“Sounds like you’ve given it some thought.”
First Jake, and now Chuck. What was this, get-in-touch-with-your-feelings week?
“Sounds like you’ve got too much time on your hands,” Bret said.
Probably still about two minutes to go on the coffee. But he’d stood here long enough. He slid the pot out from under the stream of coffee, slipped his mug in its place, and poured in some coffee from the pot without letting any of it spill. The result would probably be just about as bitter and nasty as the pot he’d poured out, but he had work to do. And having Chuck play amateur Oprah Winfrey wasn’t helping.
* * *
When Chloe left the Pine ’n’ Dine at four, the afternoon had gone gray. She’d spent over an hour writing there and finally had a decent first draft to show for it. Not bad, considering that her pen had barely moved for the first twenty minutes. She’d been too busy composing mental discussions with Bret. Because she knew she had to go back to the office, and she was already dreading it.
The silent treatment had never been big in her family, and this was getting darned close to it. With all of Bret’s distant civility, the office felt like a glacier, or a sensory deprivation tank. Almost as if she was being punished. She didn’t think Bret meant it that way. But something had to change. She never thought she’d miss the days when he was just her professional nemesis. Looking back, it seemed so much easier.
Sherry hadn’t been at the diner. Just as well. In her current frame of mind, Chloe was bound to ask too many of the wrong questions, and that could get embarrassing fast.
A light fog had settled over Evergreen Lane as Chloe started toward the public parking lot. It wasn’t dark yet, but you couldn’t call it daylight either. The Christmas lights had come on, and she wondered whether the grayness had triggered a sensor to turn them on, or a proactive human had hit a switch.
The colored lights against the gray-white mist had a strange beauty. Not quite gloomy, but—wistful? Melancholy? Unable to resist, Chloe backtracked half a block so she could turn around and capture more of the view with her phone’s camera.
Pensive was the word, she decided. The foggy street matched her mood in an almost soothing way. She took a few more photos, longing to capture it, knowing that a flat rectangle could never quite re-create the feeling.
She lowered her phone to review the pictures. When she reached the end of the Evergreen Lane photos she kept going, thumbing back to the ones she’d taken at the Harvey House in Barstow. She reached the picture she’d taken of Bret on the stairs, and Chloe bit her lip.
It was a lucky shot, as most of her best pictures were—a moment of happenstance when things came together just right. He’d looked good in that gray blazer, the same one he wore every darned day. But there was something different in his demeanor, a little looser, more relaxed. She’d shifted the camera slightly and gotten it just in time—a quick click before he caught her aiming it at him, before the moment got away.
It was a good picture of Bret, but it was more than that. It was the way he was looking at Chloe. Not at Daddy’s girl, not at a piece of arm candy—but at her. She could see a slight softening of his usual sharpness. He wasn’t quite smiling, but almost. She enlarged the photo with her thumb and forefinger, like the glutton for punishment she was.
Her phone had been worth the extra money she’d paid for it. The image enlarged beautifully, and the expression on his face was there. The same look he’d gotten when he started to leave her at her door, right before he spun around and—
She hadn’t imagined it.
It never happened, Bret had said after they kissed. This picture assured her it did happen. Not just the kiss, but that day. Like Camelot, one brief and shining moment. One glimpse of what things might have been like in some alternate universe.
With a few quick jabs of her finger, she deleted the picture.
And just as quickly, retrieved it again.
* * *
Back at the office, she plunked down in her seat and started typing up the rough draft from her notepad. A few minutes later, Bret walked out, stopping only long enough to pull his overcoat off the rack near the door. It was all she could do to keep from screaming under her breath. But she didn’t want to draw Chuck’s attention any more than she already had. It could be her paranoid imagination, but he seemed to be casting a few more curious glances today, breaking his pattern of laid-back observer. Not that she could blame him. Things were pretty weird around here today.
Typing the words from her notepad reminded her of her old process. Even in college, she’d done most of her first drafts longhand on legal pads. In the back of her mind, she imagined Bret’s voice, admonishing her against doing the same work twice. But it wasn’t quite true. She always revised as she typed.
A few minutes before five, Chuck stood and shook on his coat. “Chloe?”
She gulped and looked up, doing her best to keep her expression vacant. “What?”
“There’s snow in the forecast for tonight. I checked Facebook, and it’s already coming down on some of those streets higher up the hill. Don’t stay too late.”
She glanced toward Bret’s door. He’d left it open, so he’d definitely be coming back to the office tonight.
She nodded. “Okay.”
Chuck left. She finished typing the story, fleshed it out, smoothed it over, and sent it to Bret’s in-box. By that time it was after five-thirty. Usually she was here until about six. If she left now, she could avoid crossing paths with Bret.
Part of her wanted to cross paths with Bret. To tell him . . . what? To stop being so polite? It had almost made sense at the Pine ’n’ Dine, when she was talking to him in her head. Now she wasn’t so sure.
Chloe sighed, then e-mailed herself the notes she’d typed during a phone interview earlier today. She could work on it at home and get a head start on tomorrow’s workload. If she left now, she could avoid Bret and the worst of the snow. Definitely the smart way to go, she decided.
