Professional Development (Benchmarks)

by Kate Canterbary

  And as much as I hated to admit it, if Drew and I couldn't manage to talk shop over dinner, we had no business working together. And it wasn't like I wanted to walk across the hotel parking lot and request a table for one at Outback Steakhouse.

  With my luck, Drew would have the same plan and we'd wind up lumped together in the Lonely, Party of One section.

  We'd ignore each other, of course.

  During a short break, the event's lead trainer Doug moved to the front of the room, his phone and a sheaf of papers clutched in one hand. He raised the other hand, gathering the attention of the participants.

  "We hate to announce this because we're loving the time we've spent with you today and we're really looking forward to tomorrow's session," he said. "However, we just got word the airport will be closing at nine o'clock tonight in preparation for an incoming blizzard. It looks like the winter storm coming up from the south started moving faster than the weather folks expected while some cold air dipping down from the Arctic has stalled near the Lakes Region. All this has combined into an unexpected beast of a storm and we're right in the middle of it."

  As the room erupted in a low panic—as much as any bunch of educators allowed themselves to erupt into any degree of panic—I turned to my right but found Drew's seat empty.

  This was the product of ignoring someone so hard, you actually blacked out their existence. I swiveled in my seat, glancing toward the coffee station that'd held his interest during all the other breaks today. He wasn't there. I scanned the room but couldn't spot him.

  The mean, petty part of my mind, the part that only roared to life when Drew was involved, had me wondering whether he'd left without me.

  He hated me and resented me, and he wanted me fired. But I wasn't sure whether he'd abandon me in Albany, New York during a blizzard.

  Underneath the insults and hostility, he remembered my coffee order and hung around my door like a proper stalker to deliver it.

  "And he's an obnoxious fucker who will stop at nothing to get rid of me," I muttered to myself as I slipped my phone from my pocket. "Should've learned that lesson a long, long time ago."

  I started tapping out a message to him when I heard his voice behind me.

  "Come on," he said, his hand on the back of my chair. His knuckles brushed my shoulder. "If we hit the road now, we'll beat the storm."

  I glanced up at him. "Beat it, how?"

  He rolled his eyes. "We will arrive in Boston before the storm. Understand? Or do I need to give you a meteorology lesson? Surely they covered the basics at Bridgewater State."

  That fucker. He really needed to get some new material. The "Tara went to a lame ass state school" routine was old and boring. If he wanted some juicy content, he need only turn to my love of avocado toast, the houseplants I considered my babies, all the meditation apps I subscribed to, and my complete inability to stop buying things from Instagram.

  "Don't you think it would be better to wait until tomorrow morning?" I asked. "I mean, they're closing the airport because of this. I don't have a Dartmouth education in meteorology to back me up here but I did grow up outside Worcester and have a weather app on my phone, and I know that shit doesn't happen often."

  "Tomorrow morning," he repeated as if I'd suggested we simply chop up some Snickers bars and turn the blizzard into Dairy Queen Blizzards. "I bet that makes sense to you but no, I don't think it would be better. The roads will be a disaster. If we leave now, we'll be home before a single flurry hits the ground."

  I glanced back at Doug and the people congregated around him. "Why would they send everyone home and cancel tomorrow's session if it isn't going to snow for hours?"

  He huffed, sighed, rolled his eyes. And his knuckles grazed my shoulder—once, twice, three times. Squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled like I'd punched the air out of him. This guy was seriously impatient.

  "Because it's a handful of days before Christmas and they don't want anyone stranded here. They want everyone to get out while they can, Tara, and I can't say I blame them. We all have somewhere to be and someone wanting to be with us for the holiday. Someone we want to be with more than anything, right?" I blinked up at him as he brushed my shoulder once more. "Get your things. I'll check us out and meet you in the lobby."

  I stared after Drew while he marched through the ballroom. Now, I was left with one final car ride to broker a peace deal. As I watched those charcoal gray trousers and that tight ass striding out of sight, I couldn't see how to pull this off.

