by Sara Whitney
She maintained eye contact the whole time she spoke, not bothering with any fake contrition. When she was finished, Brandon dragged a finger across his throat, then turned and left.
Oh well. She’d made her point for the day.
By the end of her shift, she was bored. Was she supposed to spend the rest of her career locked alone in a booth? How did Skip stand it? A social creature like her shouldn’t be cooped up like this.
Her phone buzzed, and she dove for it.
Dave: Ana says u done good.
Mabel: Sorry, but you need to leave her immediately. She’s obviously lost her mind.
Dave: I also say u done good.
Mabel: Then you’ve lost your mind and she should leave YOU. Don’t worry, you can stay in my spare bedroom until the divorce is final.
She tucked the phone into her bag, feeling lighter than a moment ago. Maybe it wasn’t boredom she was feeling, but loneliness. And now she’d be headed home to an empty house. It never used to bother her, before…
Before nothing. Before nobody. This off-kilter feeling certainly wasn’t about the man who didn’t want her in his life at all. She was in a temporary weird spot, that’s all. She’d get through it.
She powered down the nonessential equipment and made sure Dave’s prerecorded voice track was set to play overnight. Then she grabbed her purse and left through a greenroom made otherworldly by the dim glow of the nighttime security lights.
Twenty-Two
Three weeks into the second stage of his life in Beaucoeur, Jake had resigned himself to the status quo. Weird how alternating work and sleep didn’t have the same appeal for him that it used to. So what if he was spending another of his Friday nights working on the Kriegsman file? It’s what he would’ve been doing in Chicago. Of course, there he’d be surrounded by the plush rugs, sleek sofas, and carefully selected architectural prints decorating his Gold Coast condo. Not that he was too good for the Formica and microsuede. Hell, everything in this apartment, including the uneven kitchen table that doubled as a desk, was miles nicer than the stuff he grew up with.
The problem was Mabel of course. She’d been in this place only once, yet he felt her absence everywhere.
He pushed back from the table with a snarl and stalked to the fridge to snag a beer. He was so fucking tired of himself. He was moping around like some kind of Howard Hughes-ian recluse when in fact his partnership was closer than ever. With an angry twist, he pulled off the cap but ended up staring into the neck of the bottle, unsure if he had the strength to even perform the simple task of bringing it to his mouth.
A pounding on his door shattered his pity party, and he braced himself to turn down yet another invitation to whatever social event Thea was jetting off to this weekend. Instead, he was shocked into silence by the sight of Milo on the doorstep with a duffel bag over his shoulder and a six-pack of beer under each arm.
“I sensed moping from all the way up in Chicago and came to make that stop.” He pushed past Jake and plunked the six-packs onto the kitchen table. He did a slow turn around the room, taking in the nondescript couch, bare walls, and tiny television, then gave a low whistle. “Love what you’ve done with the place.”
Jake ignored the insult, too flabbergasted by his buddy showing up unexpectedly in Beaucoeur.
“What the hell are you doing here? And how do you even have this address?”
“Weaseled it out of your assistant at BPS.” Milo dropped his duffel bag on the couch. “She should probably be more careful about your personal information, but I brought her a muffin and overwhelmed her with my charm.”
Milo took one look at the Budweiser bottle in Jake’s hand and groaned. “It’s worse than I thought. Here.” He pulled a bottle from one of the six-packs he’d arrived with, pried the Bud from Jake’s fingers, and replaced it with a Sliced Nectarine IPA from Moody Tongue.
The gesture blew the rest of the cobwebs out of Jake’s brain. “Thanks, man.” Moody Tongue was one of his favorite Chicago microbreweries, and Milo’s thoughtfulness was the first nice thing to happen to him today.
“You’re welcome.” His friend grabbed a beer for himself, kicked off his shoes, and stretched out on the couch. “I’m yours for the weekend, here to take your mind off whatever’s ailing you.”
“What makes you think anything’s ailing me?” God, was his bone-deep sadness sending invisible SOSs all the way to Chicago?
