Out of the Blue

by Kathryn Nolan

  Her throat worked, fingers twisting in her lap again. There was a ragged edge at the tail end of those words that had me fighting the urge to reach for her.

  “Do you think Aerial was lying in your meeting about their intentions?” I asked.

  Confusion filled her gaze. “I really don’t know,” she said, sounding distracted. “I hope not. They’ve always presented themselves with integrity. I’m hoping this was some miscommunication and that this interview with Chase isn’t going to cost me the most important sponsorship opportunity of my career.”

  Before I could respond, she dropped her head back into her hands with a frustrated sigh but didn’t speak.

  After a few seconds, I said, “You can tell me.” I bit back the sunshine endearment and added, “If you feel comfortable, that is.”

  I didn’t like this new duality of being the husband she hadn’t spoken to in four years and her agent.

  When she finally lifted her head, her cheeks were pink. “I’m upset because I feel… embarrassed now.” She said the word embarrassed through gritted teeth. “It happens to me whenever I get angry and push back against someone like that. I get this hot rush of irritation, but as it drains away, there’s a voice in my head that whispers, ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’”

  I was silent, letting her process, watching her carefully. I had a suspicion about that tiny voice in her head. It made my chest ache.

  “I know it’s my parents. All the lies they told me and Caleb. All the ways they told me it was my job to keep men comfortable and when they were uncomfortable it was my fault. For not being pleasant or sweet enough.”

  “Or telling them things they don’t want to take responsibility for,” I said softly.

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  My hands flexed against the seat, a response to my own fury. Fury at parents who’d told this woman the only way she could receive love was by being a living doll. Pretty, polite, quiet. They had demanded she fulfill gender roles so strictly that they’d done more than just withhold affection when she broke their rules. Serena and her brother went without food more often than not, locked in their bedrooms and separated from each other. Her first two years of surfing had only happened because she and Caleb invented an after-school program they had to stay late for, which allowed them to sneak out to La Jolla without their parents’ knowledge.

  “And even though I’m not ashamed of what I said in that interview,” she continued. “And even though it’s been years, I still get this response because of how I was raised, and I hate that it happens.”

  She was quiet again, and there was a rigid tension in the set of her shoulders and the line of her jaw. When she let her eyes land on mine, the pain there stunned me. This side of Serena was like witnessing a rare phase of the moon. Being vulnerable wasn’t her thing, but a long time ago, she’d let me in, dropped her barriers, exposed her fears. Given me her heart.

  I’d lost that privilege when we broke up. Seeing it now scrambled my brain and my common sense. I reached forward and held her hand.

  “I’m so sorry they did that to you,” I said hoarsely. She squeezed back with something like relief, and I felt it. I felt the force of our love, just beneath the surface, as radiant and passionate as ever.

  “Thank you,” she said on a whisper, then let me go. “And I appreciated what you told Chase, about your dad, and for defending my experiences.”

  “I’d do it every single time,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “I do.”

  Her lips were parted, chest rising and falling rapidly. If I didn’t know better, Serena was contemplating kissing me. And I knew this woman better than I knew myself.

  She was contemplating kissing me.

  “Should we go in?” She pressed a fluttering hand to her forehead. “I mean, I’ll go in. You’ll…”

  “Falco’s shift doesn’t start until tonight, so I need to check the house first, and then I’ll be posted outside.” I opened the door, exiting with a sigh of resignation. I watched Serena walk up the stairs with forceful regret.

  There was no reconciliation for us. I held tight to that. We’d once meant the world to each other, so moments like this were going to be as confusing as they were tempting.

  Inside, I swept through the lower rooms, checked all the locks, but nothing was amiss. I had my hand on the banister, one foot on the stair, when Serena swished into the living room.

  “What’s up?” I asked, recognizing the look on her face.

  “Here’s the thing.” She had one hand behind her back. “I’d completely forgotten this, in the shock of having my ex-husband for a bodyguard. But Catalina did give me something.”

  I closed the distance between us in two steps. Held out my hand. She dropped a USB stick into it with a sticky note that said, Watch Me :).

  This time it wasn’t just the back of my neck. Awareness shivered across every inch of my skin, heightening my instincts. Marty’s strange-but-friendly behavior today hadn’t made sense to me. Or maybe that’s what made sense about it.

  He’d been acting shady as hell.

  What had Quentin said this morning? Call me pessimistic, but I tend to think any billion-dollar company with something to hide is dangerous.

  “Catalina and I really did just talk about surfing, and people send me their tapes all the time to watch. I assumed she was scared to give me a surf video and did it when she picked up my bag.”

  I held up the stick. “You know, I’m a little rusty, but I thought you were lying to Marty back in his office.”

  She pursed her lips. “I was in shock after the interview. And confused. And annoyed with Aerial in the moment. It had me questioning them enough to wonder why he was asking me about missing work files. Or why Catalina was suddenly home sick.”

  I was starting to feel sick too. It was much too soon to really know what was going on, but the moment I relayed this story to Quentin, I could guess the conclusion he would leap to.