  Chapter Seven

  Drew

  I wasn't good at admitting my mistakes.

  If I could get by without acknowledging missteps and miscalculations, I did. I didn't enjoy being wrong and I enjoyed announcing those rare moments even less. It wasn't my finest quality but at least I possessed enough awareness to keep from making many mistakes in the first place.

  Today was the great exception to all of those rules. I was racking up mistakes like my life was a hot game of Skee-Ball. Any minute now, I'd have to admit I was wrong.

  My greatest miscalculation of the day involved my ability to drive through a white-out blizzard. Yes, the same blizzard I'd argued I could outrun. Hell, I grew up in western Pennsylvania and went to college in northern New Hampshire. I knew all there was about driving in snow.

  This wasn't snow.

  This was an avalanche. I was only half certain I was driving on a road rather than eight feet of packed powder. Hell, it was possible I wasn't even driving. For all I could tell, the storm was steering.

  We should've been out of the mountains by now. We should've been through the worst of this weather. We should've and I would've been able to confirm that if my GPS signal stayed stable long enough to give me an update on our location.

  For the nineteenth time since hitting the interstate outside of Albany four hours ago, Tara asked, "Are you sure about this?"

  This time, I didn't snap back at her. For as much as I couldn't deal with her and her big, dark eyes and the subtle scent of vanilla that surrounded her, I was too exhausted from white-knuckling it through this snow globe. I was too worried we'd end up spending the night together in my car. Too drained from everything between us. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be the villain in her story right now.

  "If you see an alternative, Tara, please share it with me."

  Before she could answer, red lights flashed in my rearview mirror. A siren cut through the howling wind. Of fucking course.

  "Maybe they've arrived with your alternative," she muttered as I made my way to the shoulder of the highway. Or, what I believed to be the shoulder. Lane lines had disappeared hours ago.

  You knew it was a bad storm when the patrolman pulled up alongside you rather than climbing out of his vehicle.

  When I edged the window down, he boomed, "Sir, you need to get off this road for your safety and the safety of emergency responders. The interstates are closing within the hour."

  "Okay, but"—I glanced at the road—"where are we?"

  The blowing snow made it impossible to know for sure, but it seemed like the patrolman rolled his eyes at me. "I'll escort you to the next exit."

  Without a word to Tara, I followed the cruiser's flashing lights for several minutes. Not even the road signs helped place our location as they were caked with wind-whipped snow and ice.

  At the end of the off ramp, I swung my gaze from left to right. I didn't know where we were but I was positive this wasn't metro Boston. No, we were still in the Berkshires, which meant we'd traveled a fraction of the distance in all this time.

  "Do you see that sign? Over there?" Tara asked, leaning into my space to point out my window. Like I needed that right now. "It looks like it says something about an inn. That direction."

  When we'd left Albany, I'd had a simple plan: get the fuck home. Drop off the bane of my existence, sell my car, and then bathe in boiling acid until I'd scrubbed the memory of vanilla from my skin.

  Simple plan, easy to execute. No blizzard was st
opping me.

  But here I was, with Tara's elbow jutting into my chest and her hair swishing against my chin as she gestured toward the only legible sign for a hundred miles, and it promised an inn five miles ahead.

  It was an alternative but god help me, I couldn't survive another night with a wall between us.

  I couldn't do it. There was no way. Not when I'd know she was freeing her hair from the afternoon's bun, undressing, showering, slipping between the sheets on the other side of that wall.

  Not when she was right there.

  "Drew, come on." She pulled back her arm, settled in her seat. Thank god. "What else are we going to do? Where are we going to go? It's late and it's dark and the only snacks we have are the cookies I nabbed from the training. I am hungry and tired, and I'm so cold, and I think—"

  "Why are you cold?" Not thinking for a damn second, I reached over and gathered her hands between mine. She was freezing, her fingers like icicles. And she felt—no, I wasn't going there. Couldn't. It didn't matter how her skin felt against mine. Didn't fucking matter. "You should've said something," I growled.

