It Takes Two

by Judith Arnold

  He wanted to see what she looked like first thing in the morning, with bed-head and no make-up on. He wanted to see what she looked like last thing at night, as she nestled against him and drifted off to sleep.

  He wanted to find out if the two of them together could accomplish infinitely more than each of them separately, as the words of the song had asserted.

  “Scotch-rocks,” one of the servers demanded, shattering his thoughts. “Cheapest Scotch. And a Gray Goose martini with a twist.”

  “Got it,” he said, dragging his thoughts back to the present, to the bar, to the order. Right now, it didn’t take two. It took Will paying attention to what he was doing, and putting Brianna Crawford out of his mind.

  ***

  By eleven o’clock, the Faulk Street Tavern had calmed down considerably. A few hangers-on occupied tables and stools, but the crowds had left. It was, his mother had pointed out, a school night.

  Will wasn’t in school, but he was exhausted, and his mother told him to go home. At the moment, “home” was his mother’s house. His lease in Boston had expired and he’d seen no reason to renew it, with his impending move out west. He didn’t own much, anyway—the stuff he, Craig, and Gaurav had used to furnish their third-floor flat wasn’t worth shipping across the country, so they’d passed it along to Craig’s younger brother, who was in grad school and as poor as Will and his roommates had once been. Will’s personal items were currently sealed in cartons in his mother’s house, awaiting his move.

  Staying in the house he’d grown up in was kind of weird, but less weird than it might have been if his mother was around. She spent most of her nights at Ed Nolan’s house rather than the cozy ranch house where Will and his brother had done their homework and their chores, played video games, and under some duress practiced the piano. Will had greatly preferred playing basketball to running scales, but his grandmother had insisted that he and his brother master something “cultural,” as she’d put it.

  Will could bang out “Chopsticks” like nobody’s business, but as far as acquiring culture, he’d let his poor grandmother down.

  He wondered if Brianna Crawford played the piano.

  Sighing, he shook his head, locked the front door, and flopped onto the well-worn sofa in the den. Everything in this house was too comfortable. The oversized flat-screen TV now standing across the room from the sofa was a relatively recent addition; Will and his brother had given it to their mother for Christmas last year, as much for their own enjoyment as for hers. When they visited her, they wanted to be able to see Red Sox or Celtics or Patriots games on a wide screen, in high-def.

  He lifted the remote control and surfed a bit, but none of the shows captured his interest. Fortunately, his cell phone chimed, giving him a good excuse to abandon the TV.

  “Hey!” Gaurav’s face appeared on the screen. “How’s it going, bro?”

  Gaurav sounded a lot more alert and energetic than Will felt, but then, it was three hours earlier in Seattle. “Hey, man,” Will said, leaning back into the mushy sofa cushions. “What’s up?”

  “It stopped raining! Some kind of miracle,” Gaurav said, his grin a curving slash of white. He’d sprouted a stubble of beard since the last time he and Will had Face-Timed, and his hair was a mess. Nothing new about that. “I love this place. This apartment, Will—it’s amazing. It’s a shame I’m gonna have to move out. But you gotta get your ass out here. They’ll put you up in corporate housing, too. I have to show you the view.”

  “You’ve already shown me the view.” The corporate apartment in which Pacific Dynamic was temporarily housing Gaurav was swanky and had a terrace which Gaurav had fallen in love with.

  “But it’s sunset here. I’m watching the sun sink into the sea. I don’t want to leave this place!” Gaurav flipped his phone around so Will could view the sunset splashing color across the sky beyond the terrace. The motion made Will temporarily dizzy.

  “Very pretty,” Will said blandly, mostly because teasing his friend was so much fun. Gaurav could go from zero to insanely enthusiastic in a nanosecond. It was something Will loved about Gaurav, but he couldn’t resist pretending he didn’t share Gaurav’s enthusiasm.

