On the Same Page

by N. D. Galland

  * * *

  >Time for me to take you out to dinner

  Not happening<

  >We could split the bill

  Can’t go out in public with you until after the story’s closed<

  >That’s a long time to wait for dinner

  Not if you drop the suit<

  No reply.

  Drat.

  Joanna bent her attention back to the edit meeting. Her phone resounded with Django Reinhardt. Lewis always called Joey Dias during the edit meeting.

  Everett and Sarah had been talking about an opening game of something—softball?—at the high school. “That’s a wrap,” said Everett, shooting Joanna a knowing look. “Thanks, everyone.” He rose from the table and the rest of the staff began to gather their stenopads and laptops. Joanna abandoned her gear at her chair and scooted for the side door, not bothering about a jacket.

  It was calm outside, and sunny, but that deep-rooted chill of maritime spring invaded her bones. The call was not from Lewis, but Orion. He hadn’t left a message. She called him back.

  “I’d really like to see you, Anna.” He spoke with simple affection, devoid of amorous overtones, but that just made it sexier. She leaned against the wall, lightheaded.

  “I’d like to see you too. But not in public.”

  “Well, we’re past the potluck phase and I’m done with the Orion-cooks-for-Anna-who-pays-him-for-it options. So if we’re not allowed to be seen in public, do you have any suggestions?”

  “I’ll come over there and whip something up for you,” she said.

  Another pause. She watched the seagulls squabble over something on the dock.

  “That’s permissible?” he asked, sounding incredulous. “But that’s so . . . cozy.”

  “I’m not receiving a favor from you, so you’re not buying my good regard.”

  “But you’re buying access to me—you’re paying for it by making me dinner.”

  “Good point. See you when the lawsuit’s over,” she said pleasantly, and hung up.

  She stared at her phone. That was the right thing to do. Yes. Okay. She had done the right thing. Good. Good for her. She reached for the handle to the door.

  The phone rang again and she jerked away from the door, nestling in by the scraggly forsythia bush, and tried not to grin. “All right,” he said. “Run this by your internal ethics committee: you’re providing the materials and labor, and I’m providing the tools and location. It’s a wash. Nobody is indebted or beholden to anyone else.”

  “Or we could just put this on hold until after the whole thing has been resolved,” she said, gritting her teeth. Good woman, Anna. What a slightly-less-than-reprehensible journalist you are.

  “Anna, let me ask you something.” The tone of his voice had shifted. It was cooler, brisker. “How much money are you going to make covering this story?”

  “Wow. That’s none of your business.”

  “Whatever it is, how about I make a gift to you of more than that amount, and you just don’t cover the story? Then I can take you to dinner.”

  A wave of nausea swamped her for a moment and she had to squat down onto her heels, pressing her back against the sun-warmed shingles. But she also felt a rush of adrenaline: his cavalier confidence either enraged or excited her, she wasn’t sure which. Maybe both.

  “They don’t have anyone else to cover the story,” she said. “I already begged off and the editor begged me back on. I would be creating a problem for them if I quit.”

  “But you’re a freelancer, so that’s not your problem,” he argued. “Your problem is money, and I can help you with that.”

  “I can’t tell Everett, ‘I know you need me to write about this Smith guy, but I’m not going to write about him because he’s paying me not to write about him.’ I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong for you to bribe me, and it would be even more wrong for me to accept! Jesus, Orion.”

  “It’s not a bribe, Anna,” he said, sounding taken aback. “I’m trying to help you, in a way that also helps me. I’m not trying to control what’s said about me. I don’t care what’s said about me. I don’t care if your editor devotes an entire issue to maligning me. But I don’t want him preventing my dating you.”

  “He doesn’t need to prevent my dating you, he just needs to be able to trust that I am keeping an even keel. Which, come on, we both know I’m not.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re the most even-keeled journalist in this relationship. So . . . how about you come over and use my kitchen to cook your food and then let me eat some of it in turn, and that’s a totally self-contained little ecosystem of obligations and restitutions that has nothing to do with the story.”

