center.

  She grinned back. “He's The Dream, you can't top the best.”

  “Did you live in Houston back then?”

  “Sure, yeah, most of my life,” she said, and chatted about the good old days of back-to-back NBA Championships when she was a kid as they made their way into the arena.

  The game was a nail-biter, but Dillon kept track of his own stats—nine high-fives with Serena, sixteen knees or shoulders brushing against each other, and once when she clutched his arm as a three-pointer rimmed out of the basket just before the buzzer sounded, sending them into overtime—as avidly as he usually tracked the rebound percentage. Sometimes when she jumped up with a yell he could see the curve of her breast moving through the large armholes of the jersey. When she sat forward to follow a play he could steal up-close and very appreciative glances at her jeans-clad rear end. He warned himself to stop staring, repeatedly, and the game was a brilliant distraction. But when the hell had he gotten to the point in his life that the NBA was a distraction from a woman? Damn. And when he saw her again—not work seeing, but social seeing—what was supposed to act as a barrier between his increasingly desperate need to touch Serena every damn where and his last shreds of self-restraint? Eddie's burgers? Organic produce, for fuck's sake? If he could happily envision grabbing Serena and pulling her onto his lap in the fourth quarter when they were down by four points, just to feel her hip and ass pressed up against his cock, to see if he could make her nipples so tight that he could see them, feel them through the layers that separated them from his searching thumbs, to taste her—to finally, finally taste her—then, yeah, the damn farmers were going to have to redefine ‘all-natural’ once he and Serena got there.

  Her gasp startled him back to the game. They’d missed a jumper, they were headed into a second overtime, and Dillon had been too glazed over to catch it. She gave him a questioning look during the break, and he came up with a comment about the forward getting aggressive to prove he was still focused on the Rockets. He just about had his head together by the time the Pistons were defeated and the happy crowd surged to its feet to cheer and then swarm out to contribute to the gridlock getting home.

  But it wasn’t images from the play on the court that filled his head that night while he tried, frustrated, to fall asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  For the next couple of days of only cursory contact with Dillon, Serena pondered. Okay, maybe obsessed was the more apt word. He'd half-leaned in to her when she pulled up at his door after the game, but stopped short of anything more than a “best thanks from a client ever, right?” grin and shoulder-bump before getting out. It wasn't like she'd expected to be invited in. Or to get a kiss. Or to get naked and show up to work in the morning in her Rockets jersey.

  And then their schedules turned into 'ships passing in the night' territory, as sometimes happened—when she was in, he was off-site, and when he was back, she was in a client meeting or at the inspection for the new house. Not that it mattered, since they were just pals. He might have asked her out a couple of times when he’d been new to Lanigan, but probably that was just because he was getting to know people. Almost a month later and Serena was full of inappropriate thoughts she just wasn’t sure were reciprocated, since he hasn’t asked her out again. He did email her a blurb from his neighborhood e-newsletter about the Saturday market's increasing popularity, with the subject line “High time I followed the trend, right?” So she supposed that was still on.

  And no one at work needed to know what was going on.

  Or not going on.

  Or going on, in explicit, excruciating detail. But only in her fantasies.

  That Friday was the third of the month, which meant grilling burgers at Eddie’s for whoever could show up. Serena wasn’t kidding herself. She didn’t know what exactly she wanted to happen—especially with a potential audience—but she wasn’t playing it safe and staying away. She’d overheard Dillon offering to bring a six-pack and a couple of bags of chips, and she’d confirmed on her break that the longnecks were cooling on his shelf in the fridge.

  “Hey, Toots, what’s wrong?” Janice asked, coming to an abrupt halt at Serena’s door. “You look like the fates of nations rest on your shoulders.”

  She wriggled the shoulders in question to loosen them up and grinned up at Janice. “Nothing. It’s all good. Just Friday-itis, I suppose.” Serena glanced—again—at the clock on her screen. “And it’s not even lunch.”

  “You wanna throw on your cross trainers and take a walk with me at noon?” Janice was always finding ways to fit fitness into her day. The day the smoothie shop opened six-tenths of a mile from the office was one of her best ever—several times a week now she would walk there and place her order, then take off for a two-mile jog to the bayou and back, picking up her smoothie to enjoy on her cool-down walk back to the office.

  “You’re a maniac. It’s getting hot out there. What are you going to do when it hits the nineties next month?”

  “Duh, I’ll run in the morning and do weights in my office at lunch.”

