Changed

by Alicia Renee Kline

  “So are we going to put an ad in the paper or online and tag team interview people? Kind of like speed dating for a rental?” I put my elbows up on the concrete, playing with my water bottle as I waited for a straight answer.

  Lauren grinned. “Not exactly. When does your lease run out?”

  “Why?” I waited a beat and stared at her as she continued smiling at me. A different type of dread crept up my stomach now, curling itself about my innards and squeezing tightly. There were just too many things wrong with this picture. “No.”

  How could dear old Lauren, the person whose job it was to scour people’s finances and debt-to-income ratios, even consider that option? There was no way I could afford a house payment on the pittance I brought in from the bank. Perhaps she’d lost her touch during her extended maternity leave; she’d just returned to work after the beginning of the year. She was obviously still not on her game.

  She continued to smile as I continued to shake my head.

  “I don’t make near as much money as anyone else in this house.” That much was horribly, painfully, true. “I can’t spend all of my income on a place to live. Besides, I can’t commute from up here to Indy every day. You’ve said it your own damn self. And I can’t quit my job and move to Fort Wayne unemployed. That’s just stupid.”

  There was more playing behind those hazel eyes of hers and I didn’t like it. It was time to preempt that line of thought.

  “And you are not paying for everything until I get on my feet. I’m flattened on the ground - hell, I’m buried beneath it. It will take me forever to get up. And you’re not calling in a favor to George to find me something at the bank up here. And if you think for one minute that I’ll sit around and babysit Sadie all day in exchange for a roof over my head, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  For her part, Sadie, who had otherwise been asleep and quiet, squirmed in her swing and made a disgusted noise. It was probably just gas, but I tended to agree with her. Promptly after voicing her opinion, she scrunched up her chubby face and settled back into dreamland.

  Lauren elbowed Blake and in a stage whisper that I was intended to hear stated, “See, I told you how she’d react if she thought she was a charity case.”

  “That’s where I come in,” Blake piped up. I swung my attention over to her and lifted my eyebrows, a silent dare.

  Try me.

  She remained undeterred. “I’ve wanted an assistant for a while now.”

  My face contorted at the term. The thought of trailing her around, running to go get her coffee or lunch did nothing to appeal to me. If anything, it was a demotion compared to working a teller window. Anything more than minimum wage payment for what she was suggesting would also be a form of charity.

  Blake held up her hand in the universal gesture to shut up. My lips, which were poised to say something, closed silently. In the past year or so, we’d become pretty capable of being on the same wavelength. This was why it shocked me so much that she’d go along with this whole misguided plan. If it were her in my shoes, she’d react the same way. But here we were, two alpha females locked in battle across a kitchen counter.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” The fire in her blue eyes confirmed it. “Just hear me out.”

  Sufficiently scolded, I nodded and slumped on my barstool in deference.

  “I have a lot of business. More than I should probably be handling on my own. Sure, a runner would be helpful, but I really need more than that. I need someone that I can teach.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I want to teach you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.” Just when I thought she had said all she was going to on the subject, she continued. “We’ve worked together on the wedding. On Sadie’s room. We have the same tastes, the same general ideas. You give me shit about it, but you do what I tell you to. We understand each other. We get along.”

  “I know nothing about interior design. I know how to count money and that’s it. I’ve never gone to college. You have a degree.”

  She snorted, something infinitely funny about that statement. “You don’t need a degree to do what I do. But if you’re so hung up on designations, I’ll pay for you to go to school if you want to.”

  It was my turn to hold up my hand. I couldn’t believe I was entertaining her offer of employment. I damn well sure wasn’t going to accept her sinking tens of thousands of dollars into my potential higher education.

  I shrugged nonchalantly. “I hated school. I’m not about to go back.”

  Blake matched my shrug with her own equally practiced gesture. “Suit yourself. But I’m serious. I want to teach you everything I know. At first, you’ll hate it. But I can see you having your own jobs eventually.”

  I pushed down the glimmer of excitement that her words brought with them. There’d been more than once where I’d envied her self-employment. The freedom she had when it came to doing whatever she wanted. The way she carried herself with her piercings and her blue hair, like she just didn’t give a shit about what people thought of her, and they fell at her feet anyway. Working for her wouldn’t be like having a job at the buttoned up institution otherwise known as the bank.

  “Your first test will be redoing Lauren’s house.”

  Lauren looked vaguely shocked at the revelation, but she cleared her throat and said nothing.

  “What?” Blake asked, turning to her. “It’s not a bad attempt, but I could have done way better. I’m curious what Gracie would do to it.”

  “I haven’t agreed to anything,” I reminded them both.

  “It’s okay,” Lauren said, “it’s your house now anyway.”

  “I haven’t agreed to anything,” I said again.

  “I know, I know,” Lauren said, never one for confrontation. “But if you do - if you want to - it’s yours. I can rent the house to you if you’re uncomfortable, or we can do a land contract. I can have one of the lawyers I work with at the bank draw one up. You know I won’t screw you over.”

  “I’m not worried about you of all people screwing me over,” I confirmed.