  “If you want to date me, drop the suit.” She heard her voice say the words before she’d consciously thought them.

  A silence. Then, coolly: “I assume you’re speaking not as a journalist, but as a private citizen.”

  “The very fact we’re having this discussion is proof that we are mutually failing to compartmentalize.”

  “Nonsense. You’re speaking as a private citizen. I like you, Anna. For all the usual generic reasons that one person likes another—you’re smart and funny and cute—but mostly because you get a rise out of me like no one else, even if I don’t let on much, and I enjoy that, I enjoy the sparring.”

  “. . . So do I.”

  “Good. But here’s the thing. I’d really like to please you, but if the only way to please you is by my doing something against my own interest, that makes you a person I’m less interested in pleasing. Do you need to be able to manipulate me that way?”

  “No, I—”

  “Because that’s what you did just now, you just tried to manipulate me.”

  “I thought of it as a . . . proposition.”

  “A proposition where you get everything you want but I have to give up half of what I want? No thanks.”

  She grimaced. “All right,” she said. “It wasn’t a proposition, it was just wishful thinking. I withdraw the statement. I would like to see you but it doesn’t feel right under the circumstance.”

  “We won’t go out in public,” he said, immediately warming again. “We won’t talk about the story. We won’t talk about helicopters or zoning boards or journalism ethics. Promise.”

  “That doesn’t leave much to talk about.”

  “I’ll recite poetry to you,” he offered.

  “Oh!” she said, failing to think of a retort. She tried standing up, still resting her back against the wall. She was over the nausea, at least. She wasn’t sure about the rest of it. “Oh. All right.”

  The briefest pause. “You disagree with everything I say, so I thought you’d say no to the poetry.”

  “I didn’t say no.”

  “I noticed. Now I have to actually do it!” In his voice she could hear that guileless smile that had attracted her weeks earlier.

  * * *

  She arrived at Orion’s the next evening toting her childhood picnic basket that looked like a small black terrier was about to poke his nose out of it wondering where Kansas went. The viburnum bushes, the outliers of Orion’s ex-wife’s overwrought garden, were budding, interspersed with cheery yellow forsythias. The yard was strewn with crocus blossoms and emerging daffodils, still many days away from blooming. Spring was cruel to New Englanders, but this garden had a stiff upper lip.

  Orion greeted her at the door with a white chef’s apron draped neatly over the sleeve of his wool sweater. “Come in and warm up,” he said. “Have a drink.”

  She reached into the basket and retrieved a bottle of hard cider. “I will,” she said.

  “You really are being ridiculous,” he said. “But I respect you for it. Come warm up.”

  The fireplace in the great room was blazing, small branches snapping and popping. “Pine,” she said, pausing, and nodding her head skeptically toward the hearth. “Make sure you keep your chimney clean.”

&n
bsp; “That’s a myth,” he said complacently, continuing toward the kitchen. He paused in the entrance and turned back to face her. “Pine resin doesn’t cause creosote buildup. I have that from a tree expert. So there.”

  “It’s not the resin,” she scolded. “It’s the water content. If you burn wood with high water content, it causes creosote. Hardwoods don’t burn well when they’re still green, but pine does. The danger is in burning unseasoned pine.”

  “All right, Mom, I promise to burn only seasoned pine.”

  “Very seasoned,” she said. “Shame to lose such a nice house.” She brushed by him into the kitchen.

  “God, you’re smug,” he muttered, following her.

  “I’m smug? You’re smug!” she shot back, stopping at the counter. They stared at each other with ill-favored expressions. Then both broke into laughter.

  “I didn’t know I could be so immature,” he said.

  “I did.”

  He offered her the apron. “Want a hand?” he asked, as she tied it on.

  “I’m good, thanks,” she said. “I’ll wear this because I like the aesthetic, but really I just need to heat everything up.” She pulled out a small round loaf of honey-colored bread, another bottle of cider, and a lidded Revere-ware pot.