Milo grabbed the remote and clicked around until he found the Cubs game. “I bumped into Greg McDonald at a charity golf thing last weekend. Man, you work with some douchebags.”
“Did he look smug? I bet that fucker looked smug.” His grip tightened on his bottle as he imagined McDonald’s beady, entitled eyes.
“Dude’s got resting smug face,” Milo pointed out. “I guess he recognized me from that bachelor auction we did last winter, because he asked me if I’d heard anything from you during your ‘prison sentence down south.’ I said the last report I had was that you were doing amazing work for your fancy new media company and living the good life in Beaucoeur. But I thought I ought to come see for myself.”
Jake’s anxiety spiked, and it propelled him to take a lap around his apartment. “Good life. Yeah, something like that.” Then he shut up and picked at the edge of the IPA label with his thumbnail.
“Wait a minute.” With a rustle and a clink, Milo pushed himself into an upright position and set his beer bottle on the coffee table. He even muted the game. “I remember that tone from all those years ago. You went and caught a bad case of emotions. There’s a woman, isn’t there?”
Jake cursed softly. This was the problem with people who’d known you for years. “There’s no woman.”
“Bullshit,” Milo gleefully shot back. “You’ve been gone for a couple of weeks, and somehow Chicago’s most eligible demisexual found a girl in Beautiful Cow, and now you’re sitting around your apartment listening to love songs. I’m… Well, I’m astounded, frankly. Who is she?”
“Nope. We’re not doing this.” Jake spoke with finality designed to shut Milo down. His friend had the start of it right, but Jake didn’t have the strength to tell him that it wasn’t love songs he was listening to but Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” on repeat.
Milo raised his hands in surrender. “Fine. Shut down my supportive questions. But if you’re not gonna spill your guts, I need you to shut up. The Cubs are down by one, and I have to focus.” He clicked the sound back on and reclaimed his beer. “And I am going to use this weekend to do some research and find out all about the girl.”
Research. Jake plucked that word from Milo’s jokey threats and held it up to the light. Research. There was something there, something he could use. If he could just…
He straightened with a start as the idea materialized. “I’ve got to handle a few work things. You good here?” he asked Milo, who waved him off without tearing his eyes from the screen. Jake shut himself away in the bedroom, blocking out the announcer’s voice from the TV, and selected a number on his phone.
“Well, well, well. You’re calling me for a change.”
“Hey.” Too restless to hold still, he paced the tiny length of the room. “I need to borrow your marketing genius. Got a minute?”
“For you, brother of mine, I’ve got all the minutes,” Finn said. “Let me just put my glamorous life on hold for you.”
He snorted. “Glamorous? It’s Friday night, and your boyfriend’s next to you on the couch, reading something nonfiction, isn’t he? Oh God, please tell me that’s all you were doing.”
His sister responded with an identical snort. “Actually, yes, Tom is reading a book on macroeconomics while I’m immersed in a magazine. A trashy one. Much sexy. So glamour.”
“Well, put it down. I need your help on a research project, and knowing you, you’ll want to take notes. It’s a, uh, a personal thing.”
He heard rustling, as if she almost dropped her phone. “Personal? Like, personal personal?” He grunted, and Finn stifled a
gasp. “Jake, did you meet someone?”
His heart lurched at the delight in his sister’s voice—delight that he had to crush. “No. I mean yes. I did. But it didn’t…” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose to hold back any further words.
“Oh. Oh, I’m sorry,” Finn said softly. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Jake’s younger sister was one of the people who knew how uniquely challenging his relationship situation was. Well, she knew most of it anyway. She’d helped him through the worst of his depression after he ended things with Asha, but what she didn’t know was that the only woman since then who’d sparked similar interest was her best friend Josie. Jake had seriously considered it, thought long and hard about pursuing the flirty redhead. But in the end, the possibility that it would create friction between him and Finn, and between Finn and Josie, had been too much, so he’d turned away from that possibility even though it felt a little like he was turning away from romantic relationships forever. Until Mabel.
“Yeah, I guess I do need to talk about it,” he said.
