All Through the Night

by Mixed authors

  “I’m fine,” she said, but her shaky voice didn’t seem to fool him. It probably wouldn’t have fooled anyone.

  “Here, I brought this for you.”

  Her tenant made a quick, awkward presentation of a can of soup. Chicken noodle, Kerry realized by the label. She could remember her grandmother fixing that for lunch on rainy days, along with grilled cheese sandwiches.

  “Soup, Malcolm?” Kerry didn’t know quite what to say.

  “Sometimes I wonder if you get enough to eat,” he confessed.

  Touched, she opened the door enough for him to step inside. “Thank you,” she said as she took the can.

  Malcolm had brought little offerings on other occasions, and Kerry hadn’t had the heart to tell him not to. She sensed that he wanted to help, and Lord knew, she could use some. Today, however, his other arm was tucked behind his back, making her wonder if he had another surprise in store.

  She didn’t ask. He seemed preoccupied.

  “Santa just mugged someone,” he said.

  “Oh, Malcolm”—Kerry shook her head—“stop that now.”

  “No, it’s true, one of the nuns from Our Lady of Perpetual Weeping. He knocked her down and took her fanny pack.”

  Kerry might have laughed if Malcolm hadn’t seemed so perfectly serious. She didn’t know what Santa he was talking about, unless it was one of the Salvation Army volunteers on the corner down the block. None of them had ever gone haywire that she knew of, but anything was possible.

  “Might as well live in Bosnia,” Malcolm muttered.

  “No kidding,” Kerry agreed. If anyone knew how bad it was, she did. The second time she’d been mugged a crowd had collected to watch as if it were a sporting match, and no one had lifted a finger to help her. She’d implored them to call the police, but they’d done nothing except scurry away. That’s when the fear had set in. She’d recognized one of them as her own next-door neighbor!

  “Kerry, why do you stay?” Malcolm asked.

  Kerry didn’t have a ready answer, except that she loved the place. The town house had a storybook charm about it that had always made her feel safe and secure, at least while she was inside. The breakfast nook walls were hung with sayings done in her grandmother’s hand-stitched embroidery, as was the upholstery in the living room and the cushions on the window seat.

  Nothing had been safe from Gramma Laura’s needle except Grandpa Dan’s buttery-soft, old leather rocker. No one was allowed to touch that chair, even to drape a doily over the headrest, which her grandmother had tried on a few occasions. It was where he’d rocked Kerry endlessly, telling her stories about how wishes always came true if you wished hard enough. And Kerry had probably believed him once, impressionable child that she was.

  This was how she kept her grandparents’ memories alive, she realized, by staying. But she couldn’t tell Malcolm that.

  “I’ll have noodle soup for lunch today,” she assured him. It was the kindest way she could think of to get him to leave. And she did need him to leave. He meant well, but he could get spookier than she was, if that was possible.

  “Oh, sure, good,” he said, seeming to get her drift.

  He turned toward the door, and Kerry saw the bouquet of tulips he’d been hiding behind his back. They were bright spring colors, pink and deep rose reds, sunny yellows and oranges. It wasn’t a bouquet, it was a rainbow.

  “Tulips, Malcolm? Where did you find tulips in the middle of winter?”

  Apparently her tenant had forgotten all about the flowers because his shoulders lifted in surprise. “The tulip store?”

  Kerry did laugh at that, and when Malcolm turned around, his blue eyes were twinkling like stars. She accepted the flowers and thanked him warmly, but for the first time since Kerry had rented him the room, she wondered about her new tenant. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if it was possible that Malcolm was hiding something other than a bouquet of tulips.

  She didn’t ask.

  Kerry’s cordless phone had become the enemy. It sat on the enormous tower of mail-order catalogs that she’d been collecting since she started working out of her house, and it had begun to ring shortly after Malcolm left. She could have broken a Guinness record with the tower, she imagined. Kerry Houston, Catalog Queen. But that was beside the point.