  “Hamburger bun? Clam chowder?” He raised the lid and peeked in. “Oh,” he said in surprise, examining the glop of red stew, densely inhabited with beans, thick wilted greens, and sausage. “Not clam chowder.”

  “Kale-linguica soup,” she said. “Portuguese sweet bread.”

  “How exotic,” he said, happy.

  “Peasant grub,” she corrected. “I grew up on vats of this in the winter. In the spirit of the evening, I’m commingling it with some more upmarket dishes.” From the depths of Toto’s basket, she revealed a bundle of asparagus, a lemon, a small package of shredded Parmesan, and a salt-and-pepper container.

  He blinked rapidly, as if smacked. “I’m caught between wanting to comment on the absurdity of your bringing your own salt and pepper, and wanting to fixate on the word commingling.”

  She carefully rolled the rubber band off the asparagus. “Meanwhile, you promised me something on the phone, so why don’t you get to it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Poetry. Get on with it, English major.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I was hoping you’d forget about that.”

  “Tough luck.”

  “Right. Well, I’m a man of my word. So now I have to recite poetry to an attractive female.”

  “That’s correct,” she said, rinsing the asparagus under the faucet.

  “I can’t wait for this stupid lawsuit to be over so I can do something less harrowing, like bungee-jumping.”

  “Ground rules: no talking about the stupid lawsuit.”

  “Which stupid lawsuit?”

  “The stupid lawsuit that’s in your power to stop.”

  “Oh, that one,” he said, frowning. “I don’t think we should talk about it.”

  “Go find—”

  “—find some poetry. Right,” he said, somewhat subdued, and shuffled into the great room. “What’s your pleasure?” he called out. “Sappho or Dr. Seuss?”

  “Six of one,” she said. “Host’s preference.”

  “I can recite The Lorax by heart,” he called back proudly. “But let’s see what else I’ve got here . . . How about excerpts from the Kama Sutra?”

  “Your maturity is exceeded only by your subtlety,” she said. “Have you got a lemon zester?”

  * * *

  Dinner was splendid. And not just the food. Orion had laid out a table far too resplendent for kale-linguica soup. Red linen napkins, fine china, the requisite candles and candlesticks. He had constructed a winter bouquet—sprigs of holly, twigs with pine needles, copper birch leaves, the skeletons of insect-devoured dead oak leaves, dried marsh grasses.

  “All of it is local,” he boasted, at the end of the meal. “Right here on the property.”

  It was sweet because he wanted to please her. It was incriminating because of the marsh grass.

  “I see you have wetlands,” she said, gesturing to the grass. He nodded, happy that she was interested. She gave him a meaningful look, stretching it out to intrigue him. Then: “You can’t have a helipad near wetlands; it’s very disruptive to the ecosystem.”

  His eyes had started to widen with frustration before she’d finished. “Oh my God,” he said, directing this heavenward. “We agreed not to talk about it.” His attention returned to her, with a disbelieving grin. “You are just atrocious at keeping your word, you know that? I think you’re sincere in wanting to—you seem sincere—but wow, you are a failure at implementation.” As always, he sounded friendly and understanding. “I’m going to fine you the next time you break our agreement. Seriously. Stop grinning. I am actually going to fine you.”

  “What’s the fine?” she asked.

  “One kiss,” he said. Then he blushed so deeply she could see it in the candlelight.

  A long pause.

  “Is that . . . Sorry, just to clarify, is that supposed to deter me from mentioning the lawsuit?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Pretty adroit, putting that on me,” she said. Now she was flushed too.

  “You are the one who keeps violating the terms of the dining agreement,” he said. “Given the intensity of your feelings, I don’t imagine you’d want to kiss me, therefore presumably the fine would work as a deterrent.” He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, although he’d finished eating several minutes earlier. “Let me know if I’m wrong about that.”

  “The possibility of my wanting a kiss from you exists in a parallel universe from the universe in which I have opinions about your stupid lawsuit.”