Finn listened raptly as he sketched the broad strokes of radio-station events in Beaucoeur, his spirits plunging as he neared the end of the story. He concluded with “I don’t know that Mabel will ever forgive me, but I want to at least try to make things right for her job-wise.”
Finn was quiet for a long moment. “And my marketing genius might help with that.”
“You tell me. Will commissioning a focus group work? Have them listen to the old morning show and the new, non-Mabel one?” Everything else might be fucked up, but he could at least try to help Mabel with this.
Finn laughed softly. “Oh, my quantitative-minded brother, how it does my heart good to hear you asking about qualitative methodologies. Yes, focus groups provide rich data that could help convince the new boss in a situation like this. Assuming the show actually was better before.”
“It was. So you’ll help?”
“Of course I will, Jake.”
Her simple statement of support overwhelmed him, and he swallowed thickly. “Thanks.” He was used to feeling like he had to take care of her. How strange to be the one taken care of for a change.
“So,” Finn said briskly, tender sibling time apparently over, “I’ll type up an outline for the focus group moderator and research what local firms might be able to run it. Check your email on Monday.”
“I will. Give my best to Tom, okay?”
“Oh, I will give my best to Tom,” his baby sister purred, then hung up before Jake could groan over the wrongness of that. Actually, no. Nothing was wrong with his sister finding happiness with a guy who adored her. In truth, he envied her the joy she’d grabbed for herself.
Envy. Jealousy. Frustration. Of course those feelings hit him from time to time, but he always buried them under work and gym and good-guy Jake. He was the person who toasted his friends at their engagement parties before hopping into a cab to finish up some work at the office before going home alone, and fuck, he was tired of it.
When he wandered back out to the living room, Milo spared a glance at him before zooming back to the game. “So what are the plans for the rest of the weekend?”
Jake settled on the couch. “Work. Maybe stream a James Bond movie later. I could give you a city tour, I guess.”
Milo gave him a dramatic Roman-emperor-style thumbs-down. “I don’t want a tour. I’m talking bars. Ladies. Nightlife. You may or may not have found your person, but I’m still on the prowl.” He scratched his stomach and took another pull of his IPA. “Come on, man, what do you do for fun around here?”
“I don’t,” Jake said flatly, then reconsidered. “I guess there’s a thing with the radio station I’m down here for. They’re auditioning women at a bar tomorrow to be station ambassadors.” The words were out before he could call them back.
Milo perked right up. “Sexy station ambassadors?”
“That’s the idea, yes,” Jake reluctantly confirmed.
Milo grinned. “There’s our plan then. You’re working for the station, so you have some say in the auditions, right? And I’m obviously qualified to be an auxiliary judge. So we kick around here tonight, then tomorrow you give me the five-minute tour of whatever passes for scenery around here, we eat a solid dinner primarily composed of red meats and cheeses, and then we drink our faces off with the pretty ladies of Beautiful Cow. I like it. Who else should we call to join?”
Leave it to Milo to orchestrate a night out in a town he’d never visited before. “The only one I can think of is Robbie, the new station receptionist. I think you two’ll get along.”
“Call him. Let’s do this,” Milo commanded.
As Jake tapped out a message to Robbie, he assured himself that he wouldn’t bump into Mabel tomorrow since she’d undoubtedly be steering clear of the Brick Babe auditions. Plus he was taking concrete steps to help her, and he had the promise of a night out with friends. His weekend suddenly looked a tiny bit less bleak.
Twenty-Three
“Hello!” Mabel called out as she let herself into Dave and Ana’s house. “I’m here for the lasagna!”
“In the kitchen, Garfield!” Ana called back.
After almost a decade of spending every morning with Dave, it was weird having to schedule a dinner in order to hang out. At least Ana knew how to capital-c Cook, and spending time with their two adorable kids always made her count her blessings—her “blessings” in this case being her diaper-less, LEGO-free home.
She strolled into the kitchen, brandishing a bottle of Ana’s favorite shiraz and nearly swooned at the scent of tomatoes, garlic, and oregano. “I hope you’re prepared to feed me until I’m dead.”
