by Gigi Blume
“Are you sure you checked all the points of entry?” He says this like a calculating Army general. Points of entry. Ta!
I cock my head at him. “You mean the same ones you checked three times after I did? I don’t know. Maybe we should make another round.”
Sarcasm drips from my lips. I know it’s not helping. But it’s fun.
How did we even get in this fiasco? Oh yeah. Ingram had his greedy, corporate eyes all over Eugene’s inventory, poking around the factory to estimate how much money he’d make at Eugene’s loss. Naturally, I had to keep him in check. A barb in his side and reminder I would not lose this client without a fight. I was right on his heels, wearing him down with my spunk and persistence. But he kept at it right past quittin’ time just to spite me. And now we’re trapped. Completely forgotten by the factory workers. It’s totally his fault.
He checks his watch again. Really? I mean, I don’t have any spectacular plans unless you count the frozen dinner and episode five of Mr. Robot waiting for me at my apartment. But I’m not any more thrilled than he is about the situation.
“And that phone?” His eyes dart to the red phone on the wall. I blow out a breath because we went over this.
“Internal use only. It even says so on the sticker above the dial pad.”
“That’s just to discourage employees from calling their girlfriends. Try dialing nine first.”
“I did.” As well as zero and nine-one-one, and every other combination of numbers imaginable. And so did he, but saying so would be redundant.
He curses under his breath and drags his fingers through his annoyingly silky brown hair while pacing like a caged lion. It’s his version of putting his thinking cap on. I used to think it was hot when I was a teenager. But now...
Okay, it’s still hot. But I don’t let it affect me anymore. I’m no longer the little girl tagging along with her big brother and his dreamy friend. That girl is gone. And so is the illusion.
He stops pacing and glances up. I follow his line of sight. There’s some kind of vent on the wall—way up high, about a foot away from the ceiling. There’s an aluminum tube leading to it from one of the machines. Probably some sort of exhaust thingy. I can hear the gears turning in his head.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Oh, I’m thinking about it.” He darts around the warehouse looking for something. A ladder, maybe.
“It’s like fifty feet. Even if you do get up there, and somehow pry the vent off the wall with your Thor muscles, how do you expect to get down to the parking lot? Let down your hair?”
I can’t believe I’m following him around while he searches for—whatever he’s searching for. A lasso? Zip line? He’s not even looking at me.
“Somebody’s gotta come up with something. Unless you’d rather spend the night on a bed of pitas.”
Not with you, Yale Boy.
“Maybe I don’t want to clean your brains off the floor after you fall to your death.”
He stops and looks at me for the first time, furrowing his brows.
“You were never this snarky when we used to hang out.”
Hang out? I wouldn’t exactly call it that.
I cross my arms over my chest. Defiant. “I’m not the sweet little Rosemary you used to know.”
He slowly rakes his gaze from my face all the way down to my insensible shoes then back up again. A devilish grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “No, you certainly are not.”
Did he just... swag me out? These heels do make my legs look awesome. If I’d known I’d be touring the factory today I would have worn flats. But now I’m kind of glad I can flaunt it in front of Ingram in a can’t touch this sort of way. Even if the balls of my feet are burning.
I turn and strut away, tossing him a quick look over my shoulder. Heat blooms in my cheeks and I hope my hair hides it well enough. “Fine. Decorate the floor with your innards. I’ll get a mop.”
I make a point of swaying my hips just a little extra. If he’s finally noticing me after all these years, I consider this payback.
I hear a heavy sigh behind me. He’s probably running his fingers through his hair again.
Gah! Don’t turn around and watch. Keep walking.
Besides, I need to find somewhere to sit. This place is huge. Aisles and aisles of stainless steel machinery boggle my mind and it makes me sad to think of the dozens of employees that will lose their jobs if Ingram has his way. That sobers me up real quick and my cheeks feel cool again.
What was Eugene thinking? He hired my small consulting firm to save his pita bread factory. I’m not a big shot like Yale Boy here. I run my business out of my basement in Verona, New Jersey. Just me, myself, and I. But I have amazing ideas to turn his company around. It’s what I do. I’m good at it. So why did Eugene bring Ingram in? I’ve been driving up to his factory in Albany for two weeks now. I thought we had an understanding.
I find a stack of plastic crates and sit to rest my pups. It doesn’t take long for Ingram to join me. He could be anywhere in this giant factory yet he sits next to me. He checks his watch again and we sit in silence for a long time. I feel like anything we say to each other now, after so much bad jou jou between us, is pointless unless it will help get us out of here. But I can tell by the way he twists his lips around that he has something on his mind.
Neither one of us have our cell phones. I left my purse in the accounting office before coming over to the warehouse. I didn’t think it was sanitary to bring it with me where they do the baking. Let’s not even mention how ridiculous I looked in the hair cap they made me wear.
Ingram had slugged off his suit jacket when I arrived at the office. I tell myself the heat of my disdain got him hot and bothered. But not in a fun way. More of a hope you brought your Lume way. Now he says his phone was in that jacket pocket. I know what he’s thinking. Surely someone would have seen our stuff in the office before locking up for the night. They should have looked for us. But I’d tucked my purse under the desk to keep it hidden. And it’s Friday. Nobody’s going to split hairs over a suit jacket. We’re doomed.
