by Cora Brent
Sheila Closterman wasn’t finished. “And you may have heard Dole is working for his father now. He was just talking about you recently, wondering how you were doing these days.”
Translation: “Dole’s father gave him a pity job when the whole golf dream didn’t happen, and he hasn’t actually mentioned your name in half a decade but I’m trying to flatter you into thinking he’s still hung up on you.”
My mother butted in. “Audrey, you and Dole were so young when you were together. I bet you’d each be pleasantly surprised to see how much the other has matured.” She put a hand on Sheila’s arm. “This girl works herself to the bone and her romantic life has become absolutely nonexistent. It’s awful.”
Sheila looked me over. “But you’re so pretty, Audrey. My son would fall right over if he saw you.”
“He’s seen me,” I reminded her.
My mother pretended I hadn’t spoken. “Sheila, call me next week and we’ll plan a dinner party so the two of them can get reacquainted.”
Translation: “We totally scripted every word of this conversation ahead of time in order to give our inadequate offspring the nudge they desperately need.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea.” Sheila beamed, and I could feel her gray-eyed gaze boring into me, probably trying to assess the condition of my ovaries because Dole was an only child. Future Closterman grandchildren awaited a host.
“It does sound like a great idea,” I said with forced enthusiasm. “It would be nice to have something to look forward to after my upcoming surgery.”
My mother jumped. “Surgery?”
Sheila’s sculpted eyebrows rose. “Oh no, I hope it’s nothing serious.”
I waved a hand. “Not at all. According to my doctor, a tubal ligation is a completely routine procedure.”
The eyebrows rose straight up to her frosted hairline. “Is that so?”
“Yes, and it’s all the rage among us spinster career gals. It’s better to just remove the possibility. We sleep better—sleep around better—that way.”
My mother gripped her wineglass so hard her knuckles turned white, but I didn’t feel bad. If she was determined to view me as a disappointment, then I may as well act like one.
Meanwhile, William and the boys had returned. Isaac and Leo carried colorful Happy Meal boxes and sat down at a table.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said more politely than I felt. “Be sure to let me know when the dinner party will be. Tell Dole I’ll bring the ice bucket.”
I headed for the table where my nephews were sitting while Sheila Closterman’s confused voice rang out, “Ice bucket?”
Isaac and Leo were excited to show me the little plastic toys they had received with their meals. They looked like they might be spaceships with skinny legs. William sat down with us but then was called away from the table by my father, who kept a hand firmly on his shoulder while he made a gushing, unnecessary speech about the awesomeness of William Gordon: Judge, Father, and Best Son Who Ever Lived.
People clapped. I clapped too. William smiled and waved like a broad-shouldered benevolent king. A few of the women sighed audibly.
I’d have to be a real loser to begrudge my fabulous big brother one second of the spotlight. William really was awesome. There was no reason to be jealous. It wasn’t as if my father had never made a speech honoring me before. He had. On the night of my high school graduation twelve years ago, he stood in the same spot and tiredly thanked the guests for attending his daughter’s party on such short notice when he’d received confirmation only the day prior that I’d managed to earn the right to walk with the rest of my class. It was a touching moment, one that I chose to celebrate by liberating two bottles of Dom Perignon from the wine cellar. And instead of selfishly keeping them to myself, I shared them out in the pool house with the twenty-six-year-old pothead son of the man who owned fourteen local Dairy Queens. His name was Davey, and I might have shared a few other things with him in that pool house before I wandered back to the party drunk out of my skull and wearing only a bedsheet.
People were still applauding William and shaking his hand as if he’d just accomplished something far more remarkable than coming out of the womb thirty-five years ago, when my phone buzzed.
“What’s wrong, Auntie Audi?” Leo asked with concern, and I figured I must look a little alarming. I felt a little alarming.
But I smiled at my nephew to reassure him and said, “Nothing’s wrong.” Leo returned to his fries, and I returned to my phone. The text staring at me was from ED.