  Blake grinned. “I would so totally screw you over.”

  I showed her the middle finger and turned back to my bestie, directing the words I spoke to her, but really addressing both of them. “I can’t just decide to move in twenty minutes with limited information. We haven’t talked dollar figures; I don’t know what I’m working with here.”

  “I’ll talk dollar figures,” Blake announced. Then she quoted me a salary that was easily double what I could ever hope to pull in at the bank, in a good year, with massive amounts of overtime.

  “Seriously?”

  She nodded. Her interior design business must have been kicking some major ass if she could afford to hire me at that rate. Granted, adding another employee would likely be beneficial to her bottom line, but surely she wouldn’t pay me more than she could comfortably part with, not even to be nice.

  “And you can just take over my house payments,” Lauren chimed in. “They’re not bad, easily affordable on that wage. I’m not setting out to make money on this deal. I just want to not lose money on it.”

  My fingers found their way through my hair as I contemplated things. The two of them were giving me an offer that I’d be stupid to refuse. Except one thing held me back.

  If I moved up here, there would be no Indianapolis.

  What would that mean for me and Will?

  “I don’t know,” I growled. My knee bobbed up and down against the rungs on my stool, displaying my nervous energy. “I need some time to think about it.”

  Lauren reached across the counter and placed her hand on my arm. “I understand completely.”

  Of course she did. Just a few years ago, she’d been more or less in the same boat. Her promotion into management at the bank had meant the same move from Indy to Fort Wayne. Only she’d left behind not only me, but also Eric. She’d moved up here more or less blindly - neither Blake nor Matthew we
re in the picture until she’d made her decision.

  Okay, so we weren’t in the same boat at all.

  Here I was, getting a job and a home handed to me on a silver platter. The only thing that held me back from jumping at the chance was something that I couldn’t share with either one of them. The only thing holding me back was a promise and a box of condoms with seven remaining.

  Fuck.

  Chapter Seven

  “Fuck!” I cried out as I laid my head on Doug’s kitchen table. “What in the hell am I going to do?”

  Lauren’s father observed me cautiously from his chair. Granted, I’d slid dramatically into his home with no explanation and assumed my current position. He was used to my outbursts by now; we were frequent dinner companions since his daughter had planted roots up north. I’d become his stand-in child. It wasn’t a bad thing.

  “I take it you’ve talked with Lauren and Blake,” he ventured.

  I grunted in response.

  Of course he would know about their plans for me. Something like that wasn’t a spur of the moment idea. They’d been concocting this for a while now, putting their heads together and devising their argument on why the concept was the best thing since sliced bread. Lauren had likely plotted things out during her entire maternity leave, staring into Sadie’s eyes during late night feedings and memorizing her script. Of course she’d told her dad. She told him everything.

  “Lauren was worried that you’d react like this.”

  I lifted my head and asked him the silent question: why?

  “She knows how you are about finances. She didn’t want you to think that she was doing this out of pity. Blake’s the one that came up with the idea. She’s been recruiting you for a while. Possibly since the wedding. Maybe before.”

  This brought a small smile to my face. Then I lowered my head again and slammed it gently into the wooden tabletop. Repeatedly.

  Doug’s hand reached out and touched my shoulder, halting the action before it left a mark.

  “Talk to me.”

  Though his voice was soft, his tone polite, I gave him the respect he was due. I opened and closed my mouth several times, staring at the man with the salt and pepper hair that sat across the table from me, each time making no sound.

  So he began for me.

  “You remind me of when Lauren was in this position. She had the promotion dangled in front of her nose - the one thing she’d worked so hard for - and she had a hell of a time reaching out to grab it because she knew what it meant she’d be leaving behind.”

  I snorted, despite myself. “Eric wasn’t that much of a prize. She should have run, screaming, away from him a long time before she did.”

  He shrugged. “Regardless, it was something I understood. She was hopelessly in love with him for a long time. Leaving Indianapolis meant leaving him behind. It turned out well for her, but it took some convincing.”

  “She was also worried about leaving you,” I shared, though he likely knew that already.

  “I tried to diffuse that as much as possible. It was good for her to get away. To not be tied down to my past. To this house.”

  His eyes took on a glassy look and I could tell that he was decades removed from the present day, remembering times when his wife had roamed the halls here, baby Lauren on her hip. Doug didn’t talk about Abby often; even now her death hurt too much for him to express. But as Lauren told it - and as I’d witnessed myself - he loved her as strongly today as if she’d walked out the door just that morning. He’d never leave Indianapolis, never leave that house, simply because the memory of her here was too vivid. This was the last place the three of them had been a family.

  Deep in his own reflection, he drummed his fingers on the table, absentmindedly rubbing his wedding band. It had been over a quarter of a century since the car accident had claimed her life, and he still hadn’t removed that ring. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even considered looking at another woman. Every wife should be so lucky to have a husband as devoted as him.

  “So what are you afraid of leaving behind?” he pressed. “And you best not say me.”

  We exchanged a smile. I considered making up a story, but the truth burned a hole in my stomach. I could trust Doug. I could confide in him and he wouldn’t tell a soul.