He shifts on the crate. Not the most comfortable of seating arrangements, I’ll give him that. But it’s something else. He’s studying me.
I move my gaze to him ever so slowly—my best mad dog side-eye. It is oh so not the dreamy way I used to look at him. It’s the opposite of dreamy.
“What?” I accentuate the last letter. Like a bite.
He smiles. He thinks he’s got something on me. I can tell by the glimmer in his eyes.
“Thor muscles, huh?”
2
INGRAM
I won’t survive the night.
There’s a musical my friend Bing and I performed in high school. How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. I got the lead role but everyone knew Bing was the one who’d make it on Broadway. He was made to perform. I just took theatre classes for fun. Rumor has it Bing turned down the lead role for one reason:
He was spooked about singing love songs to a character with his sister’s name.
Rosemary.
So the part fell to me. Singing that song messed with my head. We’d rehearse after school and Bing’s little sister would be there. Watching. Doe-eyed and pudgy-faced, her beauty only the shadow of a promise back then.
And I’d sing out her name… because it was the lyric.
Rose...ma-ry. One note for every syllable.
My voice filled the theatre with it and I understood then why Bing didn’t want the part. But what did I care? She wasn’t MY sister.
Funny thing about songs, though. They come back to you. Those three descending notes love to crash my thoughts at the most inconvenient times. Back in college they would burrow in my ear during a calculus final. Sometimes I find myself humming at work during an important business meeting.
And now.
Rosemary sits next to me, pouting. No, not pouting. Feisty. Fiery. Electric. A woman in every sense of the word. What is it a
bout her? She used to be so sweet. Bubbly. Eager to please, even. But one day, out of the blue, she turned frigid. I see dead people frigid.
Now, sitting next to me, she’s the opposite of cold. She’s a volcano ready to erupt. Her eyes aflame with rage. Her skin a furnace. I can feel it sear through me. It drives me wild. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve her wrath, but I’ll take it any day over her arctic indifference.
Maybe my presence here today is stirring up some old repressed feelings. Feelings that were off-limits ten years ago.
She mumbled something earlier she thinks I didn’t hear. Oh I heard her. Thor muscles. Just the idea of that slipping from her mouth makes me smile inside. And when I call her out on it she acts like she doesn’t hear me...
“Hmmm?” she says. So innocent.
“You think I’ve got a Thor bod?”
She snorts. “Fat Thor, maybe.”
I crack a grin. This woman! She’s got a chip on her shoulder when it comes to me. Why? I want to reply with a witty comeback. I want to make her laugh. I want to kiss her.
Wait. What?
I try for a tease instead.
My eyes dip to the sensitive spot just behind her jaw. She has a freckle there. It dances with her racing pulse. Out and in, out and in. It’s the most tantalizing version of the hokey pokey ever.
I inch closer, slowly closing the space between us. My lips instinctively part and she sucks in a faint, ragged breath—almost indiscernible—but it’s all I can hear. It echoes in my brain. She’s trying to keep her cool but she’s not fooling me. It’s adorable. I go in for the kill. My nose brushes against her hair and I can sense the ripple in the universe as her eyelids flutter. Butterfly wings disturbing the time-space continuum. She rocks my world—the way her vanilla scented shampoo floats through me like a drug, the way she trembles when I’m not even touching her. I don’t touch her. It’s torture, but I don’t. I’m good at keeping my hands to myself when it comes to her. Bing never so much as mentioned it, but hitting on his little sister was an unspoken violation of the bro-code. At least, it was in high school. Now? I’m not so sure.
She’s changed.
I want to kiss the sass right off her smart little mouth. Fat Thor. Two hours in the gym daily says otherwise. I lean in with a soft rumble, my breath hot against the shell of her ear as I whisper, “Are you willing to take that bet... Rosie?”
She shoots up, her high heels wobbling under her ankles. That hot lava core of hers is ready to melt into a pool on the floor.
Maybe I should dial it down a few thousand decibels or I’ll likely get burnt.
“You’re not stealing this account from me,” she snaps.
Whoa, now.
“I’m not trying to steal anything from you.”
Except perhaps a kiss.
“Yes you are. You’re a terrible person.”
“Wow, Rosie. Tell me how you really feel.”
“And don’t call me Rosie. I’m not thirteen.”
I raise my hands up in the universal sign of surrender. “Okay, okay. Rosemary.”
Rose...ma-ry. There’s that music again.
She’s so worked up right now she lights up the room. She could power a small city with her static energy.
“What makes you think I’m a terrible person?”
“You kill.”
“I kill? Like... a Jekyll and Hyde type of thing or I kill... like a comedian slays the audience with his genius improv skills?”
“You are a murderer of the American Dream. Do you have any idea how many people will suffer when you shut down this factory? How many families will lose their breadwinner?”
I raise one brow, the pun not lost on me. It’s a pita pun. A perfectly pithy, peppy, pita pun.
She goes on. “Eugene hired me first. I have amazing plans. You will not win.”