  “The Smoothie Shack will go out of business.�
�

  “I’ve warned them. Liza’s considering opening a franchise at the end of my block at home.”

  Serena laughed, and gave in. “Fine, fine, I’ll go with you, but I’m not running in this skirt. You’ll have to do that part without me. I’ll sit in the Shack’s a/c and read the free papers until you get back.”

  “Deal,” Janice said, straightening away from the doorframe. “See you in a couple of hours, then, Toots.”

  Refocused, Serena set aside questions of what to do—if anything—about Dillon that evening and turned to her light table. Get the Atkinson proposal done before lunch, stretch her legs with Janice, then head out for a site survey on the creative for Houston Green at two. The day would end before she knew it, and Eddie had promised to make beer can chicken that night as well as the burgers, so it had to end well for that reason if no other.

  Or so she hoped.

  Janice amazed Serena—and Liza, the smoothie proprietor—by pulling up a stool to Serena's table instead of hitting the road after they ordered.

  “So.”

  “Soooooo?” Serena echoed.

  Janice fiddled with a straw. “I was up early, so I've already run a few miles today.”

  “Fair enough.” As if Janice ever needed to justify opting out of physical activity. Her metabolism ran on high-octane or something—she was never still. Serena tried to run with her at lunch semi-regularly, and dragged herself to a yoga class at the gym on a basic schedule, but Janice put every fitness buff to shame. Serena had been about to launch into rhapsodic rambling about the lack of raccoon infestations at Hakeem the Dream House, but her friend’s unusual body language put everything else on the back burner of her mind.

  “Maybe I'll just go half the distance,” Janice blurted, half-standing.

  “Sit your toned butt down, missy, and tell me what on earth's gotten into you,” Serena laughed, grabbing at her wrist. “I've got the feeling that your jitters aren't the kind that can be run off as easily as they can be talked out. You were fine this morning, right? What happened?” Janice slumped—she slumped!—at the table and groaned. “It's stupid.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You're going to think I'm dumber than three fence posts.”

  “Again: so?”

  Janice laughed, at least. Liza waved them over for their drinks, and pacing just those few feet seemed to settle her down a little, because she finally gave up a little info. “Okay, you know our forklift guy, Ricky?”

  Janice’s job kept her hopping between the warehouse, the creative offices, and the print shop, usually in the middle of one call or making notes about another call looming on her horizon. The job would eat alive someone without her boundless energy, at least the way she did it. And the way she did it was kick-ass. Anica had tried to move Janice to an off-site position once, and everyone in Serena's office had threatened revolt.

  “Ricky's the one with the faux-hawk who's always losing packing slips, right?”

  “Yeah. Or running over them then giving them to me with giant tire treads over the signatures, whichever.”

  “Okay, then, sure, I know Ricky.” Serena stirred her smoothie, trying to work out what had shaken Janice up so much. Her eyes widened, “Oh, he didn't make a pass at you, did he? Or...did you want him to, and he didn't?”

  Janice gagged. “Serena. Toots. Faux-hawk, remember?”

  “Good. I mean, if you wanted...I won't judge.”

  “Yeah, well, I will. That dog won’t hunt. I'm still waiting for Prince Charming, and I guarantee that Prince Charming's never stolen a hairstyle from anyone on Big Brother.”

  Serena laughed. She was relieved that Janice was back to joking around, but something had clearly upset her friend, and she wanted to know what it was. After Janice paced a little more while pretending to need napkins from the dispenser at the other end of the tiny Smoothie Shack, Serena pulled her back down onto her stool. “Okay, what did Ricky the unfortunately coiffed tow motor driver do?”

  Janice hunched her shoulders up and glared out the window. “He said I was a dyke.” Taking in Serena's stunned face, she continued. “He said that only a dyke would work in the warehouse—which, way to get my job right, Ricky—and that if I needed a real man to show me what was what, he was sure he could find me some volunteers on the back dock.”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  “I know. I know. I'm furious. Furious, Serena. I've never—I just can't believe....”

  Serena was stunned. “So what did Anica say?”

  “Why would I tell Anica?”

  “Well, then, whoever. Miguel or, I don't know, that HR woman who is always handing out her cards.”

  “Emily.”

  “Yeah, Emily.”

  Janice sighed. “Emily would just make me file an incident report and then stick me and Ricky and Miguel and I don't know who-all in a room for interviews.”

  “Which, and I know you know this, is the right thing to do in cases of workplace harassment.”

  “Okay, sure, and I need that kind of paperwork on file? Troublemaker Janice, can't hack it in the good old boy’s world of the warehouse?”

