Strange Secrets

by Lexy Timms

  “Yeah, I work at Kingston Press,” I replied. “Well, I just started work there. I doubt I’ll be there much longer, though—I’m totally late this morning.”

  “And I’m sure I haven’t helped,” he replied, raising his eyebrows apologetically. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of black leather gloves—I hadn’t spotted them before, but there was something commanding about them that made me feel a little weak around the knees. I wondered, vaguely, just what it was that had brought a man like this to a place like Kingston—he didn’t strike me as the type who would be drawn to a town like this one. Something about him spoke to more experience, more life, more excitement that this place had to offer, and I couldn’t figure out quite why.

  “No, but I can forgive you,” I replied. I checked my phone. Shit. Nearly eight-thirty. I needed to get a move on. And yet...

  “Maybe I can make it up to you,” he offered. For a split second, I thought that he was going to ask me out on a date—I shoved that thought to the back of my mind at once. Don’t be stupid. This guy could have had anyone at all that he wanted in this town, and the chances of him settling for someone like me were next to nil.

  “How so?”

  “I have an interview at Kingston Press this Friday,” he explained. “Perhaps I could do it with you instead of Allison.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Maybe I want to,” he replied, flashing me another smile. My knees got a little weak when he looked at me like that. How could I say no to him when he talked to me with such confidence, as though he already knew what was best for me?

  “I mean, that would be awesome,” I blurted out. I couldn’t imagine how much of a boost that would be to my career—I hadn’t even thought about getting to talk to someone like him for my first interview. I’d already accepted that I’d likely be conducting conversations with the captain of the high school football team if I was lucky, but a chance to talk with someone like Jesse? Yeah, that would be incredible. And if he requested it specifically, there wasn’t much Allison could do about it, was there?

  “You really don’t have to,” I continued. Why the hell was I talking myself out of this before I had even started? I needed to calm myself down. I needed to go along with this and make it sound as though I had already done twenty interviews with people of his stature before, or he was going to take it back because he didn’t want to blow his chance with the local press.

  “I know how hard it can be when you’re trying to get started in a new career,” he replied calmly. “I think you could probably use all the help you could get, right?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Then I’ll see you Friday,” he replied. “If you haven’t lost your job for being late today, that is.”

  “If I do, I’ll blame it on you,” I warned him, and he chuckled and just looked at me for a moment—and then, finally, he turned on his heel and started off down the street away from me.

  As soon as he was facing away, I fist-pumped in the cool morning air. Holy shit! Had that really just happened? He might have been just doing it out of sympathy, but he had no idea how much an interview with him might boost my career. And if he asked for me, that would just show everyone I was working with that I was someone to look out for. They might not have known it yet, but I was going to kick the ass of everyone in that office, make it so they could hardly believe that they had never heard of me before now...

  That was, of course, if Allison didn’t can me for turning up late with no good reason. I needed to get to the office sooner rather than later and hope that some of the goodwill that had gotten me hired would keep carrying over just a little while longer. I was only a half-hour late, and when they found out who I had run into, I was sure that they would understand why I’d felt the need to stop and talk for a while. Who wouldn’t have taken the chance to chat him up, if they had gotten it? Any good reporter would have been anxious to find out everything they could about a man as mysterious as that—and when he just so happened to look as good as he did, well...

  I stuffed my papers back into my bag and started to sprint toward the office. But even though I knew that I was going to have some explaining to do when I got there, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as I went. I had just managed to score a major win, even if it had come at the cost of my punctuality that morning. And to think, I had been cursing out that elevator earlier—now I could see that it was just doing me a favor. Making sure that I ran into Jesse—could I call him by his first name now? Like we were friends?

  I had no idea. But what I did know for sure was that I couldn’t get the image of his leather-gloved hands out of my head—and I couldn’t stop wondering just how they would have felt pressed against my skin.

  Chapter Five

  Jesse

  I SWEAR, RUNNING INTO that girl this morning had me all kinds of distracted—and I was having a hard time clearing my head of everything that had been put there when she looked up at me with those green eyes and her jaw had dropped.

  But I was supposed to be at work. That was where I had been headed after spending a quiet morning eating breakfast and reading up on the news from last night—well, and checking out what kind of vibe the Kingston Press gave off before my interview there at the end of the week.

  Though I got the feeling that I had a lot less to worry about now that I had bumped into the woman who was going to conduct the interview with me. She seemed totally grateful that I had been willing to shift the interviewer from her editor to her, but honestly, I figured that it would likely work out better for me that way—I knew she would be much easier to handle than her formidable editor, who might hit me with some of the hard questions that I didn’t want to answer.

  Part of the reason that I had come into the office today, actually, was to try and give myself plenty to discuss at that meeting that had nothing to do with my past. I knew that she would still likely hit me with a few questions about it, but I was sure I would be able to deflect them and turn the piece into something more focused on what good I was doing around the town since I had arrived.