  “Did I mishear you, or did you just mention the thing we agreed not to mention?”

  She gave him a knowing look. All right, she thought, we’re doing this. We’ve been balancing on the edge of it for weeks, might as well throw ourselves over and see how we survive.

  “Do you mean the stupid lawsuit?” she said, poker-faced.

  “Anna,” he said, like a kindergarten teacher warning a truculent toddler.

  “Why would I bring up the stupid lawsuit?” she asked.

  “I’m seri—”

  “I mean, here I am at a romantic candlelit dinner with a smart, attractive, funny man whose only request is that I not refer to his stupid lawsuit—”

  “Okay, that’s it,” he began, getting up from his chair.

  “I would have to be such an ass to keep bringing up his stupid lawsuit,” she rushed on. He moved toward her. “I mean, such an ass that really, why would he ever want to kiss me?”

  “I want to kiss you,” he said, standing over her now. “I fully intend to kiss you. Am I going to have to gag you first?”

  “I’m not really into kink,” she said.

  “So maybe you could just stop talking for a moment,” he suggested. His eyes examined her face. She wondered how much lipstick still clung to her lips, and if her hair was falling the right way, and how insipid it was to think of these things.

  “Sure, okay, I can stop talking,” she said. “But I’m going to get a crick in my neck if I have to keep looking up at you like this.”

  “All right then,” he said softly. He took one large breath and then, with a smoothness she would never have anticipated, he reached down, scooped one arm under her knees and the other behind her back and lifted her out of her chair—knocking the chair over so that it banged loudly against the granite counter, before ricocheting off and crashing to the floor.

  By the time it landed, Orion had carried her straight out of the kitchen and into the great room, where he settled her onto the daybed near the fire. “All right,” he said again, as he released her. “Lean back. So your neck doesn’t get crimped when I kiss you.”

  “Oh. Right,” she said, stupidly. She leaned back against the cushions of the daybed, face up toward him. “Like thi
s?”

  He hovered over her a moment, his eyes sweeping up and down her figure. “Yeah, like that,” he said almost absent-mindedly, to her ankles. Slowly his attention moved back up her body to her face. “Are you comfortable enough that you can lie there for a few minutes without needing to move much? Because I’m about to kiss you and it might take a while.”

  “I think this will work.”

  “Good neck support? Your head stable?”

  She pressed her head back against the cushions. “Seems pretty good.”

  “So when I kiss you, if there’s, y’know, a certain amount of pressure, maybe a little moving around, you’re still good.”

  She shrugged recumbently. “I can’t guarantee anything, but we could give it a shot.”

  His eyes were slowly scanning her again. “Hm,” he said, possibly in reply.

  His gaze, suddenly, had an almost physical component to it. She could feel his eyes upon her stomach, moving up her torso—when he reached her breasts, her entire body responded, as if he had reached down and felt her with his hands. She took a sharp, deep breath, tried to be casual, tried to exhale slowly.

  He seemed indifferent to her breathing. His eyes lingered over her breasts a moment and then moved up past her collarbone to her exposed neck.

  “I’ll probably want to kiss there,” he said, his studious gaze entirely on a spot under her chin.

  “You’re being very intrepid.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and finally raised his gaze to look directly at her. “I get that a lot.”

  “Not surprised,” she said.

  He sat on the daybed beside her. They stared at each other in the firelight.

  Finally they smiled a little.

  “You all right with this?” he asked, softly.

  She opened her mouth and then hesitated, to create the impression she was thinking about it. “. . . Yes,” she concluded.

  “That was a fraudulent pause,” he said.

  “. . . Yes.”

  He grinned. The grin softened into the affectionate smile that was his signature aspect. He leaned in close to her and whispered, “All right, here we go then,” and then very gently pressed his lips to hers.

  It was delectable, both safe and dangerous at the same time—safe in all the important ways, and dangerous in all the thrilling ones. He stayed there for a long moment and for most of that she could not even think clearly. She was aware of nothing but his touch.