by Sara Whitney
The morning rolled on, and the calls kept coming. One woman wept as she told Mabel that she and Dave were the best, most loving couple she knew. “Oh, but we’re not…” Mabel started to explain, but the woman’s sobs drowned out her words.
“It’s all going to change!” the caller cried before hanging up.
Mabel held the receiver away from her ear to stare at it for a moment before setting it back on its cradle. “Hey. Let’s have a little fun and play some of these on the air.”
Dave’s thin lips twisted into a slow grin. “Let Brandon know that the listener reaction isn’t dying down after all?”
“Exactly,” she said primly. And they still kept it professional, selecting voicemails from callers who weren’t too angry or upset. They even played one message from a man who drawled, “Thank God. Now that dumb chick won’t hold Dave back no more.”
Mabel strapped on her Valley Girl tones immediately. “Ohmigod, dumb? That’s the nicest! Most people just call me ugly, which is, like, so obvious. But this guy noticed that I have no brains to go with my no talent, which makes him the best! Call me back and give me your number, dude. I think we should date!”
While she was speaking, Dave held up the memo and pointed to the Brick Babes paragraph, raising his eyebrows at her. She gave him the go-ahead sign and a massive eye roll.
“And bad news, guy who’s never gotten laid: I may be losing my smart, beautiful, talented partner to the afternoon show, but I’ll be joined very soon by a new feature here at 105.5: the Brick Babes. Ladies, have you ever wanted to get up close with the sweaty lumps of humanity who are your favorite deejays? Do you like the thought of free T-shirts and mingling with crowds in loud bars during public appearances? Well, do we have the opportunity for you!”
Dave ran down the pitch for women to represent the station at its public events and even join him on the morning show. And although he kept his voice upbeat, his expression was resigned. Mabel made monster faces at him the whole time.
When ten o’clock came and they finally handed the show off to Skip, they agreed that those four hours were even harder than the ones they’d done the day before.
“Best not to think of it as a countdown. Just enjoy the rest of the week.” Dave pulled her into a one-armed hug that she allowed herself to sag into.
Talking about her departure from the show for two days straight had taxed her more than she’d expected, and she was weary down to the roots of her hair despite all the sleep the night before.
Dave gave her one more squeeze and then released her. “Oh hey, would you mind reviewing some of the cuts that came in last week? Brandon wants something good for New Music Wednesday, but I’ve been super backed up.”
“Sure.” Mabel pulled back to look at him. “Everything okay?”
“Hope so, yeah. Just been busy with family doctor appointments. It should be fine.” Dave squeezed her one more time and then slid out of the room before she could ask any more questions.
Alone, Mabel shifted her weight from foot to foot in the greenroom, looking at the new furniture. Brandon hadn’t seemed completely unreasonable over the past few weeks. She nibbled on the edge of her thumbnail as she considered. Would it be possible to bargain with him? She could offer to do both shows while they found someone else for afternoons. Or they might let her stay on mornings if she took a pay cut. No, she couldn’t slash her already meager salary. Maybe she could take on even more advertising work if she stayed on mornings so Lowell would get their money’s worth out of her?
Options about what she could offer in exchange for leaving her work schedule unchanged dogged her steps as she walked down the hall toward the main office. But when she stopped in front of the closed door, she couldn’t bring herself to knock.
Begging Brandon to help her? No. Never. Her temper surged as she revisited the memory of Monday’s conference-room meeting. She’d rather die of thirst in the desert than take even one sip from Brandon’s flask.
Maybe she could talk to Jake instead.
Fuck. No, that wouldn’t work either. She shouldn’t have anything to do with him until she wasn’t torn between lunging for his eyes and licking his neck.
She’d better give it another day. Or ten.
Eighteen
“It’s not the hot girl I was hoping for, but I kind of love the bouncer vibe.” Brandon folded his arms and gave Robbie a once-over while the new receptionist answered the calls that rolled in over the noon hour on Wednesday. He’d dressed for his first day in a button-up shirt and suspenders, which upped the station’s cool quotient by a few degrees at least.