  I took a deep breath and debated. He watched me with great interest. I looked first at him, then at my nails, then at the clock on the kitchen wall, then back to him.

  “I’m sleeping with Will.”

  He wasn’t expecting that. “Will?”

  I nodded.

  “Delaney?”

  I nodded again.

  He stared at me.

  “Is it that hard to believe, Doug?”

  “No,” he said, regaining his composure. “It’s just that I hadn’t heard anything about this.”

  “I said I’m sleeping with him, not dating him. No one knows.”

  And we’re keeping it that way, I said with my eyes. Doug caught my drift and lifted his chin.

  “So how did that happen?”

  “We got drunk together one night. And then he showed up at my door on New Year’s Eve and it became a thing. We didn’t even drink that night. And we’ve sort of made arrangements for it to happen again.”

  “So what’s the big deal? Wouldn’t moving up there make it easier to do whatever it is you’re doing?”

  “The big deal is that he’s thirty-six and he has a sixteen year old daughter. So if you’re a bit slow at math, that means I’m closer to his daughter’s age than I am to his!”

  I sort of wound up into hysteria on that last part, the facts I’d contemplated in my head so often since our coupling finally out in the open. Yep, they sounded as ridiculous to me when I said them out loud as they did internally.

  Doug blinked a couple times, then cleared his throat. Just when I thought he might dispense some of his sage wisdom, he pushed his chair back and stood up.

  “Excuse me,” he said on his way out to the garage. The door closed gently behind him. Then I distinctly heard laughter. Great. My torment amused him. After a couple minutes, the sound died off and I sat there, patiently awaiting his return.

  The door swung back open and he resumed his position at the table. He folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his chair and observed. When I did nothing but return his stare, he sighed and moved the conversation forward himself. “Age is only a number.”

  “And the punch line to the funniest joke you’ve heard all day.”

  “That’s not what’s giving you pause,” he deduced correctly. “What’s the real issue?”

  “I’m cool with the friends with benefits thing,” I started in an attempt to convince myself. “I didn’t expect it to happen more than the three times it did the first night.”

  Okay, so Doug wasn’t one to judge, but his eyes did bug out a little at my confession.

  “But then the next morning he joked about how we had this whole box of condoms and we’d only used the ones we did. He told me he’d keep them as a promise that we’d use the rest eventually. I know, too much information, but I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “I thought he was full of shit. I left his house and went to the courthouse to see Blake and Chris get married. Of course he was there, too, and we pretended like nothing had happened. But something had happened. And I’d given him my phone number and he had mine. Then Christmas came and went and no word from him. I figured he’d come to his senses and realized what a stupid thing we’d done.”

  “Only you didn’t think it was stupid?”

  “Only I didn’t know what I thought it was. It was more than a hookup, because he’s like part of the inner circle, you know. He wasn’t some random guy or some dude I dated a couple of times that I’ll never have to see again. And we now have this secret.

  “And I felt bad, because really my only motive the night I went over to his place was to get drunk with him and listen to his
sob story about his divorce. He was so sad, sitting there at the bar by himself. I just wanted to make him feel better.”

  Doug smirked. “I’d say you accomplished that.”

  “Do you talk to your daughter like this?”

  “Heavens no. Matthew’s my son-in-law.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Glad you have boundaries.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Continuing on,” I said with a dramatic pause, “I was sitting at my place on New Year’s Eve when out of the blue he texts me. He sounds depressed, as much as you can in writing. So I prepare myself for a phone call, but he’s already at my apartment. He knocks on the door and he’s brought me dinner.”

  “Nice.”

  “Dinner that I had to cook for him. He’s lucky I’m more like Lauren than Blake. In that regard, at least. Then we kissed at midnight and he told me something about how he hopes the theory is true that what you do at midnight you’ll be doing a lot throughout the next year.”

  For whatever reason, my voice cracked as I said that. “And then we spent the next day like we were dating. We went to the mall together. He carried my bags. He held my hand. We went back to my place. He laid down with me and just held me.”

  “Just?”

  “Well, not just. But we cuddled afterwards. Like full on spooning, just like he held me when we fell asleep the night before.”

  “And you liked it.” A statement, not a question.

  I nodded. “He told me before he left that when I was in Fort Wayne, if it wasn’t his weekend with his daughter, we could hook up. And that he would reciprocate by coming down to Indy and there we could act like we were together.”

  “So if you get rid of Indianapolis, you’re afraid you won’t have the opportunity to act like you’re together?”

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat and nodded again.

  Doug’s hazel eyes softened and I could see him choosing his words carefully. “You really like him, don’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I hedged. “I barely know him.”

  “But you want to get to know him better?”

  “Yes. More importantly, I want to not fuck this up by conveniently moving up north and invading his space. I mean, he’s flighty already. All ‘it’s best if no one knows about this’.” For the last part I adopted a deep voice, a sorry imitation of talking like a guy. “And he flat out told me he’s still in love with his ex-wife. Even if I have the best reason in the world for moving there, I’m scared it will look desperate on my part. And that me being there will be too close for comfort and then we’re just done.”