“I wouldn’t have invited you if I wasn’t,” Ana said.
Her friend looked far more collected than a woman toiling away at the stove should. Not a strand of her shiny black hair was mussed, and she wasn’t covered in sauce or flour or any visual indicators of kitchen endeavors. At this point in dinner-party prep, Mabel was generally sweaty, cursing, and covered in at least five different ingredients.
“Grab a tomato and help Aiden with the salad stuff,” Ana instructed.
The drummer for the Moo Daddies looked up from where he was slicing a cucumber and cheerfully waved his knife at her. “Miss Mae. How’s tricks?”
Mabel grinned. “Well, hey, Adonis! I had no idea you were so handy in the kitchen.”
The sharp blades of Aiden’s cheekbones turned pink. “Come on, you’ve gotta stop calling me that. I will get so much shit if that catches on with the rest of the band.”
Ana looked up from where she was layering the lasagna to chide him. “Language! And Adonis, you must admit that you’re a beautiful man. Let us womenfolk gaze upon you without any backtalk.”
She and Mabel both stopped what they were doing to moonily stare at Aiden until he was red all the way to the tips of his ears and the two women couldn’t contain their laughter any longer. He shook his head and kept slicing.
“Where are Thing One and Thing Two?” Mabel asked as she started on the tomato. “I was hoping to get in a little auntie time tonight.”
Ana held out a glass of wine, which Mabel accepted.
“Dave’s putting them to bed. If we’re very lucky, they’ll sleep through the evening so we can speak as adults.”
“I work in a radio station. I’m deprived of adult talk,” Mabel said. “Tell me things about the world where actual grown-up people work.”
“My job is nothing but staff meetings these days,” Ana said. “Aiden?”
“Don’t look at me.” He shrugged. “I work with incredibly competent craftsmen, but the one thing we don’t do is have deep, meaningful conversations. Mostly we grunt about who took the ladder and what radio station to listen to for the day.”
Mabel gasped and dropped her tomato. “You don’t automatically tune to the Brick?” She and Ana hit him with a double dose of stink eye until he raised his hands to ward them off.
“When it’s my turn to pick, of course! But other dudes have musical preferences too.”
“Adonis, your father owns the construction company. You can be a little prince and demand it,” Mabel reminded him.
He pointed the knife at her. “Just for that, I’m switching over to the Top 40 station next week.”
She clasped a dramatic hand over her heart just as Dave strolled into the kitchen.
“Everybody’s asleep. If we can keep the ruckus down tonight, they all might stay that way.”
Ana greeted her man with a kiss and a bottle of beer. “You need to have a talk with Aiden. He’s not exhibiting the on-the-job loyalty to the Brick that one might hope.”
Dave took a long pull of his beer, then leaned across the counter until his face was even with Aiden’s. “Get out of my house, asshole.”
“Language!” Ana thwapped Dave on the butt with a kitchen towel.
“Hey, the kids are in bed! Let me work blue tonight.”
Ana’s stern expression dissolved as she leaned in for another kiss that left Mabel a wee bit jealous of their easy affection.
As soon as Dave’s lips left hers, Ana warned Aiden, “You’re still not off the hook.”
“It’ll be all Brick all next week, I swear,” he said. “Although it’s not the same with this one gone.” He inclined his chin in Mabel’s direction.
Look at that. She could bounce from envy to misery in a few short seconds.
“Don’t remind me,” Dave said glumly. “The Brick Babe auditions are tomorrow, and then I’m gonna be stuck with a rotating cast of bimbos.”
She’d just have to joke her way out of her dark mood. “Hmm. Kind of like Aiden’s dating history,” she mused, enjoying the return of his flushed cheeks. You’d think he’d be un-embarrassable about his sex life, but apparently not.
“Anyway,” Aiden said loudly, “Ana would you tell us more about the grown-up world of social workers so the rest of us heathens can understand what it’s like to work a respectable job with respectable people?”
