by Steve Richer
And in some ways that was even worse than anything physical. It was untouchable. Irreproachable.
It wasn’t fair.
All of this.
The accusations. The blindness she had to what he did for her, and to his own on-going struggles.
He loved her. So damn much.
And he feared that even that might not be enough.
It was maybe a minute or two later that he sensed more than saw a figure in the darkness.
Libbie. Doing her thing of hanging back, unsure whether to intrude or not. Somewhere between stalker and the model of diplomacy, he thought.
“Hey,” he said, acknowledging her presence so she no longer had to make that choice.
“Hey. Fighting again?”
She knew when to talk straight, too.
“You heard.” Not a question. Their voices had been raised, only a floor separating them from Libbie’s space. “Sorry if we disturbed you. We’re not usually this way.”
“You’ve said that before.” A pause, then: “So has Alice.”
How many times had they fought recently? Probably more times in the last month than in all the time they’d been together. Even when things had gotten really bad inside Tom’s head, he and Alice had mostly remained solid, rarely erupting into full-blown argument.
“Yeah, well… There are a lot of strains at the moment. At work.”
“You don’t have to make excuses for her.”
He paused, peering through the gloom at their tenant. She wasn’t usually so forthright in her assessments.
“I’m not making excuses—”
“It’s okay.”
How had she come to be standing so close all of a sudden?
Close enough to put a hand on his chest. Her touch was both soothing and invigorating at the same time.
“You want to talk? Come down to the apartment, Tom. Have a drink. Try to let some of it go. I’m a good listener.” Her hand still rested lightly on his breastbone. “I’m good at providing comfort.”
Did she mean what he thought…?
“I’m fine.”
“I can tell.”
Her hand, still on his chest.
He reached up to remove it, but instead his hand simply came to rest on hers, feeling the cold smoothness of her skin. Pressing it harder against him rather than removing it.
His throat felt dry. His heart far too loud.
Her hand moved now, but instead of pulling away he felt the bones and tendons shifting as her grip closed on a bunch of his shirt.
“Sometimes you just need distraction, Tom.”
Pulling him closer, until he felt her breath warm on his face.
It would be so easy to kiss her.
He knew the feel of those lips already. Her kiss, in greeting or parting, her lips soft on his cheek. That brief intimacy.
It was only a small leap to imagine how those lips would feel against his own.
Distraction…
So easy.
She was stretching up toward him now, so that he felt some of her weight being taken on his shirt, where she gripped it so tight.
Why not? Alice already thought the worst of him. Was continually disappointed in him. Thought he would stoop so low as to screw their sixteen-year-old neighbor. Why not just confirm her expectations? Seek comfort. Distraction.
Libbie’s lips against his were soft, just as he remembered them. Slightly parted.
The contact was tender, almost gossamer-light at first, and then—
He jerked back. So abruptly that he pulled her with him as she still clung to his shirt. They staggered, him taking a step back, her stumbling forward against him so that he suddenly, briefly had her in his arms. He felt the way her soft curves fit against him, molded to his shape.
Briefly, he knew what it was to hold her.
Then she righted herself, straightened, staggered back, and released his shirt.
“I… I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! I don’t… I don’t know what…”
“It’s okay. It’s fine.” It wasn’t. But that’s what you say when you’re the good guy who only cares what other people think.
Even when you’re the good guy who’d just come so close to crossing a line that could never be uncrossed.
Not even crossing it for good reasons, if there could ever be a good reason. Not crossing it for desire or passion or love, but crossing it for what? Revenge? Some pathetic impulse to self-destruct?
“It’s fine.”
Say it often enough and maybe you’ll believe it.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked. “I really didn’t mean to… I got carried away. Lost all perspective.”
“I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“I am.”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
They’d run out of bland, meaningless things to say, and so now simply stood facing each other in the gloom.
Tom turned, went around the corner of the house to where she’d parked, but then realized she was gone.
He didn’t know what to do. It was only early evening, although the darkness made it feel later. And here he was, a grown man standing in his own yard, scared to go back inside his own house and nowhere else to go.
What a mess.
What an unremitting, goddamn mess.
Chapter 25
Alice got in the car and drove.
When Tom had stormed out, the house had felt so incredibly large and empty without him, in complete contrast to how claustrophobic it had felt moments before when he was still there.
She couldn’t bear to be there alone.
When she got in the car she didn’t have a plan in mind, but now she decided she would head to the office. It was long enough after normal office hours that it was unlikely anyone would still be there. Maybe she’d find that peace and quiet she’d sought and failed to find at home. Even if she only managed an hour working on refining the pitch that would be more productive than the rest of her day.
Traffic was slow as she hit downtown. Everyone else finishing for the day. Heading for home. Happy families. Relaxation.
She leaned forward and thumbed the stereo, flipping through the stations before turning it off again.