  It wasn’t a safe one.

  14

  Serena

  I pulled on an oversized hoodie and running shorts, then walked back downstairs to find Cope on the couch with his laptop balanced on the coffee table.

  I was grateful he hadn’t noticed me yet. He’d shed his suit jacket, loosened his tie, rolled up his white shirtsleeves. His shoulders stretched the fabric. His bare forearms flexed with muscle. The sexual desire I still felt for my ex-husband demanded I climb onto his lap. I wasn’t skeptical of his reaction. He couldn’t hide his body’s glorious response while pressed together in that elevator or the fleeting glances filled with want and need. If I did now what I used to do—flirt, tease, tempt him into a myriad of sinful pleasures—this bodyguard would have me flat on my back before I could say please.

  My muscles shivered. I was tired, needed to sit on that damn couch before my legs gave out. But my own stubborn self-preservation kept me frozen on the bottom step. It would have been simpler to deny this craving if Cope hadn’t spent today proving that four years apart hadn’t stripped him of the qualities that made him so easy to fall for: compassion, kindness, unconditional support.

  My brother and I stood up for what was right because we grew up in a house where no one stood up for us. We’d learned at a young age that the world was unfair and cruel to a lot of people, but instead of feeling helpless it had given us a direction. A guiding light in the darkness.

  Cope was outspoken because of the opposite: two devoted parents who raised him up well, taught him with words and examples. Even now, the protective instinct he’d nurtured since his father’s death sprang from an innate understanding of the way people could be hurt.

  Having a partner like that—marrying someone like that—had been a privilege. This entire day had been an unfair reminder that I’d been very, very lucky once.

  “Are you done creepily staring at me from the stairs?” Cope asked, face lit up by the blue of the laptop screen.

  I blinked. Realized with a start tha
t I had been staring like a dreamy-eyed fool.

  “You don’t know what I was doing,” I said, lifting my chin.

  He peered up at me. “I always know when you’re checking me out.”

  “The last time I did that was four years ago, so you must be confused.” I fell backwards onto the couch casually, like it didn’t matter, like his nearness didn’t matter. The sheer volume of orgasms we’d given each other on this very piece of furniture didn’t matter one bit.

  A smile still played on Cope’s lips, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  Whatever he thought Catalina had given me was making him nervous. Which, in turn, made me nervous.

  “Got anything interesting?” I tucked my feet under me and tried to peek over his arm.

  He moved it, tilted the angle of the laptop so I could see clearly. He held up the USB stick. “I was waiting for you. You ready to watch this?”

  “Totally,” I lied. The way Aerial had made me feel today—like they were hiding something, like they had lied to me—had set off a chain reaction of wariness and distrust. I wanted them to be good though—to be ethical, to have integrity. I wanted this afternoon to be a messy and frustrating misunderstanding, not an indicator of their values.

  “My money is still on the odds that this is a tape of her surfing,” I said, trying to ease my own nerves.

  “Or maybe a really embarrassing stand-up comedy routine she wants your feedback on,” he murmured, plugging in the drive. His laptop whirred and blinked as it loaded. “Or, even better, a song she wrote. About you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “People don’t write songs about me.”

  He grinned, and it soothed the thorny edges of my anxiety. “On the, let’s say, darker corners of the internet, there are definitely amateur songwriters who have uploaded videos of songs they’ve written asking you to be their best friend or brazenly declaring their romantic love.”

  “And you know this because you hang out in these darker corners?” I asked. “Or do you know this because you’re the amateur songwriter in this scenario?”

  “Oh, Serena.” He shook his head with that charming smile. “I was twenty-two when we met, so you know I took out that acoustic guitar I barely knew how to play and wrote cheesy-ass songs about your hair and shit.”

  I laughed out loud, forgetting myself. Forgetting reality. Merely enjoying the extravagance of this exchange because sitting next to Cope made it too hard to resist.

  The moment was short-lived.

  “Wait, hold up,” he muttered, attention yanked back to the screen. “What the hell is this?”

  I practically lunged toward the laptop. A white box popped up with about ten different files labeled incoherently. A few pictures. Cope clicked on one, and it was a document that listed the names, contact information, pictures, and badge numbers for factory inspectors with the Arizona Safety and Hazards Association.

  The next thing was a picture of the current San Diego City Council. Cope squinted at the screen before tapping his thumb on the guy in the middle. “Isn’t that David Lattimore?”

  “Huh,” I said, fingers at my lips. “I didn’t know he was a city councilmember.”

  “Remind me, what does Aerial make and where?”

  I sat back on the couch, giving me the perfect vantage point to study Cope’s reactions. He hadn’t stopped staring at the files. “The Lattimore brothers founded it in the seventies as a direct response to other outdoor adventure companies at the time mass producing goods and clothing without any care given to the impact it had on the environment. If we all shared a common love of the outdoors, then we’d want our gear to do the least damage possible. The center of their mission was climate justice. Reducing their carbon footprint. And producing goods ethically.”

  He finally twisted around to look at me. “I’m guessing their factories are in the US?”