  In this case…yes, it was a pretty sunset. But having a water view didn’t mean much to Will. The house he’d grown up in was a ten-minute walk to the nearest town beach, a three-minute bike ride. He couldn’t see the sun set into the horizon in Brogan’s Point, but he could see the sun rise out of it. The Atlantic Ocean was every bit as enthralling as Puget Sound.

  “So, how’s work?” he asked Gaurav. “How is Pacific Dynamic treating you?”

  Gaurav’s smile faded slightly, and he shrugged. “Eh. Fine. They love us here, Will. They’re gonna love you if you ever get your ass out here.”

  “What do you mean, eh?” Will pounced on that one far-from-enthusiastic syllable.

  “Well, you know. It’s a big company. We’re working for someone else, now. Answering to people. It’s not the same.”

  Nothing would ever be the same as what the two of them and Craig had created in their cramped attic apartment in Boston’s Allston neighborhood. Three good friends, the ink still wet on their diplomas from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a concept for digital storage. Nothing sexy about it, nothing high-profile. Just a really good idea to create a software system that could provide businesses with something they weren’t getting from existing systems.

  To save money, they’d shared the apartment. They’d lived on pizza and ramen noodles, and they’d located every all-you-can-eat restaurant in their scruffy neighborhood. They’d picked up odd jobs when they’d needed a quick influx of cash, and taken out loans, and eventually, as their start-up gained momentum, they’d found a venture capital firm willing to fund them. One of their professors had connected them with a few companies willing to beta-test their product. Word had spread, and Pacific Dynamic, a huge digital inventory management company out in Seattle, had bought their start-up for a bigger sum than Will and his partners had ever imagined.

  “We love you guys,” Pacific Dynamic had insisted. “You’re geniuses. We want you to come to Seattle and be on our team.”

  Will wasn’t sure they were geniuses, but the jobs the company promised were impressive. Generous six-figure salaries, fancy titles, the chance to do new product development without having to subsist on ramen noodles or scraping to find money to pay for health insurance. Gaurav and Craig had headed out to Seattle immediately. Will had said he’d join them in a couple of months.

  “So how bad is eh?” he asked Gaurav.

  “Like I said. Big company. We’re cogs. They want us to do new product development, but first we’ve got to tackle a bunch of the company’s current problems.” He sighed. “Not enough women work here.”

  “You might consider meeting women outside of work,” Will suggested.

  “I’m putting in ten-hour days. Trying to get up to speed.” Gaurav sighed again. “At least I’m eating better. State-of-the-art kitchen, Will. I’ve put on a few pounds.” From the motions of his shoulders, visible on the phone’s screen, Will guessed that Gaurav was patting his belly. “But hey, nice paycheck every two weeks. No scrounging. And these sunsets, man! They leave me speechless.”

  Will grinned. Gaurav and speechless did not belong in the same sentence.

  They talked for a few more minutes, and then Will ended the call. He was tired. It had been a long day.

  Actually, not much longer than yesterday or the day before. Will found working at the bar both tiring and invigorating. All those people, all that noise. Orders coming in and going out. Laughter. Music.

  It takes two, baby…

  He realized he wasn’t so much tired as…anxious. Edgy. Did he really want to work for a big high-tech company? Living hand-to-mouth with two roommates had been stressful, but as invigorating as working at the Faulk Street Tavern. Challenges, obstacles, glitches. Money problems. Patent filings. Always some new th
ing to take care of.

  But he and his partners had been the ones to take care of them. It had been their baby. They’d been in charge.

  Grow up, he reminded himself. The time had come to work a real job—and a top-tier job at that, with a steady, high-end salary and excellent benefits. Will had waved farewell to his twenties. It was time to settle down, to take care of his investments now that he had money to invest, thanks to his share of Pacific Dynamic’s huge payout. Time to find a woman, get married, have a kid or two. If Gaurav was having difficulty meeting women out in Seattle, well, that was Gaurav’s problem. Will had had a decent sex life in Boston, despite working long hours and being chronically broke. He was sure he’d be able to meet women in Seattle.