  It had been a busy morning—the end of the summer always brought about a new wave of people with ideas that they were looking to get funded, and my assistant, George, filtered them well enough that the ones who came through the door were almost entirely winners. I had approved three applications so far, sharing a few thousand each with them so that they could get their businesses off the ground. They had all promised me that I would be welcome there any time that I wanted, and I nodded and smiled as they thanked me over and over again. I was just glad that I could do something good with the money that I had.

  I couldn’t even think about where it had come from. Truthfully, most of it had risen from some solid investments I had made after I had first arrived in this town, wanting to get that cash as far away from me as possible so that the stink of stealing it wasn’t too fresh on my back. But that had turned out better than I’d expected, and I had wound up with millions.

  Since I hadn’t exactly grown up with money, I didn’t know what to do with it now that I had it. I didn’t want it. I had supported Luke for long enough now, and he was at the stage where he just wanted to take care of himself. I didn’t want to patronize him by trying to look after him now that he was a grown-ass adult, and I was happy to let him set off and do his own thing on his own terms.

  But that meant that I had a whole hell of a lot of money to get rid of, and I intended to do everything I could to get rid of it. I knew that I had already done more good in the last six years than I’d pulled off in the twenty-five years that preceded it, but that didn’t mean that the weight of it didn’t press down on me some nights. I would lie awake in bed, stare at the ceiling, and the memories would flood through me like an avalanche, crushing my chest under the weight of everything that I knew I would never be able to undo.

  Maybe it was what the universe had already decided on for me. I did bad, and then I did good. My m
other would have been proud of the man that I had managed to become. If she could have ever forgiven me for what it had taken to get to this point.

  I had one more meeting that afternoon, with a woman called Nancy—she was due in at four, but it was already a few minutes past, and there was no sign of her. Suddenly, I heard a flurry of activity outside, and then a knock at my door came and I rose to my feet to answer it.

  Sure enough, there she was, dressed in a long skirt and a blouse, her hair tossed up in a messy ponytail, with dark rings under her eyes that looked as though they had been embedded there for the last five years straight.

  “Nancy?” I greeted her, and she nodded and smiled and stretched her hand out to greet me.

  “Nice to meet you,” she blurted out. “And thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me—I know I’m running late, but I can explain—”

  “You don’t have to,” I assured her at once. “Come in, take a seat. Would you like a coffee?”

  She nodded, and I stuck my head outside to George to tell him to bring us a couple of cups. I knew that it was late in the day to have one, but I got the feeling that she was going to need all the energy she had to get through this, and I didn’t want to leave her sipping on her own.

  “So, my pitch,” she announced once she had the coffee in her hand, “is a daycare center. As you can probably tell...”

  She gestured to herself.

  “I could really use a little help making it through single motherhood,” she continued. She sounded as though she had rehearsed this. Her voice was shaking slightly, as though she was worried that she was going to fuck this up. I wanted to assure her that she had nothing to worry about, but I got the feeling that she wasn’t going to listen to me.

  “So I came up with this idea,” she explained. “Co-op daycare. All the single parents who need to use it put in as much as they can to pay the staff, and they get to leave their kids for free...”

  She explained the concept to me. It was a good one, and would be a solid way to help out the parents who were struggling to hold themselves together in between work and raising their babies. I knew it was the kind of thing that my mother would have loved to have access to when she was raising us. My father had never really been around, vanishing out of our lives when Luke was young, and she’d had to battle to make sure that we got the care that we deserved, as she tried to keep working and put food on the table for us.

  A lot of what I did here, I did for her. I saw people like her coming in every day, people who had worked hard all their lives and just needed that one little break to push them over the edge. And I was glad that I could bring that to them. I knew what these people must have been through, how desperate they must have been to ask for help, and how they likely looked at me and saw someone who had never had to struggle with the same things that they had. Sometimes, I wished that I could tell them that I understood, but I knew that most of them would never have believed me in the first place. Better to just keep my mouth shut, keeping people guessing about where I got my money from, and hope that I could change the world for the better a little longer before I ran out of cash that I could give away.

  Once she was finished pitching me her idea, Nancy sat back in her seat, clutching her coffee cup nervously as she waited for my response. I nodded at once.

  “I really like the idea,” I replied. “How much did you say for the lease, again?”

  She repeated the price to me once more, and I reached into my top drawer and pulled out my checkbook. I scribbled her out the cost, and a little more for anything else that came up and handed it across the table toward her.

  She stared down at it for a long moment, as though she wasn’t quite sure that this could be happening. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back up at me with tears brewing in her eyes.