“He’ll be great,” Jake said. For all he knew, Robbie’d be a train wreck on the phones, but it felt good to take a leap of faith and give someone the benefit of the doubt. The benefit that Mabel hadn’t offered him. It wasn’t that he was angry with her. He was just bitterly disappointed at how it all turned out.
“Already better than furniture,” Robbie said after he ended the call and leaned his elbows on the reception desk that was three sizes too small for him. “That’s a low bar though.”
“Keep it up.” Brandon flashed a distracted thumbs-up. “Can you show him around? I’ve got calls.”
After Brandon was gone, Robbie shook his head in wonder. “So I work at a radio station where a BPS accountant gives tours. This is wild.”
“Radio. So wild,” Jake said flatly. “Okay, the tour leaves now.”
He guided Robbie through the various offices, warning him about the sacred pact of the On Air signs: no mortal soul dared enter the studio when they were lit. The last and most important stop was the kitchen.
“Pretty standard,” he told Robbie. “They tend to have fresh coffee going all day long since somebody’s always on the air and needing the caffeine.”
But the Brick’s newest employee wasn’t looking at him anymore; his eyes were fixed on the doorway. Somehow Jake knew who’d be there even before he turned around. Was it her perfume? Her shampoo? Her very essence, calling to something primal within him?
Fuck, he needed to get out of here. This was why he’d rented his own office.
He turned slowly, but Mabel’s eyes flicked right past him and settled on Robbie.
“Hi,” she purred. “Rumor has it you’re our new receptionist. I’m Mabel.”
She stepped into the room and extended her hand. The stab of hurt he felt at being so thoroughly dismissed vanished when Robbie’s brown eyes widened and he lurched forward and shook her hand mechanically, his enormous paw dwarfing hers. He nodded his head but didn’t return her greeting.
“Welcome aboard.” She eased her hand out of Robbie’s grip and looked at him expectantly, but the man seemed to have lost the power of speech.
The silence in the kitchen stretched interminably, and Jake was about to take over the conversation just to end the sheer awkwardness, even though Mabel was doing her best to pretend he wasn’t there, when the Brick’s newest employee suddenly found his tongue.
“I just want to say I’m your biggest fan,” he blurted, voice unnaturally loud. “I’ve been listening to you since I was in high school, ma’am.”
Mabel’s head snapped back, and her eyes narrowed fractionally. Jake watched in amazement as she stalked up to Robbie, who edged backward until he bumped against the fridge.
“Come again?” she asked, looking up, up, up into his face. She was tall; Robbie was so much taller.
Robbie had to clear his throat twice before he managed to squeak out, “I said—”
“Oh, I heard you.” She smiled wolfishly and planted a hand on her hip. “But ma’am is for grandmas and women who wear novelty holiday vests.” With her free hand, she gestured down at her short skirt and striped tank top. “Do I look like a grandma? Or a woman who wears novelty holiday vests?”
“No, ma— Uh, Mabel. You don’t.”
“Good. Good,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to lean as close to Robbie’s face as possible. “Then I’m going to make you a promise
right now: if you ever call me ma’am again, I’m going to make you regret it. And you won’t like my techniques. Or maybe you will. Let’s hope you never find out.”
Robbie gave a small, strangled moan.
“Excellent!” The seductive menace in her tone vanished, replaced by her usual chipperness. “Welcome to the station!” Without a single glance at Jake, she spun on her heel and breezed out the door.
Neither man moved or spoke for a second.
“I don’t know whether I’m frightened or turned on,” Robbie whispered.
“You and me both.”
“I need a drink.” Robbie exhaled hard.
“You and me both.”