  Make a dream come true. It just takes two.

  His dream had already come true, hadn’t it? Or it would come true when he moved out to the West Coast and began the new, grown-up, financially secure phase of his life.

  He didn’t need that song. He didn’t need the Faulk Street Tavern. He didn’t need New England town meetings about new municipal buildings. He didn’t need to be thinking about how many elevators a building required in order to be in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, or whether a female architect had a messy history with a male architect. Even if she was pretty. Even if eating a lobster roll with her at the Lobster Shack had been the best dinner date he’d had in years.

  It hadn’t been a dinner date, he reminded himself. He didn’t even know Brianna Crawford. The evening hadn’t ended with them naked in bed. They’d both been hungry, that was all.

  He didn’t need her.

  He sure as hell didn’t need that funky jukebox and its golden-oldie songs.

  Chapter Five

  “How’d it go?” Michael asked when Brianna entered the office of North Shore Design the next morning.

  Brianna slid her jacket off and hung it on the wall peg near the door. North Shore Design occupied a spacious single room one flight above a beauty salon and a gourmet food shop, both of which tempted her every morning as she bypassed them for the stairs to the second floor of the strip mall. She wasn’t above slipping downstairs for a hummus and mushroom pita sandwich or a Caesar chicken wrap at lunchtime, or ducking into the salon for a quick manicure on a Friday afternoon. She did have to eat lunch, after all, and while bringing a sandwich from home would be cheaper, her sandwiches didn’t taste as good as the ones she bought at the shop downstairs. As for her nails, well, no question. The salon’s technicians were much more skilled than she was.

  Maybe she’d save a little money if North Shore Design was located somewhere else. But she hadn’t chosen the location. Michael di Maio had.

  She was enormously grateful that he’d taken her in after her stretch of joblessness when she’d left Cahill and Associates. Michael was the older brother of Brianna’s college roommate, and he’d been the one to interest her in architecture when she’d been an eighteen-year-old freshman, undecided about whether to major in art or math. “Architecture combines both,” he’d told her. A graduate student at the time, he’d inspired her to follow his career path. Lisa would joke that she wouldn’t follow Michael down a flight of stairs in a burning building, but that was just brother-sister sparring. Lisa was still Brianna’s good friend. And now Michael was her boss.

  North Shore Design specialized in house renovations and additions. When Brianna had suggested that they submit a proposal for Brogan’s Point’s Town Hall, Michael had shrugged and said, “It’s not what we usually do, but what the hell.” They hadn’t expected to make it as far as the finals, but there they were.

  Of course, Brianna had submitted an excellent proposal. She’d labored over it in her spare time, when she wasn’t hustling for contracts to update the kitchen in a 1970’s-era split level or add a bonus room above the garage of a fifteen-year-old colonial. She knew Michael wasn’t exactly awash in commissions. North Shore Design did well enough, but if Brianna wanted to work with him, she’d have to bring in commissions to cover her income.

  It wasn’t like working at a well-established outfit like Cahill and Associates, where clients came to the architects. Cahill’s main office was in downtown Boston. The firm worked on hotels, apartments, municipal buildings, and other major construction projects. In terms of career growth, moving from Cahill and Associates to North Shore Design was a step down, but Brianna consoled herself with the knowledge that at North Shore Design, unlike Cahill, she wasn’t just a tiny cog, assisting her superiors and praying for a promotion. Working with Michael meant finding clients and tackling projects on her own, even if those projects were nothing more exciting than updating a kitchen by knocking down a wall, adding an island, and installing a farmer’s sink.

  There was something to be said for being in charge, claiming the design as her own. At North Shore Design, she got to do that.

  Michael was waiting for her to answer his question about last night’s presentation. She filled her mug with coffee from the pot he’d brewed and shrugged. “I think it went well. But the Cahill proposal was a lot glitzier.”

  “Big new building,” Michael murmured.

  “Big new price tag. We’ve got him beat on that.”