Nothing was going to please her right now.
Least of all Tom.
Had she been harsh with him? Maybe. She was aware she’d let loose tensions that had been building up for some time now. All in one mad rush. No wonder he’d looked so shocked!
And she couldn’t help thinking that if those tensions had been brewing for so long, that wasn’t exactly the healthiest of signs.
Had she even been right to stick with him last year? A clean break then might have been far simpler. She’d been close at the time. Close to just walking away. But you can’t walk away from a sick, broken man. Particularly one you love.
She couldn’t believe she was even thinking like this.
Thinking almost wistfully of the life she might have had if she’d washed her hands of him back then.
She’d have gotten through the pain, come out the other side. She’d be healed by now, moving on. Instead, she was fighting the same old battles. The jealousy. The insecurities. The erratic, thoughtless behavior.
She couldn’t believe he’d gone to Marissa’s house, even if it was entirely innocent. Most likely it was innocent. He’d hardly have admitted that’s where he was if he’d been up to anything, would he?
She didn’t know what to think.
It seemed that everywhere she turned something was going wrong in her life. Work. Home. The renovation at Whitetail Lane. Rusty and Marissa.
And it seemed her relationship with Tom was at the heart of it all. If not the source of all the problems then, sadly, it didn’t seem to be part of any of the answers either.
Had she finally stopped loving Tom?
Asking that question was bad enough, but not having the answer broke her heart.
~ ~ ~ ~
; Michael Tuckett was just emerging from Pierson Newport when Alice pulled up in her parking space. He saw her immediately, and for a moment almost looked as if he was going to blank her and turn away to his own car.
Instead, he stopped. Waited.
The look on his jowly face was like a storm waiting to break.
Alice couldn’t look him in the eye. Instead, she fixed her gaze on his thick, tangled eyebrows.
“Alice.”
“Mr. Tuckett.” Not on first name terms yet. Maybe not ever.
“Ruth’s made a time for us to sit down tomorrow. I didn’t know your vanishing act would be over today.”
You have a meeting or a consult with Tuckett when things are going well. A sit down sounded ominous.
“I’m taking it off you, Alice. Mapleview. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have pushed you into it. You’re not ready.”
She felt sick. She felt blackness creeping into the edges of her vision.
“Sir?”
“I’ve briefed Jilly and Lloyd on taking it over already. They have access to all the documents.”
Lloyd was the company golden boy. It had been a close thing between Alice and Lloyd for getting Mapleview the first time around.
And Jilly. Michael Tuckett’s daughter.
“Mr. Tuckett, I’ve been home all day working on the pitch. Will you at least look at what I’ve done? I think we’re close to having a final proposition to put forward. I’ve worked so hard on this!”
“I think we’re close too, Alice. And Lloyd and Jilly will be putting it forward. We need to win this one. And when we do, the entire company will benefit. It’ll be a team effort and your work won’t be overlooked.”
Gold-plate it all you like, but Alice still knew grade A bullshit when she heard it.
It wasn’t a team effort. She was being swept aside. She’d done most of the work but she wouldn’t get any credit, or any of the rewards. She certainly wouldn’t get VP. She’d be lucky to still be working at Pierson Newport by the end of the month.
This was a cutthroat business and Michael Tuckett had just wielded the knife.
“I’m sorry, Alice, but sometimes the hardest decisions have to be taken. It’s not easy.”
“You have to make the right choices for the business,” she said. She even managed a flicker of a smile. She couldn’t afford to burn this bridge completely. It was all she had.
“Get your head down, Alice. Regroup. Come back fighting. That’s the Pierson Newport way!”
“I will, sir.”
“Good night, Alice.”
“Sir.”
She watched him walk away.
She almost went back to her car, then, but instead, keyed her way into the building and headed for her office.
She would show him.
She hadn’t been lying when she’d said the pitch was close to completion. She’d done a lot of work on it, and once she’d reincorporated the missing elements she could show it to him, force him to at least give it a glance.
Regroup. Come back fighting.
Oh yes! Just bring it on, Mr. Tuckett. Bring it on.
There was only one other person still in the office. As she entered the open-plan area, Alice saw the familiar screen glow coming from Walter’s side-office.
She went over to stand in his doorway.
“Waiting for everyone else to go away, before it’s time to play?” she asked.
She knew he was sensitive about his hobby. People could be cruel. She felt honored that she was just about the only person who could get away with teasing him, because he knew there was nothing mean behind her words.
He looked up now, his face lit by the screen. Smiled. “You know me so well.”
“I didn’t want to disturb you, but I sure could use some of that whiskey you keep in your desk right now.”
“Whiskey? What whiskey?”
She said nothing, just fixed him with a raised-eyebrows look.
“Oh swell,” he said. “And here I was thinking that was my little secret.”