ED: Ran into CH architect at Diamondbacks game. We had a few drinks and he asked for a meeting. You need to be at jobsite 7am tomorrow.
I knew what CH was. Courthouse. But ED wasn’t short for Edward. It stood for El Diablo, which was the identifier I’d selected for Jason Roma. My prior choice had been FuckNuts, which would give me a giggle whenever I scanned through my list of contacts, but now that Jason and I were working closely together, I had to change it to something less obvious. If someone were to peer over my shoulder and see the word FuckNuts, they might assume I was unprofessional. ED was a tad more benign.
I texted back with one word.
FINE.
It irritated me to no end that Jason was already cultivating a bromance with the courthouse architect when I had yet to meet the man. I could feel him gloating through the text. But I’d worry about Jason Roma tomorrow.
“Let’s go raid that fancy cake, boys,” I said to my nephews, and took Isaac’s hand.
On our way to the cake table I briefly caught the eye of Sheila Closterman. She hastily looked away. Now that she knew I was either insane or soon to be infertile, I was a much less desirable match for Dole.
Funny how I hadn’t really thought of Dole in years, and now his name was getting thrown in my face the same week I was partnered up with Jason Roma for the biggest assignment of my working life. The reason it was funny—and by funny I mean uncomfortably ironic—was because my relationship with Dole had imploded mere weeks before I began training a new employee at Lester & Brown. I had still been raw and vulnerable when Jason entered my life six years ago. Maybe he understood that about me right away, that I was desperate to put the whole humiliating Dole Closterman mess in my rearview mirror and was therefore ripe for an illicit office fling.
Isaac couldn’t believe that the cake fondant wasn’t actually a layer of flattened clay and insisted on having every trace scraped from his slice before he would touch it. I accepted the challenge of revising my nephew’s dessert and carefully removed the offending fondant while trying not to think about how I had been seduced in my heartbroken condition.
There was a problem with that narrative, though. It was a lie.
I wasn’t heartbroken over Dole at all. From the moment I shook Jason’s hand for the first time and went weak-kneed over the sexual heat of his touch, I wanted him more than I’d ever wanted any man before.
Or since.
CHAPTER FOUR
“You hiding back here?” William wanted to know when he located me sitting on a stone bench deep in the orchard as dusk approached.
“Just thinking,” I said.
William glanced over to the table where his sons were hunched over a tablet our mother had spontaneously produced to keep them quiet. “I’ve got to get going in a little while,” he said. He rubbed the back of his neck briefly and then scowled. “The boys are supposed to be back at their mother’s place in an hour.”
My brother looked tired. The past year had been a brutal one for him, and if I could have spared him any of that pain, I would have. But William wasn’t one to air his troubles out loud. We had that in common.
“You okay?” I asked. I’d asked that before. And like before, the ghost of a frown slipped away from his face and was replaced with a smile.
“I’m doing fine, Audrey.”
I smiled back. “Just let me know before you leave. I want to make sure I get a chance to squeeze those precious boys one mo
re time.”
“Will do,” he said. He started to walk away, then gave me one more glance. “Don’t sit here all alone with your thoughts for too long.”
“I won’t,” I promised, and watched him return to the party. I was surprised my mother hadn’t come barreling over here to drag me out of the orchard yet, but perhaps after the Sheila Closterman conversation, she’d had enough of my social skills.
When I visited home my thoughts often strayed uneasily back to the ugly years when my adolescent rebellion veered off into addiction and ruin, but that wasn’t where my mind was right now. Thoughts of Jason Roma kept intruding.
Not just thoughts.
Memories.
Memories that were six years old.
Memories that were now surfacing after I’d tried so hard to keep them at bay all this time. Yet they were as vivid as if they had just happened.