As she walked down the hall, she could see the white flakes falling in the parking lot through the glass door of the employee entrance. The late afternoon chill hadn’t been so bad, but it would be colder now. And wet. And if they’d gotten much snow, she’d need to scrape her windshield before she got into her car.
Chloe waited a moment, her hand on the door. In the security lights of the parking lot, the fine white particles glinted against the now-dark sky. She could barely make out the bumper of the car nearest the door.
She tucked her head down, pushed open the door, and plunged outside. Cold and wet, but at least the wind wasn’t blowing. Chloe pulled her coat around her and glimpsed the grille of the first car she passed. It had a Mustang pony logo in the center. Her heart twinged.
She raised her head to locate her car, a few spaces down the short row in front of the sidewalk. And saw him.
Actually, she could only see the back of Bret’s black overcoat, collar upturned against the snow, and his dark hair above the collar, already dotted with white flakes of snow. Leaning over the hood of her car, he was using the edge of a credit card to scrape the crust of snow from her windshield.
Chloe slowed her steps. She heard the rasp of plastic against glass, probably the very sound that had kept Bret from hearing her approach.
She reached the front of her car, and he turned to look up with a start. Guiltily, as if she’d caught him slashing her tires instead of clearing her windshield. He stepped back with an awkward nod.
She’d been frustrated all day. She still was. But he’d just done her a kindness. In the snow. All her roughly composed speeches died away.
Not that it would have done her any good. The cold, wet night didn’t exactly invite conversation. Even if she’d been prepared to clear the air with Bret, this wasn’t the time.
And he was already circling the rear of the car next to hers, taking the long route away from Chloe to get back to the sidewalk.
“Be careful on the road,” he said o
ver his shoulder. “Good night.”
She watched him stride briskly toward the employee door with the sure steps of someone who had years of experience walking over fresh snow.
“Thanks,” she called belatedly after him.
He disappeared into the building, like one of Dickens’s lesser-known Christmas ghosts.
Chapter 14
“Close the door.” Tiffany’s abrupt tone didn’t sound like Tiffany.
Chloe hadn’t even stepped all the way into the apartment, but with the icy air rushing in on her heels, she was happy to oblige. After she did, she saw the reason for Tiffany’s urgency. A little brown and white cat trotted purposefully across the living room to meet her.
“What—” Chloe began.
“He was under the car in the parking lot when we left work,” Tiffany said. “Trying to keep out of the snow. He’s lucky we didn’t squish him.”
The cat wound rapidly around Chloe’s ankles, apparently in a big hurry to rub off as much fur as possible onto the bottom half of her slacks. She could hear his purr from where she stood. Unable to resist, she dropped to the floor and knelt to pet him. The feeling of the soft, slightly bedraggled fur set off an ache in her throat.
The surprise guest raced back and forth under her hand as she stroked its back. Cats were usually aloof. Not this one. He—She?—had the gangly, scrawny look of a cat that wasn’t quite full-grown.
Kate emerged from the bathroom, dressed in the sweats she’d undoubtedly just pulled on after taking off her uniform. Tiffany still wore her dated pink dress from the Pine ’n’ Dine.
Kate said, “We were thinking of calling him Rascal.”
Her roommate’s tone carried the hint of a challenge. Chloe looked up at Kate, who was clearly braced for an argument. Because, of course, their apartment rental agreement didn’t allow pets.
The cat let out a raspy meow when Chloe stopped petting him. He reared up on two legs to rub the top of his head against her hand.
“Are you guys nuts?” Chloe scooped up the cat, rewarded by an even louder raspy purr as he bumped his head against her chin.
Kate and Tiffany stared at her as if trying to regroup.
“You’ve got no imagination,” Chloe said into the silence. “‘Rascal’? Haven’t you ever heard of a thesaurus? Or a baby name book?”
“Yeah, pick up one of those around here and we’d have the town talking for days.”
“Search the Internet, then.”
The cat climbed toward her shoulder, looking for a place to hide in her hair. Chloe turned her ear toward his muzzle and listened to that wheezy buzz saw of a purr. She hadn’t had a pet since her first cat, Nipsy, died during her freshman year of college. She closed her eyes and stroked him some more.
“The apartment manager is going to kill us.” Kate, caught off guard, was now playing a halfhearted devil’s advocate.
“She’ll have to find out about him first,” Chloe said.
“We were afraid you’d say no,” Tiffany said. “You’re the one who’s usually a stickler for the rules.”
Was that who she was? If Chloe was the responsible one in this bunch, they were all in deep trouble.
“We don’t have to call him Rascal,” Tiffany said, her eyeliner faintly smeared. “How about Catsby?”
That was pretty good, actually. Tiffany knew the way to her heart was a literary reference, and Chloe did love F. Scott Fitzgerald. But . . .
An idea seized her. “Hemingway,” she said. “His name is Hemingway.”
Tiffany and Kate exchanged looks, as if to confirm that Chloe had just lost her mind.
Kate gave another shrug. “O-kay.”
The talk turned to cat food and litter boxes. Chloe kept petting Hemingway and let his noisy purr drown out the sound of her common sense. It wasn’t a great idea and she knew it.