At the end of the workday, they jumped into Robbie’s car and headed to the diviest Beaucoeur bar Jake had ever seen, a subterranean retreat next to a comedy club and a sad-looking strip joint. He gingerly seated himself next to Robbie at the long sticky bar, terrified that he might have to learn the condition of the restrooms at some point. But he needed alcohol to wipe away the memory of Mabel’s husky, sexy threats. Bad enough to be in the room when she delivered them, but worse not to be their intended target. His body had lurched to life and begged for her to whisper vague promises of retribution into his ear.
Fuck, he was a mess. “What’s on tap?” he asked the grizzled bartender, who merely shrugged and poured him a glass of yellow-gold liquid. Jake accepted it with only mild alarm, and by the third drink, the tightness in his chest had eased.
“I mean, I knew she worked there and that at some point I’d meet her, but I didn’t expect her to be so beautiful, you know?” Robbie said.
“I know. She is,” Jake agreed, possibly a little too emphatically. He stared down into his beer, hiding the misery on his face while Robbie regaled his bar buddies with the tale of Jake swooping in to rescue him from his life of furniture drudgery. By the end of the story, the assembled men were hailing Jake as a hero and insisting on buying his drinks for the rest of the night.
Things were getting blurry around the edges when Robbie returned to singing Mabel’s praises, this time with the help of a few other patrons.
“Yeah, I saw her at a broadcast they were doing at a bar last year,” the squat guy next to Robbie said.
Jesus, did everybody in this town know who Mabel was?
The guy ran his hand over his shaved dome, looking depressed at the memory. “Tried to get her to party with me, but she turned me down. Really nice about it though.”
Jake’s own memory was much sharper. “Yeah. She’s… she’s really great.” He sighed. “Her voice is so… God, it’s just so…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Robbie shot him a curious look, then gestured to the bartender for another round.
By midnight, Jake was well and truly wasted, and maudlin didn’t even begin to cover how he was feeling about his romantic entanglements in this Podunk town.
“Okay, new friend. I’ve got an Uber on the way. Time to go,” Robbie said, slinging a huge arm around Jake’s shoulder and helping him stumble up the stairs to street level. The sun had been up when they’d descended to the lower-level bar, and now Jake was seeing Beaucoeur after hours. The neighborhood was hopping, cars packing the parking lots of the nighttime establishments and clusters of people loitering outside, having a smoke.
With a pang, Jake recalled leaving the Elephant with Mabel on Saturday. He’d wanted to ravish her in the middle of the bar, long before they ever reached his Jeep. If he had, maybe they’d have had a different ending.
Fuck, he was too full of beer and regrets for thoughts like that. It had drizzled while they’d been underground, so he did his best to focus on the reflection of the stoplights glimmering on the damp street as they flipped from green to yellow to red.
Thankfully, their driver pulled up before Jake was completely overtaken by melancholy. He and Robbie tumbled into the vehicle, and fifteen minutes later arrived at the shabby little house Robbie was renting with two of his buddies.
Before he climbed out of the back, Robbie gripped Jake’s shoulder with his giant paw and, tears in his eyes, said, “Thanks for giving me a chance, buddy.” Then the man and his pompadour rolled out of the car and up the front walk.
When the driver turned to Jake, he was gripped with an unsettling realization: they’d only given the driver Robbie’s address. Worse, Jake couldn’t quite remember where he lived. He’d checked out of his hotel that morning, but he hadn’t officially moved into his new place yet, and his beer-addled brain refused to cough up the street name of his short-term rental when the driver asked for it.
“It’s, uh, big apartment thing,” Jake mumbled. “Like one hundred some units? Got trees and a parking lot? S’brick. Something with flowers.”
Jake brandished his new key at the driver, who peered at it, muttered something about drunk idiots, and pointed his vehicle north. He deposited Jake in the central courtyard of the Mayflower Apartments, which did look vaguely familiar. He thanked the man and turned in a bewildered circle, baffled as to which of the six identical buildings was home. Time for trial and error.