He reached down to the second drawer and produced a bottle and two plastic cups.
“It’s not single malt,” he said.
“I don’t care if it’s discount turpentine right now.”
“That bad?”
He poured two good measures, then topped up the first and handed it over.
She nodded. “Michael Tuckett’s just told me I’m as good as fired.”
Walter’s mouth fell open.
“He’s taken Mapleview off me. Given it to golden boy and his little baby.”
“Lloyd and Jilly? Terrific. That’s just so damn… terrific.”
“I was surprised my keycard even worked to let me into the building, or that my name’s still on my office door. Not for long, I’m sure.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to nod and smile and hope things work out, is what I’m going to do. And in the meantime I’m going to carry on finishing off my pitch in the hope he can be convinced to reconsider. I don’t have anything else.”
“I wish I had some good advice. Or even bad advice. Anything.”
“You can tell me where you got that screen-name from.”
Walter looked surprised for a moment, then laughed. He’d never told her any more than that it was a cool thing among gamers to have just the right avatar name. She still remembered his embarrassment when she’d walked in on him at that office party and found out the guilty secret that he spent his spare time playing games on the company’s high-speed network.
“It’s what I was called at school,” he said. “It was cruel then. A bullying thing. I reclaimed it, made it my own.”
She’d worked that much out already. “What was it? Some kind of ironic superhero name? SwelterificJones?”
“Nothing as glamorous as that. I was never the most articulate kid. I struggled to find the right things to say. So when I had to respond to something quickly I’d say something like swell, or terrific. Add my surname, and there you have it. Swell-Terrific-Jones.”
She smiled. She should have known it would be something simple like that. Now that he mentioned it, even now he said swell and terrific a lot more than most people.
“That’s… terrific,” she said.
“Swell.”
They each took a long sip of their drinks. She was only vaguely concerned that the alcohol would mess with her blood sugar levels. She had bigger problems tonight.
“This whole thing’s pretty damn swell right now, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “You’ll turn it round. Remember, you’re the superstar. You’ve got this.”
“It sure feels that way.”
Now she remembered them standing like this in her own office a couple of days before, positions reversed: her at the desk and Walter at the door. “You remember saying you’d do a bit of digging into our perfect tenant for me?” she asked him. “I don’t suppose…?”
She wanted a distraction. But if she thought she might get some kind of reassurance that at least one area of her life was not descending into turmoil, she was sadly mistaken.
She knew something was up as soon as she’d asked the question. A cloud passed over Walter’s features.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’d been meaning to talk to you about that, but… well, you’ve been busy, and then today you went home before we got the chance to talk.”
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing, I’m sure. I just haven’t dug deep enough yet, or in the right places.”
She knew that wasn’t true. Walter knew where to dig. And he was good.
“And?”
“I can’t really find anything of any substance about her. That in itself is odd. Everyone has a big and usually very messy digital footprint these days. Everyone leaves an online trail. Usually the problem is that there’s too much to wade through, not too little. But I can’t find a work history for her, or a school history.”
“I can’t find drunken vacation snapshots, or embarrassing video clips friends have posted on social media. She has a Facebook profile, but it’s only the bare bones of one. The privacy on her social media profiles is tight, but even when you sidestep that there’s not really anything to see.”
Walter was tapping at the keyboard as he spoke, as if he was going to show Alice something, but then he let his hands fall.
He continued, “There really is nothing to show. It’s weird. It feels manufactured, like those fake profiles you hear about. You said she’s a photographer?”
Alice nodded.
“So where’s her online portfolio? There’s nothing at Smugmug, 500px, Zenfolio or any other places you might expect. She has minimal presences on Flickr and Instagram, but if you look at the images, well… it’s hard to pin down, but they don’t feel right. Too generic. The pictures don’t feel like they were all taken by the same photographer, if that makes sense?”
“What about school? She went to NYU.”
“That’s what she told you. Interactive Media and Technology. But that program is only available at NYU Abu Dhabi. Has she ever mentioned living and studying abroad? Why go all that way to study something she could have studied stateside at a different university? It hardly seems likely, does it? And that campus only opened for real in 2010. How old is she? Early thirties? Wouldn’t she have been studying for her degree before then? It doesn’t add up.”
“So what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It could be as simple as you’ve misremembered her school, or the precise title of her degree program. It could mean she has some strange family reason to have done her degree late and in a distant country. It could be that she’s a very private individual and she uses all the tricks she learned in her degree to protect her social media presence from prying eyes like mine.”
“Or it could mean she’s lying.”
“Have you heard of Occam’s Razor?”
She had. It was a rule that stated, simply, that when faced with more than one explanation, the simplest explanation was always the most likely one.
And according to Occam’s Razor, Libbie Burchett had been lying from the very start.