But tonight, a lovelorn, raspy-voiced feline was just what she needed.
* * *
Bret was doing his best to immerse himself in the words on his screen when a familiar voice broke in on his thoughts.
“Bret, this is awful.”
Chloe stood in the door of his office. Not too far in, but she didn’t look like she was about to budge. Posture straight, feet planted firmly on the ground, she blocked his only exit. It was late morning and she’d waited until Chuck left for an interview, so they had all the privacy they needed, and he had absolutely no means of escape.
Cornering him in his own office—or McCrea’s office—was dirty pool. But she looked armed and ready for battle. Determined to break through his wall, which, for his money, was every bit as sturdy as a Lego tower.
Bret’s mouth went dry. He told himself that if he couldn’t handle a twenty-four-year-old cub reporter, he didn’t know what.
He leaned back from his keyboard, but not too far, as if to remind her that he had important things to do. He folded his arms. “What’s awful?”
It was a patent bluff, but he had to start somewhere.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t even.”
Okay, for a woman who made her living with words, that was weak. If she couldn’t say the words, maybe he could make it through this.
But before he could formulate his next obtuse question, she added, “That thing that never happened.”
Silently, Bret pulled in a deep breath.
He couldn’t meet her eyes without reliving some part of it. Not just the sock-melting kiss, but the sheer joy of being with her that day. The way she laughed. The way she grabbed for her camera phone when she saw something she liked. Her moral indignation when he suggested that the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper album was overrated, and Abbey Road was probably their best work. The way she smiled at him, which wasn’t quite the same way she smiled at anybody else.
Meeting her eyes brought all of that back. But he couldn’t avoid her eyes now, or his defense wouldn’t hold water.
“Chloe, you were right. We’re professionals. We can’t—” He shook his head, keenly aware that they were in his employer’s office, as if the walls were witnesses that could testify against him. “We just need to move past it.”
“But this isn’t like it never happened. It’s emphasizing the fact that it did happen.”
“In what way? What, exactly, am I doing wrong?”
He’d made sure his behavior was above reproach. On some hypothetical level he was aware that this was a sexual harassment suit begging to happen, although he didn’t think Chloe had that in her. Still, he’d written and read enough news to know that people often did things you would never expect. Especially when they were angry or hurt. But that wasn’t what really worried him.
It was himself he couldn’t trust.
“Stop being so polite to me,” she said. “I hate it. We were just starting—”
“To be friends?” He couldn’t keep the bitter edge out of his voice. Like it or not, friends was a word every guy hated hearing from the woman he was attracted to. Yes, he supposed that at some tottering midpoint, they’d been friends. But Bret had fallen over to the other side of that, and he couldn’t see going back. Yes, he liked Chloe. It was what drew him to her so strongly, with a pull that went beyond physical attraction. But trying to separate that liking from the part of him that wanted to close the distance across the room between them and—
Well, that could take years.
She’d been a willing participant. He didn’t think he’d imagined that. Her parted lips, her arms around his neck, that slightly confused look when he pulled back. He’d put that look there, and he couldn’t help feeling some satisfaction from that.
It made it that much harder for him to ignore that there was something between them. Something that went beyond an impetuous moment of heat. He never did anything impetuous, rarely did anything on impulse, and couldn’t remember the last time he’d done something because he so purely and simply wanted to.
Now she wanted to be friends?
And they said men were the ones who compartmentalized.
>
Focus, Radner. What had he been saying?
“This isn’t about being friends.” With difficulty, he picked up the conversational thread. “We’re colleagues, first and foremost. Anything that jeopardizes that is bad for both of us.”
“It’s a little hard to be colleagues when we can’t even stay in the same room together.”
“You’re the one who left yesterday.”
“I needed air. It’s hard for me to write when the air is thick. And you left right after I came back.”
“I had an interview.” Another patent lie.
“Bret.” She closed her eyes briefly before meeting his again. “I’m not trying to make this worse than it is. I just want a comfortable working relationship. If we could get back to where we were, even last Friday . . .”
The rest dangled in the air. Time travel isn’t an option, Bret thought, but he didn’t feel up to the comeback.
Bret looked beyond the lift of her chin and the set of her jaw. Her gray-green eyes were steady, and he had to give her credit. This wasn’t an attack. She wasn’t even being unreasonable. She was making an honest effort to cut through this mess, and however ill-advised, that took guts. More guts than he had.
She wasn’t asking him to confess to anything. She just wanted a little détente, a truce in what wasn’t even a war.
But he didn’t know how to deal with it differently. When he was near her, everything wanted to spill out. He wanted to say he’d meant every bit of it, that there was no other human being he’d rather spend time with, which was saying a lot, because most of the time he enjoyed being alone.
Of course, he couldn’t say that. Something akin to panic clutched at his throat. He was out of moves. He had to say something, maybe something to make her so angry she’d turn and leave. Because that might be the only way out of this.
“Bret?” Jen’s voice came over the intercom on his phone. “You have a call on line two.”
He raised a finger to Chloe. Saved by the bell.
Or so he thought, until he answered the phone.
* * *
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