  “Miguel doesn't run it like that.”

  “No. But only because he's too macho to let a girl threaten his sense of his own superiority.”

  “Then isn't he macho enough to put a stop to this crap happening in his warehouse?”

  Janice slumped again. “I don't know.”

  “You should tell him,” Serena urged. She didn't know the warehouse manager super well, but she'd always thought he was an upstanding guy, and Janice had never said anything against him, no matter what kinds of problems or hold-ups from that quarter were threatening her sanity at any given time. “Do you think he wouldn't believe you?”

  Janice snorted. “It's not like he's never met Ricky before.”

  “Okay, then?”

  “I should be able to handle this kind of crap by myself,” Janice grumbled.

  Serena smiled. “You're wishing you'd pulled out the roundhouse punch on Ricky, huh?”

  “At least. In kickboxing class last week we learned this excellent punch-jab combo.”

  “And I'm sure it's very effective,” Serena said, slurping her smoothie, “but not very appropriate to the workplace.”

  Janice rolled her eyes. “You're no fun at all sometimes, Toots.”

  “Granted. But you'll go talk to Miguel?”

  Janice nodded briefly before slumping against the table again.

  Serena shot a reassuring smile towards Liza, who was watching Janice's extremely uncharacteristic body language with wide eyes, then glanced at her watch and clapped her hands together. “Great! Let's walk a half-mile before heading back. I want to feel guilt-free about whatever I eat at Eddie's tonight.”

  “He's making beer can chicken,” Janice sing-songed, finally smiling as she rose.

  “I know. He has to. I told him we'd boycott for the next three months if he didn't stop promising and never delivering. He thought it was funny. Funny! To dangle the specter of beer can chicken in front of me and then withhold.” They waved to Liza on the way out the door. “What's funny about that?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Eddie's wife, Magnolia, opened the door then immediately reached up to give Dillon a smack on the cheek. “Baby doll! Good to see you. You have more pics of the little one?”

  “Hey, Mags,” he returned with a kiss of his own. He’d met Magnolia a couple of times when she’d stopped by the office or happy hour to see Eddie, and they’d bonded quickly over the adorable nature of his new nephew. Dillon handed the beers and chips to Eddie before pulling out his cell. “Let me show you. Here's Toby having his sponge bath—look at his nose!”

  Magnolia took the handset and scrolled through the latest uploads from Shannon, cooing.

  “Oh, lordy, you've done it now,” complained Eddie, sighing dramatically. “Now she's going to jump me tonight for sure.”

  “Pobrecito,” muttered Jorge, who crowded in the doo
r behind Dillon.

  “I know, right? Just write it in your calendars for ten months from now, 'Eddie Jr.’s Christening and BBQ.’”

  “You're grilling at our baby's baptism?”

  “Mags, my love, I'm grilling while you're in labor.”

  “Best to start rethinking that whole ‘Eddie, Jr.’ thing then, dear one. Dillon, you’re a fine looking young man, and clearly fond of the little ones. Would you care to procreate with me?”

  Dillon awkwardly but gamely danced Magnolia into his arms in time to the country music blasting from the next room. He stumbled just a tad when he spun them to see Serena in the doorway, looking quickly up from the level where his butt had been pre-spin, but Magnolia didn’t seem to notice, laughing as Eddie pulled her away from him.

  “Get your own woman, Dillon-tante, this one’s all mine.”

  “Dillon-tante?” Dillon snorted. “Seriously? That’s bad even for you. Hey, Serena, let me help you with that.” He reached for the salad bowl. “Grow these tomatoes yourself, did you?”

  Serena “mm-hmm”ed at him as she twirled Magnolia away from Eddie to say hello. The two of them linked arms and headed out back. Janice had seen them coming and pulled a couple of beers from the cooler, leaving the men to sort the appetizers and side dishes into some sort of accessible order before the burgers needed tending.

  “Well, that’s gratitude for you,” Dillon grumbled. “I was going to give your wife a baby, and instead I got left holding the salad.”

  Eddie slapped him on the back. Eddie, it must be said, did more than his fair share of back-slapping on a routine basis. “I’ve been left holding worse than that whenever I’ve tried it, my friend. Be grateful.”

  “I don’t think he’s that good looking,” Jorge put in.

  “Eh?”

  “Dillon. Mags said he was good looking. I was standing right beside him, but she didn’t even look at me. Does she got something against a biracial kid? No Mexican in her precious bloodlines?”