She seems to think this is some sort of contest. Makes sense. She was the most decorated Girl Scout I’d ever seen. Sold my mom seventeen boxes of Thin Mints one year.
“I don’t think you understand what my company actually does,” I say, still fixating on her bright pink cheeks.
“I know exactly what your company does, thank you very much. You destroy. You sweep in and kill businesses when they’re in peril.”
“Well, if you want to put it that way, I guess you could call it mercy killing.”
She tuts. “Such a mercenary thing to say.”
“And who uses the word peril?”
Probably not the best thing to say considering her ire towards me right now. I dunno. Maybe I like it. Maybe I’m a masochist.
She points a dainty finger my way and opens her mouth to speak but another sound drowns her out. It’s an alarm or something. A blaring, screaming horn in short, successive squawks.
“What the—“
Then it stops and a definitive clunk echoes through the whole place. Like one big deadbolt latching down. Her face says it all. Those wide eyes wondering... if we thought we were locked in before, then what the blazes just happened? Her face is the last thing I see before the lights switch off.
3
ROSEMARY
It’s pitch black for a split second before the industrial nightlights flicker on. Of course they’re red and ominous. This is the part of every horror movie where one of the characters foolishly wanders off from her party and gets bumped off. Then later on someone finds her severed head and lets out a blood curdling scream because that’s a brilliant way to hide from a psycho killer. People in horror movies are idiots.
I look over at Ingram. His face is a chiseled study on deep shadow and red glow. He’s achingly gorgeous even in the scary lighting. I hate him for it.
“Are you all right?” he asks. You know, in case the pita bread monsters come out to get me.
“Yeah. Why shouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know.” He waves his hand in my general vicinity. “Your face.”
“My face?” He means my funny face. That was one of his many nicknames for me. My hackles are out and I don’t try to hide them.
“You looked startled, that’s all.”
“Startled? Me? No, no. This happens to me every day.” I play it tough because if he sees my weakness, I’m a gazelle and he’s a big, bad cat.
Not gonna freak out. Not. Gonna. Freak. Out.
He bites his bottom lip and looks around. I don’t know what he expects to see. Even with the red lights it’s still pretty dark in here. He takes a few steps away.
“I’m going to try and find an emergency lantern or a flashlight.”
“Don’t you dare leave me,” I blurt out—a little more panicky than I intend to. That stops him. He comes over, playfully sauntering into my personal space.
“My, my, my. Are you afraid of the dark?”
“No.” I don’t like the shaky tone in my voice. It’s small and timid. Ingram does that to me. It’s his pheromones or something. I pull myself together, straightening my spine. “Our vision will adjust, is all.”
He moves closer, those penetrating eyes of his taking survey of my features. He’s quiet for a beat then brushes a finger along my forehead, righting a stray strand of hair. I don’t stop him. I didn’t even realize how much the hair was bothering me until he swept it into place. How wild I must look right now. How blotchy my skin must appear under this red lighting while he looks like he jumped right off the walls of a modern art gallery. I don’t see how this is fair. My traitorous heart quickens. Why oh why must my body have this visceral reaction to him... every time?
Something akin to dismay flickers over him and he steps back. Aaaand there goes the pacing scalp rubbing show I can’t resist. He checks his watch again and really what’s the point? It’s too dark to see the time. Wherever he has to be right now it’s not gonna happen. Seriously his obsession with the time is getting on my nerves.
“My guess is it’s about 7 o’clock.” There’s a little sass in there mixed with a measure of triumphant booyah.
I suppose I fe
el wickedly pleased that his plans are toast. A small taste of retribution for the heartbreak he put me though. They say you never quite get over your first love. In my case, I never got over my first crush and the emptiness I felt when I realized my affection was unrequited. Maybe it wouldn’t have stayed with me all these years if it was just a schoolgirl infatuation—if he hadn’t made promises only to stand me up and pretend he hadn’t pulverized all my hopes. Maybe if he’d owned a watch back then he wouldn’t have kept me waiting on my prom night.
Because I’m a glutton for punishment I go ahead and ask.
“Hot date?”
“Something like that.”
I try for a breezy tone. “Where are you taking her?” It’s not a breezy tone. Unless chipmunk was what I was going for.
He sighs. “If you must know, The Royal Crown.”
The Royal Crown in Manhattan? Swanky. And quite a drive from Albany. He’ll never make it now. Unless he takes his private helicopter. It wouldn’t surprise me.
“Ohhh. Fancy pants. How did you manage that?”
“Sold my left kidney for reservations.”
My stomach twists. Sounds serious. “She must be a special lady.”
“She is.” There’s a deep fondness in his voice. It almost cracks my heart, but I keep on with the third degree because I’m stupid.
“Were you going to propose tonight?”
He laughs like it’s a ludicrous idea. “No.”
“Oh come on. The Royal Crown? You can’t take a date there and not expect her to at least suspect—“
“She’s already married.”
Say what now? Married? What kind of monster is this guy? I always thought he was bad news but this is next level.
“I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.” I make a show of swallowing then stick out my tongue. “Yep. Definitely some upchuck action going on there.”
He flashes me a hard stare. “Why do you care so much?”