  Her ringing phone was the point. She knew exactly who was calling, which was why she hadn’t answered. She’d finally had the sense to turn down the volume, but that hadn’t turned off the emotion churning inside her.

  One look at the Caller ID number had told her it was starting all over again. The Genesis Software people would not give up! Genesis was the company she’d left three months ago, under the most embarrassing of circumstances, but their human resources person kept calling and insisting that she come back. He’d offered her everything under the sun, including more money, big money. She’d actually bundled up today with the thought of going over there to negotiate a new employment contract, that’s how much damn money it was.

  The man had tempted her, and she’d almost succumbed. But in point of fact, there wasn’t a salary big enough to pay for the humiliation she’d been through at Genesis. Even if she could get out her front door, she would never go back there.

  She peeled off her hat and the parka, along with several layers of clothing, and piled it all in the leather rocker that sat next to the catalog tower. The weather wasn’t the only reason she’d bundled up. The bulk was meant to make a very average, five-feet four-inch woman look less vulnerable. If the local toughs thought she was an undersized hockey player, all the better.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the software company’s number with purpose and resolve. She didn’t know the man who’d been calling as anything other than Phil in Human Resources, but she was ready for him when he came on the line. She didn’t even bother to introduce herself. He had to know her voice by now.

  “I want you to stop calling me, Phil. I’m not coming back and I never will.”

  “I’ve never called you Phil… and did you intend that to rhyme?”

  Kerry smiled despite herself. Lucky for him that she had smiled or he might have gotten another verbal one-two. It also worked in his favor that he had a great voice. He was no Mr. Quick-Where’s-My-Vibrator, but his conversational tones were low and masculine and sort of steamy, like a pot on simmer. That might even be the reason she’d allowed him to call as often as he had. Yes, she rather liked Phil’s voice. It shivered up a person’s neck like warm air currents. Nevertheless, she had to be firm with him now.

  “I’m quite serious,” she told him. “I have no desire to work in design anymore. I’m perfectly happy as a game tester, and if you call me again, I’ll be forced to report it as harassment.”

  “Hey, hey, no one’s harassing anyone here. If you don’t want me to call again, I won’t. But could you answer one question? Why are you so adamant? Do you feel as if you were treated unfairly here? Was anyone unprofessional or improper?”

  She was treated like yesterday’s news, trashed by the boss himself, but it was a highly personal situation and she wasn’t going to discuss it with a veritable stranger.

  “There’s improper and there’s improper, Phil. One’s about wearing hoop earrings and a leather micro-mini to church. The other’s about acting boorishly without a thought to the pain you cause others. I’ll let you figure out which is which.”

  With that, and an icy-bright best wishes for the holidays, she pressed the OFF button and considered herself well rid of the pest and his simmering pot of a voice.

  Joe Gamble’s telephone headset was calibrated to pick up noises as faint as normal respiration. People breathed and he could hear them. Unfortunately. Because right now he had a dial tone trying to buzz-saw a hole through his head. Kerry Houston had just cut him off at the kneecaps, and he was probably lucky it wasn’t higher. She hadn’t let him get in one more word, much less the last one.

  Damn, it annoyed him when that happened.

  It an
noyed Phil, too. Technically Philip was his middle name, but since she refused to talk to Joe Gamble, and most everyone else at Genesis, he’d had to resort to the subterfuge. He snapped off the headset and draped it over his halogen arc lamp. Apparently there were still a few people who could not be bought, and she was one of them. He admired her for that, but how was he going to get her back if not with filthy lucre?

  The game he’d been uploading suddenly flashed onto his computer screen, distracting him. An array of multiple-choice questions appeared against a background of pink cupids, pouty red lip imprints and silhouetted females of the supermodel variety. It was pretty garish, plus the music playing through the speakers sounded suspiciously like the “Love Boat” theme.

  “Preferred breast size?” Joe read aloud.

  It wasn’t the first question that came up, but it was the first one to catch his eye. A set of multiple-choice answers followed: (a) plums, (b) peaches, (c) Texas grapefruit or (d) honeydew.