  That's right. It's her fault. Keep leaning into that strategy. It hasn't failed me yet.

  "I'm okay," she said, rubbing her palms together as I held her.

  Oh, Jesus Christ, I'm still holding her hands. I'm holding her hands and she's letting me and the universe hasn't imploded. But I had to stop, this had to stop.

  "Fine, we'll see about this inn." I set her hands in her lap, which granted me the misery of brushing my knuckles over her thighs.

  Shouldn't have done that. No. Should not have done that.

  I stabbed some buttons on the center console, flipping on the seat warmers and cranking the heat. I'd kept it cooler to prevent the windows from fogging and hadn't noticed the cold, mostly because I spent the past few hours panic sweating as I struggled to keep us from spinning out and t-boning a guardrail.

  With a curse under my breath, I turned left toward the inn. These roads were as bad as the highway but a long stone wall bracketed either side, forming a makeshift trail. The minutes crawled by as I itched to take her hands in mine again, to keep her warm.

  Eventually, we turned down the inn's long, winding driveway. I prayed for two rooms on opposite ends of the property. I required acreage between us because there was no way I could endure another night like the last. It had been brutal.

  The amount of time I'd spent sitting on my bed, still and steady and just fucking listening for any sound of her was…well, it was embarrassing. I was tired in a way that my eyes seemed incapable of closing for more than a blink, my muscles wrought too tight to loosen enough to rest.

  And—and she was cold. She was cold and I couldn't reach over to warm her because we opposed each other like magnetic poles. The order and function of the planet would have to collapse before we could do anything but dance around each other because we weren't nearly as different as I wanted to believe.

  No, Tara Treloff and I were exactly the same and I couldn't handle that at all.

  "This place doesn't look too…" Her voice trailed off.

  "Inhabited?" I murmured, rolling to a stop at the entrance. As best I could tell through the snow, a series of small cottages were stringed along either side of the main house, the only building with lights illuminated. "Let's just go up to the door and see if there's—"

  "Room at the inn?" she asked, laughing. "Jesus, I hope so."

  "That's not even funny," I said, but I couldn't help but laugh along with her. Because I enjoyed torturing myself, I reached for the hands she clasped in her lap. She felt like a barely defrosted ribeye. "Any better?"

  She wiggled her shoulders in that obscenely cute way of hers. She always did that when she didn't want to be a problem.

  Be my problem, sweetheart.

  "I'll be better when I have some hot chocolate and Kahlua and fifteen blankets," she said, giving my fingers a curious glance as I rubbed the back of her hand. "Which is why we need to get in there before we're sent off to the barn. I'm a bit rusty on my catechism but I don't believe the wise men brought Kahlua. They should've. Gold, frankincense, and Kahlua sounds more useful. Even vodka would've been better than myrrh. Right? Who the hell needs myrrh?"

  I reached into the backseat for my coat and shrugged it on. "I don't know, Tara."

  "You're—wait a second. You're admitting you don't know something?"

  The squeal in her voice informed me I'd just fallen into a trap of my own making. Brilliant. "Can we reserve the discussion of my general fallibility for another day? When your lips aren't turning blue and we're not in danger of being snowed inside the car?"

  Tara gave a groan of indignance—I knew this because I'd categorized her groans and replayed them on a loop every time I wanted to resent something for existing while also protecting it with my life—and pushed the door open. Snow gusted in and she shrieked at it as if that would help.

  "Fuck my life," I mumbled as I rounded the car to shield her from the worst of the storm. "Take that hat off. It's going to trap water on your head. Take mine."

  "What? No. Let's just do this," she replied, trudging through the drifts.

  I caught up with her quickly and more a result of wind pushing us together than any plan of mine, we huddled close to each other as we climbed the front steps and rang the bell.

  It was miserably cold and it didn't matter how many blizzards I lived through, the churning roar of it always surprised me. It was the wind that made these storms treacherous, not the snow, not even the cold. It was always the things you couldn't see that changed everything.

