“On the brothers?” I asked. “Hank told me it was just on Bruce.”
Candace shrugged. “Alls I know is alls I heard.”
I sighed. It wasn’t like I was going to actually walk over there and introduce myself. I decided I’d just wait until Weinstead left. Then I could go talk to Hank privately and tell him the bad news. Accepting the fact that I was giving up on the piece felt like I was letting a part of myself go.
I was ashamed of how I hardly even dug for any real information about Bruce once I realized I had feelings for him. I felt like a silly little girl who didn’t deserve to have a job in journalism. After all, I finally got a real assignment and I blew it. Literally and figuratively.
My heart stopped when Hank looked in my direction and his eyes lit up. He pointed at me, said something to Mr. Weinstead, and then they both started coming my way.
“Can I use you as a human shield?” I said to Candace, but when I turned to look for her, she was already fast-walking back to her desk.
Weinstead and Hank reached me with expectant smiles. Hank, for his part, looked like he was hoping I wouldn't embarrass him. Weinstead looked like he thought I was about to spill some of the juiciest dirt he'd ever heard on Bruce and his brother.
“So you’re our undercover agent?” asked Weinstead. He had a kind of Santa Claus look, but a weirdly high-pitched voice and beady, dark eyes.
“You make it sound a lot fancier than it really is,” I said, laughing nervously.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Nat. You landed the job like it was nothing. Been imbedded over two weeks now. That’s no chopped liver.”
I forced a smile. “Well, it’s not all that impressive.”
“So,” asked Weinstead. “Making progress, I assume?”
“I was actually wondering if you could give me any details on why you suspect the Chamberson brothers of corruption,” I said.
“Let me give you a little tip from one journalist to another,” said Weinstead. I noticed the look on Hank’s face that seemed to say he was just as aware as I was that Weinstead had never even been close to a journalist, but did my best to look eager and receptive anyway. “Don’t forget your job is to investigate the subject of your piece, not the person who assigned it to you.”
I gave a tight-lipped smile. It was as clear a refusal to answer my question. “Well, I was only asking because I haven’t seen even a hint of corruption in Galleon. Maybe if I stuck around for months, I would eventually overhear something, but even if I wanted to do that, which I don’t, there’s no way I could survive months without getting paid. The fee for the article wouldn’t even come close to covering my expenses for that long a stretch, either.”
Weinstead spread his hands and looked to Hank. “Then pay the woman what she needs.” He dug in his jacket pocket for a checkbook. “What do you need to stick on this case? Two thousand? Five?”
The casual way he threw out such staggering amounts of money as an option took my breath away. God knew I could use the money, but at the same time, this wasn’t about a magazine piece anymore. It didn’t matter how much I craved the recognition and respect that would come with a piece like this. Bruce was the subject, and there wasn’t a price tag for smearing him or betraying his trust by playing along with this charade any longer.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”
That was the precise moment the universe decided to give me the worst case of bad timing in the history of my life. Just as I was reaching out to push the checkbook back to Mr. Weinstead, I saw Bruce Chamberson standing only a few feet away.
“You were supposed to be out of town,” I said. I realized my hand was on the checkbook and snatched it back like I’d been caught stealing. “God, Bruce. I can explain all of this.”
“You don’t need to,” he said, and it broke my heart when I heard the coldness in his voice. “You have bills to pay, and you were doing what you needed to pay them.” He fished out a check from his jacket and handed it to me. “This is fair pay for the time you worked as my intern, including overtime. I had to ballpark some of the numbers, and I didn’t include two hours of your time, because we weren’t technically working.”
Prickles of heat traveled across my skin at that. He was talking about the two times we let our desires turn to action, but the mention of those times didn’t feel like it was intended as a flirtation. It felt like he was reminding me so I’d feel the fresh jab of how truly twisted it had been of me to fool around with him under these circumstances.
“Bruce, please…” I tried to give him the check back, but he folded my fingers around it.
“Take the money. But I don’t ever want to see you again. Oh, and I prepaid for a hotel room your brother can use for the rest of the month. He already has the room key and knows where it is. I wish I could say I’ll miss you. Goodbye, Natasha.”
“I wasn’t going to write it. Once I met you, I—I was going to tell you, but I was too scared you’d…” He was already walking away, showing no sign of hearing me or caring. I couldn’t say which.
Mr. Weinstead slid his checkbook back into his jacket and fixed Hank with a glare. “I expect you’ll find a way to rectify this? I need that piece.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Hank.
And without another thought, the two men seemed to forget me. In an instant, I wasn’t just back to where I’d started. I was lower. I’d had a taste of the possibility. The idea that one day I might climb myself out of the crummy hole I’d dug for myself in life. Instead, I’d fallen flat on my ass, right back at the bottom. Now Hank knew I couldn’t be trusted with a real assignment. Worse, his boss knew. I was honestly going to be surprised if I even got the bottom of the barrel assignments going forward.
I tried to keep everything, and instead, I’d lost it all.