My fingers were still colorfully mottled from the vending machine M&M’s I’d been eating at my desk, a post-breakup staple in my diet, when Marilyn from Human Resources stopped by my desk with a new employee who was introduced to me as “Jason Roma, the new project coordinator you’ll be training.”
I swallowed the last melted blob of chocolate that I’d been rolling on my tongue and said, “What?” in a high, surprised voice, because no one had said a word to me about training or new employees.
Marilyn immediately began to look impatient, but that might have been because she suffered from infamous bladder-control issues and needed to use the bathroom about thirty times in an eight-hour workday.
“Didn’t Frank explain to you that you’d be training a new member of the project team?”
“No. Frank’s been in Flagstaff since last week dealing with the university library delays up there.”
Marilyn shifted her weight. “Well, it’s Jason’s first day and he’ll be shadowing you all week. Jason, you’ll be in good hands with Audrey. Please stop by my office before the end of the day and I’ll issue you an employee handbook.” She’d barely uttered the final syllable before scurrying away in the direction of the restrooms and disappearing around the corner.
For a second I was too exasperated to speak. As a lowly project coordinator who had been on the job for only a year and was aiming for a promotion someday, I also had to serve as backup to the frequently forgetful managers who sometimes failed to cross their own t’s and wound up endangering million-dollar projects. And I was still in the process of consoling myself, because only a few weeks had passed since discovering my boyfriend with his tongue in another girl’s vagina.
No, this was definitely not a good week to be trailed by some dewy-eyed trainee.
But since I was aiming for an eventual promotion to project manager, I couldn’t very well refuse. I plastered a charming smile on my face and took my first good look at this Jason Roma person hovering beside my desk.
HELL-O!
He wasn’t just good-looking. Jason Roma, with his thick black hair, defined cheekbones, and CrossFit kind of body, could be classified as whatever category came after “fine.”
“It’s Audrey, right?” He raked me over with a pair of dark eyes that set my lady parts to tingling and held out a large hand that did not wear a ring. “My friends call me Jay.”
I offered my hand. “Nice to meet you, Jay.”
His large fingers curled around mine for what should have been a simple handshake, but the moment of contact did strange things to me. There was his powerful hand holding on to my dainty manicured one for a heartbeat longer than necessary. There was the instant acceleration of my pulse. There was the way I boldly checked out the size of his thumb and blushed over the recollection of an old wives’ tale. Then he released me and I noticed that my fingers were still coated in candy residue and were almost certainly gross and sticky to the touch.
I grabbed a tissue and handed it over as words tumbled out of my mouth. “God, I’m sorry. I was eating M&M’s and I was on a conference call and they were melting in my palm. They really do that, you know. And I still ate them, but now it looks like I’ve been finger painting. Would you like some hand sanitizer?”
Jason took it all in stride. He balled up the tissue in his palm and fired it into a trash can fifteen feet away without looking to see if he reached the target. He was that sure of himself. I was fascinated. And when he smiled at me, all the noise in the room vanished. A man who had the power to make entire landscapes disappear with one grin was a force to be reckoned with. And even though he was obviously young, intimidatingly good-looking, and represented a very inappropriate selection as my new coworker, I couldn’t deny that I had an instant crush on him.
Over the next few days as we worked side by side, I was surprised to learn that Jason was sharply intelligent with a cutting wit. He caught on to tasks with lightning speed and always seemed to know how to make me laugh. It didn’t seem fair to stuff so much excellence into such a perfect package. How were ordinary people supposed to concentrate when there were Jason Romas running around in the world?
And to top it off, he was a lot of fun. Since I had a corporate credit card and received HR’s blessing to have working lunches while I was training him, we hit up a different downtown restaurant every day that first week. He was a recent graduate from ASU, living with his best friend close to the university. His family used to own a local construction company, and The Man had known his father back in the day. I got the feeling things weren’t all rainbows and unicorns on the home front, because he got quiet and changed the subject when it came up. I could relate to that. My own father had demanded spontaneous Breathalyzer tests until a little over a year ago, when I finally had the resources to move out. I always submitted and never argued, though I hadn’t taken a drink since my last rehab stint, but it stung a little that he wouldn’t recognize how successfully I’d changed.