  “What?” Joe remarked dryly, “no seedless watermelon?”

  He clicked on the FEEDBACK icon, and then RECORD. “The fruit references aren’t going to fly,” he said, leaving a message for the game’s architects. “I don’t want to ruin the fun, but is it possible for you pervs in design to think in terms of small, average, full… something like that?”

  Joe was evaluating a Genesis product in the design stages with a working title of “Build Her and She Will Come.” The idea of the game was to let men visualize and create their ideal mate from head to toe, including her physical characteristics, but globular fruit was certain to offend a key demographic who might buy it for their brothers or male friends, namely women. And the title was certain to offend everyone.

  He clicked on “Peaches,” just for evaluation purposes, of course. Honeydew was excessive, plums were vaguely prepubescent and grapefruit had never been a big favorite. Made his teeth hurt.

  An animated cupid thanked him for his answer, and then pointed his little pink arrow to the next question: “Preferred leg length?”

  This one had a flower theme. The design team was having way too much fun, Joe thought, as he read the choices under his breath. “(a) Long-stemmed American Beauties, (b) daffodils, (c) daisies or (d) Christmas cacti.”

  Joe figured the last one must either be a nod to the season or a woman who didn’t shave her legs. He clicked the first one. Okay, so he liked long stems. That didn’t make him a pervert, too, did it?

  On the right side of the screen was a computer matrix outline of a woman, who was materializing as he made his choices. The woman didn’t concern him as much as the cupid, flying around her in a presentational way, pointing to each body part that appeared.

  “Fellas? Lose the fruit, the flowers and cupid.”

  Joe scrolled back to the questions he’d skipped over and settled in to finish the game. By now he was curious what this arrangement of X-rated body parts was going to look like when it was finished. Maybe that was a plus. Once you got the woman started, you had to finish her.

  Oops, he thought with a faint smile. Better not go there, either. The game was booby-trapped with double entendres.

  Joe’s office was also his own personal think tank and where he did most of his creative work when he wasn’t traveling on business. The walls were lined with traditional cherry bookcases that groaned with the weight of his varied interests and his research, and he worked at a desk, like everyone else. But most everything in his office was computerized, digitalized and automated. He could open the skylight and look up at the starry sky by speaking to it—the skylight, not the sky. He didn’t have a lock on Mother Nature yet, but technology, that he took to its limits… because he could.

  By the time he’d finished the questions, he was glued to the screen, but not because the game was that good. It was the challenge of making it better that absorbed him. Probably more than it should, considering the state of his personal affairs. What affairs? to be exact. His office overlooked a green belt, planted with Japanese cedars, and there was the equivalent of a winter wonderland right outside his window, but he rarely took the time to look at it, much less experience it. There didn’t seem to be any way to unglue himself from whatever the current project was.

  A wall panel opened behind him, revealing an office-sized refrigerator and microwave. Joe glanced at his watch, only mildly interested in the lunch reminder. He’d programmed the panel to open at twelve-thirty because he had a bad habit of forgetting to eat.

  It was curiosity more than hunger that made him open the refrigerator today. The pizza caught his eye, but he picked up the container of East Indian tandoori instead and popped it in the microwave. It was spicy as hell, which almost let him overlook the fact that it was low-fat and “good for him,” according to his assistant.

  Moments later he walked to the window with his steaming food, still in its microwaveable container. But it was the wonderland outside that had finally caught his attention. For some reason he was reminded of the Godzilla-like snowmen he’d made when he was a kid growing up on the family farm. He’d even gone on great treks into the woods to find a tree on Christmas Eve because his parents were too poor to afford one. What had happened to that kid?