I spent two weeks feeling sorry for myself. It seemed fitting. For two weeks, I’d lived a different life. A life where I tangled with the thrilling and scary idea of Bruce Chamberson and what a man like that could mean in my life. For two weeks, I’d known how fun it was to feel like everything I’d ever wanted was within reach.
So I spent two weeks purging it all from my brain. I tried to forget everything. Him. Galleon. Business Insights. I wanted to forget it all. I’d waited tables before, and the work might not have been fulfilling, but at least it was steady money. Maybe I’d need to find a place to live outside the city once my lease was up in a couple months, but I’d survive. I always had, and I would find a way now.
Braeden was visiting, which was a rare occurrence. He still had the room Bruce booked for him at the hotel, which felt like a weird thread to the part of my life I was busy trying to forget. Still, it was nice to see my brother because he felt like stopping by and not because he had to have a place to stay.
Despite his previous enthusiasm about not being a burden on me, my brother, as usual, hadn’t changed a bit. He was laying on the floor by my wall, mostly because there wasn’t room for a couch and I was already sitting on the bed.
"Think about it though," he said. "It'd be like a hammock but you could use it underwater. I mean, you can't seriously tell me that doesn't sound like a billion-dollar idea, can you?"
“Yes. I seriously can,” I said a little more harshly than I meant to.
He sighed, sat up, and leaned his back against the wall while he scrutinized me. “You still bent up about Batman?”
You could say what you wanted about my brother, but he was a sweet guy. Calling Bruce “Batman” instead of his name was just one way he’d been trying to make me feel better, like we could make him into a big joke instead of the gaping hole in my heart he actually was.
“I’m getting over it, bit by bit,” I said.
“You know. Not that I’ve watched too many romance movies, but isn’t this supposed to be the part where the guy does all these grand gestures for forgiveness? You know, like the part everybody watching can splooge over because they get to see the guy down on his knees groveling?”
“Okay, so why don’t you take a cue from all the groveling men of the world. Do something grand. Make the guy forgive you. Somehow I don’t think you’re on a fast-track to impressing anyone like this, unless you’re trying to out-do me in the whole unemployed department. But joke’s on you, sis. Batman said I was ‘aggressively’ unemployed, and I don’t think you’ll ever top that level of praise.”
I rolled my eyes, grinning. “No. You’ll probably remain king of that one. But you seriously think he’d even care if I tried to apologize?”
“Would you, if the tables were turned?”
“Well, yeah. I’d care. I don’t know if it would make a difference.”
“Just because we like to wave our dicks around and flex in the mirror, it doesn’t mean us guys don’t have a soft side, Nat. Think about it. The poor dude just got out of one bad relationship and then he runs into you? He liked you, too, and he’s probably embarrassed he let himself be seduced again by another wily woman who was out to get him.”
I glared. “I was never out to get him. You know that.”
“I do,” agreed Braeden. “But does he?”
16
Bruce
Life went on, more or less. I’d woken up from a particularly enjoyable dream to a temporarily crushing disappointment to realize it was only fantasy more than once. Ever since I told Natasha to stay out of my life, it seemed that I had to remind myself she was gone every morning. She wouldn’t be waiting in the progressively more beaten up company car in front of my apartment. We wouldn’t have flirtatious exchanges on the drive to work. She wouldn’t harass me about the fact that I wasn’t paying her or that she had no real work to do.
She was gone. It was strange to me that in just a couple weeks, Natasha had made such a strong impact on my life that her absence could feel so staggering.
I knew I should be mad. Furious, even. I should be hurt. Maybe I was all those things to some degree, but nothing struck me as strongly as the feeling of loss. I knew I couldn’t let myself go back to her, but I hated that reality.
So when I stepped outside my building that morning, I wasn’t expecting to see Natasha. I definitely wasn’t expecting her to be holding some god-awful ugly sort of quilt full of hand-sewn pockets.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said seriously, apparently oblivious to the looks she was drawing from people walking to work. “But I’m sorry, and I know you love to organize things, so I made you something to keep your socks all sorted out. There’s all these pockets, so you can put a pair in each pocket or just organize them by color…” her voice trailed off a little and she bit her lip. “I wasn’t sure how many pairs of socks you have, but I could make you another if this doesn’t look like enough pockets.”
I took the thing from her and frowned at it. I was dying to say fuck it right there, to sweep her into my arms and kiss her, to tell her all was forgiven. But I had broken ties before she had a chance to make the wound as deep as it could have been. I’d gotten out, and forgiving her would be opening myself right back up for the dagger to the back I knew would inevitably come.
As much as I wanted to thank her and kiss her, I only took the blanket and walked to the car where my driver waited. I showed her the minimal respect of neatly folding it and setting it on my seat instead of tossing it thoughtlessly in the car, but I didn’t dare give her more than that.
She was there every day after that, like a sad, homesick puppy. Sometimes she brought me coffee, and it never had sugar. She always brought a perfect banana. She even wrote my name all over it just like I had taken to doing once she ate mine by mistake that first day. I spent longer than I would’ve ever admitted sitting in my office, studying the girlish curves of her handwriting, as if they held some secret answer about whether this was true regret or just regret for being caught.