At first Jason’s questions for me mostly centered on the job, but by Friday he was getting a lot more personal. I didn’t mind at all. I’d been on my guard for far too long, and something about Jason’s humor and casual manner set me at ease.
“So, Audrey, you’ve never mentioned a boyfriend,” Jason said over plates of hummus and pita wraps. He’d already told me several times that I could call him Jay, but I couldn’t get used to the nickname. A man like this deserved more than one syllable.
I looked him in the eye. “Neither have you, Jason.”
He hadn’t mentioned romantic entanglements of any shape. I thought I saw him glancing at a few tits and asses during our lunch dates, but that might have been my paranoia. Honestly, I was half hoping at this point that I was barking up the wrong tree with my newfound infatuation.
But Jason laughed loud and hard. When he was finished, he crossed his arms over his chest and peered across the table at me. “Boyfriends have never been in the picture.”
“Girlfriends?”
“They think so.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “It means I’m into having a good time. Not really looking to slap a label on anyone’s ass.”
“That was blunt.”
“Yep.” He leaned forward and playfully tapped my hand. “So are you going to tell me if there’s a boyfriend worth mentioning?”
I sighed and told the story of Dole. How we’d been together for about nine months, practically an eternity on the Audrey Gordon Relationship Scale. But now when I thought about it, I realized that near the end we weren’t really feeling the heat anymore. Still, that didn’t mean Dole was free to go shoving his patrician nose into the first willing crotch that came along.
“So you caught him?” Jason asked.
“In flagrante delicto.”
“That sucks.”
“Yes, it does.”
“’Cause if I was planning to go down on a girl at a party, you’d be my first choice, Audrey.”
I dropped the pieces of pita bread I’d been tearing up as I talked about my asshole ex. Jason took a casual sip of his water.
&nb
sp; I must have heard him wrong. I had to have heard him wrong.
“What do you think about that?” he asked.
I thought I might like to shove my panties down, stand on the table, and swallow Jason’s absurdly handsome face between my thighs.
“Um, I’m not sure.” I picked up a new slice of pita bread and began savagely shredding it.
“What can I do to make you sure?” His deep voice was velvet and butter—all things sinful and delicious.
I was having a whole lot of trouble sitting still. “You can tell me what you want.”
He chuckled. “That would be a hell of a filthy conversation to have here among the lunch-hour crowd.”
I looked him in the eye. “Then let’s have it later, Jason.”
He nodded with approval. “Later works.”
“I have my own apartment, no roommate.”
“Good.”
I felt drunk, reckless, irresponsible. The way I used to be. The way I’d stopped being some time ago. “I should tell you that, while there’s no official policy, I get the feeling the company frowns upon romantic connections between coworkers.”
Jason’s sexy grin practically melted my panties. “Then we won’t brag about it.”
That evening Jason knocked on my apartment door, and I’m not overstating when I say we screwed each other’s brains out. Jason was a year younger than me, but someone—or multiple someones—had given him a hell of an education. There was no boundary he shied away from pushing, nothing he didn’t want to try. I didn’t kid myself that we were having some great affair. I knew it was just sex. I knew it would end sooner rather than later.
Helen from the accounting department was the only friendship I’d developed in the year I’d been working at Lester & Brown. And even though I’d told her all the dirty details of Dole, I told her nothing about Jason, not even when she went fishing.
“So the new boy seems like he’s fitting in real well,” she said over lunch plates of Thai food.
“Is he?” I asked, struggling to keep a straight face as I poured an excessive amount of soy sauce over my food and tried not to think about all the exotic ways Jason had been “fitting in” to my body lately. I had the delightfully sore muscles to prove it. But I wouldn’t admit it to Helen. Or to anyone.