  “This is...I don’t know what to say,” she muttered, and she quickly grabbed a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her eyes. I shook my head.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I assured her. “A business like that could really make a difference. I’m sure that you’ll show me that I made the right choice soon enough.”

  “Thank you for believing in me,” she told me, and she rose to her feet and extended her hand to mine. I shook it.

  “You won’t regret this,” she replied, and after we said our goodbyes, she headed to the door and closed it behind her, and I slumped back into my seat and stared at the spot that she had just been sitting in.

  She had been so happy. I was glad that I was able to make a difference for someone like that, I really was—sometimes, I wondered if I was tempting fate by giving away all my money like this, begging for someone to come and notice what I was doing with it and start asking some very reasonable questions about where it had all come from.

  But I couldn’t just sit around like a miser, hoarding every cent of what I had stolen, of what I had to live with for the rest of my life. I had better things to do than that. Brighter things in my future and to give to Kingston’s future than to avoid doing anything worthwhile with it. Besides, it was a joy to see the way that just a few thousand dollars here and there could change the course of the lives of the people in this town who needed it most.

  And this was going to give me even more to talk about when it came time for my interview with the Kingston Press on Friday. I knew that I might have been down to talk to someone who wouldn’t push as hard, given that she was new there and likely didn’t want to alienate me, but I was glad I would be able to walk in there with plenty to prove that I had been the best thing to happen to this town in years.

  It was hard to believe that half a decade or more had passed since the last time that I was wrapped up in the life I’d had before. Sometimes, it seemed so present I was sure that it had to be yesterday, —other times it was so distant that I doubted that I could ever have done those things at all.

  But I had. And I needed to find some way to reconcile that version of myself with the one that existed now—the one who only wanted to do good in the world, the one who wanted nothing more than to make a difference and prove that there was still good to be found here. I wanted everyone to know what kind of man I was. And that meant avoiding the memory of the man I used to be.

  Chapter Six

  Sarah

  I WAVED AS SOON AS I saw Tiff sitting at our usual table at the Rosewater—the one on the porch that allowed us to keep an eye on everyone passing by in front of us. She leapt to her feet and hurried toward me so that she could give me a big-ass hug, and I squeezed her right back. I was so glad that she was here. I knew that I was lucky to have a friend like her around at the best of times, but right now, I actually had some exciting news to share, and I intended to make the very most of it that I could.

  “It’s so good to see you!” Tiffany exclaimed as she looked me up and down like she half-expected me to have some profound and total shift in my very personhood since I had started at the new job.

  “How are you finding being the editor of the Kingston Press?” she asked me eagerly. I laughed.

  “Okay, you’re going to need to calm down there a little bit,” I warned her. “I only just started. I’m not going to be running the place anytime soon...”

  “That’s what you think,” she replied with confidence. “I think you totally will. I see how hard you’ve been working. You deserve a spot at the top.”

  “As true as that might be, I don’t want to get ahead of myself,” I protested gently. I knew that she meant well, but I didn’t want her to jinx any hope that I actually might have had of taking this where it needed to go. It might not have been much, but I had my foot in the door, and I didn’t want to do anything to mess that up.

  “Come on, let’s get some drinks and something to eat and you can tell me all about it,” she suggested with a smile, waving down the water and brushing a piece of her curly hair away from her face. She had already found her career success, of course—she was an esthetician, had been sin
ce she left high school. She’d had the same focus and drive that I did, just for a completely different field, and I had always respected how she was willing to work her ass off to get her hands on what she thought she deserved.

  Which included my nether regions for waxing, usually—she kept offering to give me a Brazilian, whatever that was, and I had kept telling her that hell would freeze over before I let her anywhere close to my lady bits.

  We got our usual selection—a combination of the appetizer platter and the cheap cocktails they did on Thursday nights—and I sipped on my Cosmo happily as I munched down on the mozzarella stick that had come with our giant platter. Normally, this thing was meant to serve four people, but we had it between us and called it nourishment for the night.

  “So how did you find your first week?” she asked me enthusiastically. She knew better than anyone just how much I had been hoping to get this job—in fact, she had been the one to keep everything crossed for me as she focused all her cosmic energies on asking the universe to give me the position that I had been working so hard for over so many years. Yeah, we might have had some different approaches to the world, but variety is the spice of life, right?

  “It actually went better than I expected,” I admitted. “I had been ready for things to be way tougher than I thought they were going to be—I thought that Allison was going to kick my ass and try to test me and everything, but she actually just seemed happy to have someone else on board who was able to keep up with the news.”

  “That’s so good!” she exclaimed happily. “You know how proud I am of you, right? Oh, I can’t wait to see your name in print for the first time... I’m going to get a copy of that paper and frame it in my treatment room.”

  “That might take some explaining,” I teased her. “But thanks for the support. I appreciate it.”