The metal exterior doors to each building were locked, and his new key fit the second one he tried. Once inside, he rode the elevator up to five, slumping against the wall for support and praying he was correctly remembering that his new apartment was on that floor. When the doors slid open, he stumbled into the quiet hallway and swayed left, then right.
Shiiiiit. He had no idea what number his apartment was, and the hallway stretched impossibly long in either direction. He rested his forehead against the wall next to the elevator and tried to force his useless fucking brain to think. It was probably one of the doors that didn’t have a floor mat or wreath or some personal touch. He was a sad single guy with no friends or personal connections after all. No friends, no wreath. This all felt so much worse than it did in Chicago.
Jake rolled off the wall and lurched down the hallway to examine the two undecorated doors in the hallway. They were side by side. “Convenient!” he said loudly and then shushed himself.
He groped in his pocket for his key and inserted it into the lock of the door on the right. He tried twisting it a couple of times, but the handle refused to budge.
Okay then. It must be the other one. Trial and error! But before he could pull his key out of the lock, the door swung open to reveal a woman in a short robe, wielding an irritated expression and a can of pepper spray.
“What the hell do you think you’re— Uh, Jake?”
He peered at her blearily. “Hey, I know you. Right? I know you?”
She blinked in surprise but didn’t release her hold on the pepper spray. “Thea. From the hotel. What are you doing here?”
He pointed to his keys, which were still sticking out of her lock.
“Just moved in. I think.”
Thea’s face cleared in understanding. “Oh sure. The apartment next to mine’s been empty for a while. I wondered if you might end up in that one. And wow, are you drunk. Here,” she said briskly, extracting his key and plugging it into the neighboring door. It swung open immediately. “There you go.”
She pushed him inside and stepped in after him. Jake staggered a few steps into his apartment before realizing that his luggage was still in the back of his Jeep, which was parked in the radio-station lot. Well, shit.
“Um, are you… moved in?” She looked around his bare living room in confusion, but at least she’d pocketed the paper spray.
Jake scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Yeah, s’fine. I’ve got more stuff to bring up tomorrow.”
She frowned. “But what about your bed? Is it made? Do you have towels and—”
Exhaustion suddenly enveloped him, and his limbs became too heavy to stay upright. He had to ditch this friendly stranger.
“Thanks for your help.” He pushed as much authority to the surface of his drunkenness as possible. “Got it from here.”
She looked longingly around his apartment, no doubt still wanting t
o be useful, so he stretched his mouth into a wide yawn. She took the hint and cheerfully wished him a good night before bouncing out the door, which he swiftly locked behind her.
He listed into the bedroom, where of course the mattress was bare. Then he located the bathroom, which had no toothbrush, soap, or towels waiting for him. “Goddammit!” he roared, then clapped a hand over this mouth. No need to summon more assistance from next door.
Whatever. Sleep beckoned. He located some folded bedding in a closet and grabbed the comforter, then shucked his clothes and, clad in nothing but his boxer briefs, rolled himself into a blanket burrito on the bare mattress.
He was about to drift off into an uneasy drunken sleep when he remembered what he’d been trying to forget all night. He and Mabel had been in the same room today, and she’d completely ignored him. Unless…
He groped on the floor for his phone, which was still in the pocket of his pants. No notifications. Mabel hadn’t called or texted. And why would she? He knew how furious she was with him.
That didn’t stop him from throwing his phone across the room though.
Nineteen
Thursday after the show, which was full of more announcements about the deejay shake-up and Brick Babe auditions, Mabel walked down the hall to the main office and steeled herself to bargain with That Arrogant Asshole. Acid bubbled in her stomach thanks to all the rage she was swallowing, but the inevitable ulcer would be worth it if she could just stay with Dave.
She took a deep breath and stepped inside. The office was empty. And not just empty, but unusually clean. Jake’s desk was devoid of laptop, paperwork, notes, everything.
“He’s not here.” The voice behind her made her jump, and she spun to find That Arrogant Asshole surveying her from the doorway with a blandly amused expression. “Your righteous indignation drove him away.”