Most days, she said nothing. She just waited with the gifts and watched me with those big, innocent eyes when I took them. Every day, it was harder to resist. I had to force myself to say nothing, because I knew if I spoke, I’d risk saying what was in my heart instead of what was wise.
She made me so many handcrafted organization devices, decorations, and tools, that I started to wonder how she could possibly think of anything else. After a few weeks, my apartment was packed with things she had made me, most of which I found surprisingly useful, especially the contraption she put together out of hangers to hold all my ties in a way I could see without having to flip through them. Of course, I’d already had a pretty good system, but somehow, knowing Natasha had dreamed it up made me instantly prefer her methods over mine every time.
I was a man of routine, and pretty soon, she became my favorite part of my routine. I didn’t wait all day for the banana I had before lunch. I waited for the glimpse of her I’d get in the morning.
The best gift she brought me was Caitlyn. It had been a few weeks since she started the routine of waiting outside for me, but she was holding Caitlyn’s hand when I came out instead of something she’d made for me.
Caitlyn made an excited squeal when she saw me and rushed to hug my legs. Natasha watched, even though she was trying to make it look like she was studying the ground.
“How did you pull this off?” I asked. It was probably the most I’d said to her since this whole thing started, and Natasha looked surprised to hear me talking to her.
Caitlyn answered for her. “I’m taking journalism classes. Natasha messaged me online and said she was a friend of yours, that if I convinced my mom to hire her as a tutor, she’d bring me over and we could hang out!”
“I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” I said, but still hugged Caitlyn back tightly.
“Well,” said Natasha. “It’s probably only just a little bit illegal, if it is. But it’s worth it, right?”
I got to meet with Caitlyn again the following Wednesday, and Natasha said we’d do the same on Friday, but when Friday morning came, Natasha was nowhere to be seen. I waited outside for half an hour before I got worried. Natasha never quite grew out of her tendency to be late for every reason under the sun, and I figured she’d just missed a train or overslept, but I finally decided to call her.
It felt like a kind of surrender to reach out to her after all this time with her waiting outside my door, but I knew she deserved at least that much, if not far more by now. She had betrayed my trust, but she was going beyond what I thought just about any woman would to make amends for it.
She didn’t pick up.
I tried her brother next, but he didn’t pick up, either.
I called my secretary and check for an emergency contact in Natasha’s file, wondering if I could possibly catch her parents somehow, but had no luck.
I had no choice left but to overreact, and I had my driver take me to the nearest hospital.
“Bruce?” said Natasha.
She was waiting in the lobby with red, puffy eyes. She rushed to me and hugged me tight. “It’s Braeden. He got kicked out by my parents when his days in the hotel ran out, and he tried to sleep in the park again. He got in a fight and there was a lot of blood, but they’re saying it might not be anything except a few lacerations on his scalp.”
“Good. Your brother is an asshole, but I’m glad he’s not dead.”
Natasha laughed. “I’ll make sure I tell him your exact wording on that.”
I smirked, and it felt strange, like after the weeks of our strange, nearly silent dance, we had stepped into a moment of time where it was like nothing had ever happened.
“You know,” I said after a moment. “If somebody really wanted me to forgive them. You’d think they would remember how much I enjoyed it the last time they got me a banana split.”
Excitement flashed in her eyes. “Maybe somebody didn’t think they would be able to pull the same move twice.”
“Then somebody underestimated how muc
h I love banana splits.”
“Are you telling me I could’ve saved all the theatrics and gotten you to forgive me with a banana split from the start?”
"No. I'm saying you're adorably persistent, and I already didn't want to be pissed at you from the start, so you've done enough, and now I am just hungry for dessert before I forgive you."
"And you tell me this now, when I am stuck in the hospital worrying about my brother?" "Your brother sat half-naked on every conceivable surface of my apartment, moved my things around, and left a stench I haven't been able to completely remove. But if you want to make sure he's alive before we get dessert, I can respect that."
She leaned into me, forehead resting on my chest and let out a long, shuddering breath. “You mean it?”
“Yes. I don’t know how your parents raised him, but he has no manners. It was unbelievable.”
“No, you big idiot,” she said with a small laugh. “You really mean you’ll forgive me after what I did?”
“I’ll enjoy having an excuse to be a hardass on you again. You’ll need to accept that for now.”
She nodded. “Gladly.”
I sat across from Natasha in a trendy little cafe a few blocks away from the hospital. A banana split was between us, and I was digging into it like I hadn’t eaten in weeks.
“Did you forget how to find your lunch without your trusty intern or what?” she asked.
I tried to slow down a little as I laughed at myself. “Well, you could say I’ve been a little distracted.”
“By?”
“Remember the part where I said I’d enjoy being a hardass again?”
“Yes…”
“It means you don’t get to ask the questions here. Reporter.”
She cringed at that, as if she wasn’t quite ready to forgive herself for everything that happened, even if I was.
“Bruce, I—”
I held up my palm. “You don’t need to explain. I’ve got an apartment full of shit you made for me with your bare hands. I’ve got weeks of proof that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to prove you hate how this turned out. Call me simple, but I’ve got enough. Really, there’s only one thing I still want.”
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