  To say that Joe Gamble worked too much was an understatement. He could have taken an Olympic gold in working. He just wasn’t sure why. His married friends had suggested that he was avoiding something, which was a nice way of saying he was a commitment phobe, but how could he be when there’d been no relationships to be phobic about? He’d been married once, almost on a dare, while he was in college. It was a crazy, impulsive thing that happened mostly because her wealthy parents were determined to split them up, and it only lasted a year before his bride decided her doting father was right. Joe didn’t have enough money to make her happy. That experience had left him gun-shy, especially now that he did have money, pots of it.

  He’d dated over the years, but none of the relationships would have been considered long term. No smart woman wanted to play second fiddle to a man’s creative obsessions, and, sadly, the women he’d met had never challenged or absorbed him the way a new idea did. Work had always been enough, but that was changing now. Something was missing. He was restless and unfulfilled, and stranger yet, the only thing that seemed to intrigue him at the moment was a woman. Kerry Houston had sparked his interest like nothing else had in a long time, and he had a hunch it was because she was as good at this idea stuff as he was. Maybe better.

  A heaping forkful of tandoori got him some rice, raisins and a savory chunk of chicken and sauce. He ate slowly, reflecting.

  He’d debated the wisdom of telling Kerry who he really was, but he’d learned over the years that his presence had an inhibiting effect on even the best and the brightest. It was one of the reasons he’d stopped sitting in on the various creative teams’ brainstorming sessions and started videotaping them instead, with the members’ knowledge, of course. That was how he’d first discovered Kerry Houston, watching her interact on tape as a new designer on one of the teams. He’d immediately given a bonus to the human resources person who hired her, a guy whose name wasn’t Phil.

  Kerry was inspired, and watching her had inspired him. He loved the way she brainstormed. She was quietly intent at first, offering feedback only when she had something cogent to say. But it soon became apparent that she absorbed the collective energy like a sponge, because when she pitched an idea, she was as quick and kinetic as lightning.

  Those eyes were like bolts from the sky. And, God, that attracted him. He would never have described her as a hot number. You couldn’t even call her sexy in the way men normally thought of those things. But that fire.

  At some point an idea would drive her right out of her conference chair, and every head would swing her way, riveted. They might be a little envious of her passion, but they couldn’t take their eyes off her. Her color was high and her voice took on heat as she raced to get the flow of thoughts out as swiftly as they came to her. Even her body
showed signs of arousal when she got that excited… and so had Joe showed some signs, although that had nothing to do with why he was trying to get her back. She was his best person. She kicked butt.

  Joe finished off the tandoori and left the container on his desk as he went back to his chair. He’d actually had hopes that Kerry would revitalize his entire design division, and then one day she was gone. She excused herself from a strategy session to take a potty break and never came back. She’d never explained her exit, either, although he’d learned later what happened, and he’d blamed himself. He’d had his people track her down, offering career amnesty, and making increasingly generous offers to get her back, but she’d said no to everything, including him.

  He rarely attended company functions, and he’d only met her in person one time. It was a few months after she’d started, and there’d been a meeting in which he’d congratulated her on something. He couldn’t even remember what it was now, he’d been so intrigued with the idea of meeting her face to face. He’d expected to see sparks fly when they shook hands. Instead it was an internal reaction, and the sparks were icy hot. His gut would probably never be the same. Most guys would have known that this was the beginning of something incredible. Joe knew it was the end. He had no idea if Kerry felt the same way, but he made a strategic decision to back off the very next day. She was much too valuable to mess with, in any sense of the word.

  Joe came out of his preoccupation with Kerry Houston to the frustrating awareness that he’d recreated her on the screen in front of him. The gaze wasn’t fiery enough, but it was none other behind the impish smile. Apparently she was determined to annoy him in every possible way. She wasn’t even that cute, with her mousy brown hair and the mole near her lip that matched her intensely dark eyes. He’d been going for Cindy Crawford, anyway.

  Still, he continued to stare at the image until his body reminded him of the power a woman could have over a man, even when all the poor sucker had was a cartoon characterization of her. There was a tug of anticipation deep in his groin, and various muscles were yanking at the bit. He couldn’t tell if he was angry or aroused, but one was as good as the other for his purposes.