  I bit my lip. “In Arizona, actually.”

  He nodded like he expected that answer.

  “They’re well-known for their ethical factory conditions. Living wage, safety, minimizing pollution. A dedication to social responsibility and philanthropy.” I flipped up the bottom of my sweatshirt, which I just realized was an Aerial design. The tag on the inside said: Made in America. Made for the planet. I showed Cope, and his brows knit together.

  He opened the other files, the non-photo ones, and a bunch of legal documents popped up. They were long, hundreds and hundreds of pages, and my eyes glazed over immediately.

  “Quentin said they were tied up in private arbitration. Lawsuits not in the public record. Makes for better concealing,” he murmured. “I wonder if that’s what these are.”

  “I guess Marty was right, then? That Catalina somehow dropped these work files into my bag by accident?”

  I was secretly relieved. Cope, however, was not.

  He drummed his fingers on the sides of the laptop, clearly thinking. “Unless Catalina did this on purpose.” He ejected the drive and held it tightly in his hand, staring at it. He didn’t speak for almost ten seconds, and my simmering worries ratcheted up the longer he was silent.

  I ducked my head until I caught his eye. “Spit it out, Cope.”

  With a sigh, he turned to face me. I backed up a few inches to avoid our legs grazing each other. “Sometimes there are things, bad things, going on at companies, and employees are too scared or have been too threatened to speak up about it. I’m wondering if Catalina passed you information that needs to be exposed. Quentin thought something was up with them from the get-go.”

  His words sent a chill rippling through me. I pressed my palm to my forehead. “Aerial was dedicated to protecting the environment before it was trendy or popular. Their entire brand is based around ethics.”

  “I know,” he said, still staring at the flash drive. “I’m not saying I want to think badly of this company. And we’re nowhere close to a complete picture of what’s really going on. I am saying that Marty was acting weird as shit when he spoke to us today, right? And an employee attempted to covertly slip you documents that the CEO was trying very hard to convince us he was only a little worried about.”

  I thought back to our encounter, peeling back the shock and anger I felt after my argument with Chase and remembering the odd expression on Marty’s face. The mismatched tension, the way he was almost too casual when he cheerfully informed us that he’d watched me and Catalina on security footage.

  I rubbed my arms as goosebumps raced across my skin. “It feels like you’re working out a plan.”

  “I’m thinking I want to show this to Quentin.”

  “You want to involve more people?” I asked.

  His next words were slow. Deliberate. “I think my gut is telling me I’m holding a drive full of bad fucking news. If it’s innocent, I’ll drive you to Aerial myself so you can return it. But if I’m right, and this company is covering something up, then it’s exactly what you said to Chase today. And my best friend happens to specialize in this kind of investigating.”

  I fell back against the couch cushion, equally wired and exhausted at his suggestion. “We have a responsibility to do the right thing.”

  “To be clear,” he said softly, “I’m hoping my instinct is wrong.”

  The reality of what we were talking about came crashing down around me. “I just signed a three-year contract with them,” I blurted out. “I just became the official embodiment of this company and their values. I have to give interviews after I compete tomorrow, talking about how great they are.”

  Cope’s gaze filled with sympathy, muscles primed for action. But he stood up, instead of reaching for me, and I pretended I wasn’t disappointed. He began fixing his casual appearance, transforming back into my hired security and security only. Sleeves buttoned, jacket back on, he slid the USB stick into his pocket.

  “I will figure this out for you, okay?” His smile was back, and the warmth of it chased the chill away. “It’s my job to do so, and I don’t want you worrying too much when you’ve got T
restles tomorrow.” He paused as if considering his next words. “I just… I know us.” His tone lowered, infused with intimacy. “On the slightest chance that you were given something important and we found out later that we’d done nothing to stop it—”

  I dragged my fingers through my hair. “Talk to Quentin,” I said firmly.

  He checked his watch then peered out the front window. “I should get out there, check in with my boss. Prep my report for when Falco arrives.”

  “Right, of course,” I said. I walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. Stared at my reflection in the window above the sink. Cope stood behind me, at least six feet away, but it still felt too close. We made accidental, lingering eye contact, and I felt the pull of lust, low in my belly. He eventually cleared his throat, shattering the moment.

  “I know this sounds dramatic, but don’t mention this to Dora or Caleb, okay? Don’t mention it to anyone until I say so.”

  It didn’t sound dramatic at all. If anything, his somber, I work security let me handle this vibe amplified my concerns.

  It was so not like him. It made me, for the first time, more scared than nervous.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll keep it to myself.”

  A tiny bit of lightness came over his face. “I thought you were going to battle me more on that one. Since I was—what did you say?—‘Trying to control your actions and telling you what to do.’”

  “For one time only,” I said, not fighting the smile tugging at my lips. “And I’m not apologizing for saying that because it’s still true.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He spun on his heels and made it all the way to the door before stopping, turning around with a vexed expression.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Today, in Marty’s office, he reminded me of someone, and it’s been bugging me.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I just realized who it was. Gary Duncan.”