  We waited, our heads ducked low and our arms folded tight to our bodies.

  And we waited.

  And we waited some more. That I didn't sweep her into my arms or press her hands under my shirt when I heard her teeth chattering was a major accomplishment not unlike hiking the Atacama or swimming the English Channel or me leaving one of her verbal jabs unaddressed.

  Finally, several lights flipped on and the door swung open to reveal a woman in a floor-length robe that zipped up to her throat. She beckoned us inside with frantic waves, standing away from the door as we shook off the snow that'd accumulated in the minutes we'd been outside.

  "We're so sorry to bother you but the interstate is closed and we're kind of stranded," Tara said. "Is there any chance you have two rooms available?"

  Immediately, the woman replied with a bewildered, "No."

  "Oh. Okay," Tara said. "I guess we'll have to f-f-f-ind somewhere else." She glanced over at me. "For the first time in my life, I really sympathize with Mary."

  "We're only open in the summer, you see," the woman continued. "We're closed up for the winter. We turn off the water to the units before the first frost and keep the heat in the low sixties to prevent the pipes from bursting. We only keep one unit functional this time of year in case my sister-in-law comes up from—"

  "We'll take it," I said, despite the absolute horror of this proposition.

  The roads were horrendous and only getting worse, and it was too late to go looking for substitutes. I'd manage. I didn't have any choice. I'd post up on a couch or chair. A bathtub, if need be. The floor would do in a pinch. I'd manage.

  I'd managed for two years, hadn't I? I could make it through one night even if it crushed my soul and ate what remained of my spirit with a spoon.

  "It's a one-bedroom and it's not in any condition for guests," she argued. "We're in the middle of a remodel. The furniture is piled up in the center of the room, the wallpaper has been scraped off, the bathroom is halfway painted—"

  "We will take it," I repeated.

  "Honestly, it's fine," Tara said through her shivers. I was going to die if that didn't stop soon. "We don't mind."

  The woman twisted her fingers together as she glanced between us. "At least let me give you some supper. I have a bit of shepherd's pie leftover if that suits you."

  "We'd love that. You're extremely kind and generous," Tara
said. "Thank you."

  The woman shuffled down the hall, quickly returning with a grocery tote and a key hanging from a chunk of worn wood. Tara reached out with shaking hands but I snatched up both items.

  "I have this," I murmured to her as we turned toward the door. "Concentrate your efforts on not turning into a popsicle, okay? The last thing I need right now is you losing a couple of toes to hypothermia."

  "Yeah, Drew, I'm doing this to annoy you."

  Once we were outside again, I pointed at my SUV, saying, "I'll grab the bags, you head toward the cottage." This meant I had to hand over the key which only made me grabbing for it more egregious as far as my bad behavior was concerned. "Go on. Let yourself in since your goal is not, despite every indication to the contrary, to drive me mad. I'll be right behind you."

  In a simpler world, Tara would've trudged through the knee-deep snow and unlocked the door to the space we were sharing tonight without incident.

  Unfortunately for me, I didn't live in a simple world.

  I lived in a world where I wanted my colleague so much, I plowed all the way through lust and came out the other side in the deep end of resentment.

  And Tara lived in a world where those useless boots of hers sent her sliding on a patch of ice and tumbling face first into a snow drift.

  I jogged toward her, careful for the ice, and scooped her out of the snow. "What the fuck was that, Treloff?" I shouted, hoisting her over my shoulder. It was a good thing she was doll-sized. I wouldn't have been able to manage Tara, the luggage, and the shepherd's pie otherwise and fuck me if I was leaving the shepherd's pie behind.

  "I fell in the snow, Drew."

  I rolled my eyes. It saved me from thinking about my cheek and how it was resting on her thigh. "Those boots are useless. No traction whatsoever."

  "I'm sure you have a story about how you did something important with snow and boots with extra traction while at Dartmouth," she said, her hands fisting around the back of my coat.