  Michael knew a little about Brianna’s history with Rollie. Not a lot. Not the broken promises and false assurances. Michael just knew there had been something between her and Rollie, and she’d left Cahill, and there was nothing between them anymore.

  “I think that once people stop ooh-ing and ahh-ing over his fabulous building and actually crunch the numbers, they’ll decide they don’t want to raise their taxes enough to pay for a building that doesn’t even fit in with the town’s character.” She carried her mug to her desk and turned on her computer. “Anyway, I did the best I could.”

  “I’m sure you did.” Michael studied her for a moment. She glanced down at her blouse—had she spilled orange juice on it? Or maybe she’d left a smear of toothpaste on her lip?

  Or was she just feeling a little…different? Different enough that someone who knew her might notice? She’d had trouble sleeping last night and blamed her insomnia on the stress of having had to make her presentation at the town meeting. But really, what had kept her awake was an ear-worm, a song that kept humming through her mind.

  It takes two.

  Well, it did take two. Her and Michael. They’d collaborated on the design for the Brogan’s Point Town Hall renovation. Brianna had done most of it, but Michael’s suggestions had improved her initial design considerably. The two of them, working together, had made it as good as it could be.

  Good enough to be one of the town’s two finalists, she reminded herself.

  She opened up her files on the Louvelle kitchen and reached for her phone to contact the granite dealer who would be cutting the counter tops. The Louvelles hadn’t liked the dark green he’ had in stock, and Brianna was waiting for him to locate a paler green for the room. She’d been waiting three days to hear from him; it was time to give him a nudge.

  Before she could punch in his number, however, the door swung open and Will Naukonen entered.

  As if on cue, that song bopped and bounced its way through her head again. It takes two, baby. Me and you.

  She gave her head a slight shake to clear it, then smiled at him. A cool, courteous smile, she hoped. “Good morning.”

  He smiled back—an equally cool, courteous smile. “Hey.”

  All the coolness and courtesy couldn’t overcome the quiet tug she felt somewhere in her soul as she peered up at him, then pushed out her chair and rose. He remained standing near the door, surveying the office, his attention finally settling on Michael, whose gaze shuttled back and forth between Will and Brianna. “Michael, this is Will Naukonen. We met last night at the presentation. Will, this is my boss, Michael di Maio.”

  Will crossed the office to shake Michael’s hand. “Partner,” Michael corrected her. “Nobody is Brianna’s boss.”

 
Will’s smile widened. “I suspected as much.”

  He turned back to Brianna, who remained standing awkwardly, unsure of why he was there, what he wanted, why that damned song kept prancing through her mind. “What can I help you with?” she asked, sounding absurdly formal and businesslike, given…

  Given what? That he’d chivalrously posed as her boyfriend to send Rollie a message last night? That she and Will had feasted on lobster rolls together? That he’d sat in her car? That when she’d dropped him off at the tavern, she’d felt something between them, something more than just the aftermath of a pleasant conversation and a delicious meal, and a song?

  He was on his way to Seattle. Whatever that something was, it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. He probably didn’t even care what happened to the Brogan’s Point Town Hall, since by the time ground was broken—either on Rollie’s design or hers—he would be three thousand miles away.

  Surely he hadn’t come here to hire her and Michael to renovate his house—unless he already had a house waiting for him in Seattle. Would he be willing to fly her out there just to oversee the job? Was North Shore Design prepared to take on projects on the other side of the country?

  “I wanted to let you know,” he said, “that Davenport is in Brogan’s Point today, lobbying for his building.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s sitting in the library. I stopped in, and there he was, where your design and his are on display for people to study. He’s shaking hands with anyone who approaches, and explaining why his design is the better one. I thought you’d want to know.”

  A variety of thoughts tumbled through her brain. Why would Rollie do something so tacky? Did he not think his design could speak for itself? Would people wandering through the library be swayed by his spiel, enough to vote for his design over hers when the town had its special election in a few weeks? Did Rollie view himself as a politician, glad-handing voters?