by kc dyer
The front doors are open, just as they were that early morning, another lifetime ago, when I entered to persuade Teresa Cipher to give me the job. I run straight through and into an open elevator. Inside, I hit the number for the fortieth floor, and then button-mash it at least a dozen times before the doors finally close. For an elevator in an empty building, it takes an eternity to climb to the top. But when the doors open on the fortieth floor, the office inside is not only dark, but totally deserted.
I leap out anyway. “I’m back, and I’m in time,” I yell, but my voice is swallowed by the empty office space.
Down the hall, the clock in Teresa Cipher’s office begins to chime. After everything I’ve been through, this? Is a total anticlimax. No one is even here to witness my arrival.
On Powell’s desk in front of me, a large-screen monitor flickers into life. There’s no sound, but on it I see a room filled with people. Everyone is holding up what look like glasses of champagne. Teresa stands in front of the throng with her assistant, who hands her a fluted glass. A large form blocks the frame for a moment, but as he steps away from the camera, there’s no doubt who it is.
Dominic.
So. He made it first, after all.
On the screen, everyone, including Dom, raises their glasses toward the camera.
I slump back against the elevator doors, feeling completely defeated. Behind me, the doors slide open, and I lurch backwards in the elevator and trip over my own suitcase.
This is the final indignity. The doors close, and I don’t have the strength to do anything but lie there on the floor.
To tell you the truth, it’s a relief to put my feet up.
* * *
—
After a minute, the elevator lurches into movement, and I pull myself to my feet. It’s not until I’m standing that I realize it’s going up instead of down.
“Oh, that’s not spooky at all,” I mutter, shivering a little. This endless day is finally catching up to me. At the sight of my tangled hair in the elevator mirror, I yank up my hood and turn back to face the doors. As they slide open, I smack the lobby button, and the doors begin to close again.
Suddenly a large, perfectly manicured hand reaches inside. The doors bounce back and Teresa is standing outside, looking a little shocked.
“I think perhaps I shouldn’t have used that arm,” she says, rubbing it. Using her body to block open the elevator doors instead, she ushers me out into a cheering crowd.
* * *
—
This penthouse office is essentially a glass room, and the view is, as once promised by Teresa’s assistant, breathtaking. Somehow, the view serves to drive home my loss even more strongly, and I have to take a deep breath to stop myself from sobbing. I’ve never taken acting lessons, but there’s no way I’m willing to show my disappointment in front of all these people.
Who the hell are all these people?
Feeling completely gobsmacked, I turn to look back at Teresa, who is not looking at me at all, but at someone behind me.
It’s Dom, of course. Before I can say a word, his mouth is on mine, and his arms are around me, his fingers caught up in my hair.
Literally caught up. My hair hasn’t been brushed since sometime in Saskatchewan.
“You made it!” he says when he finally releases me long enough to breathe. He scoops a pair of champagne glasses off a passing server’s tray and holds one out to me.
I drain it in one gulp.
“What the actual hell, Dom?” I explode. It’s taken me a minute to recover my mental faculties after that kiss and remember why I’m mad at him. “Why didn’t you answer my messages?”
He stares at me. “I did. I said I’d meet you here, and—here I am.”
He holds out his arms, including the one attached to me, as evidence.
“You didn’t! I haven’t heard a thing since you disappeared from the train. I thought you’d dumped me.”
“Dumped you? Are you crazy? I left you a note. And I answered all your texts and e-mails as soon as I could get my phone charged up again.”
Suddenly, the memory that I’ve been using his phone cord since I left mine on the ski bus returns to me.
“That’s no excuse,” I mutter. “You can get another phone cord anywhere.”
“I did,” he says patiently. “But my mom’s in the hospital. As soon as I found out how she was doing, one of the nurses charged it up for me.”
I swallow hard. That was an excuse, and a good one too. “Your mom’s in the hospital? Is she okay?”
He nods and sips his champagne. “Yeah, thank God. But it was meningitis, and when Teresa texted me, things were looking really bad.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “I sent you all the details this afternoon, as soon as I could. Check your phone, you’ll see.”
I shake my head. “My phone didn’t make it across the Niagara River,” I say, adding, “Long story,” at his puzzled look.
Instead of telling it, I paste on a smile, and clink his glass with my empty one. “Congratulations. I’m so happy for you.”
“Me too. It’s a huge relief to find out she’s okay,” he replies, and kisses me again.
I do not kiss back, and his face is puzzled as he pulls away.
“You do know I took a commercial flight, right?”
“You—what? When?”
“To get here. This morning, at the crack of dawn. I took a commercial flight, and Teresa knew all about it. I tried to meet you at the train station, but . . .”
A voice comes from behind me. “I knew all about what?”
It’s Teresa, who is wearing a long bandage dress in carnelian red, and four-inch matching stilettos.
“My flight,” Dom says.
Teresa waves a hand dismissively. “Oh, that—of course. I’m just glad your mother is going to be fine. Look—Powell’s got the tape cued up, finally. She’s going to play it again.”
She steps back, and points upward. On the wall above the elevators is another CCTV screen, identical to the one on Powell’s desk. I watch myself, in crystal-clear black-and-white, racing into the ExLibris offices. Someone freezes the image when I have one foot in the air, and zooms in on the wall clock, visible in the background. The minute hand is frozen at two minutes to midnight.
A cheer rises up around us again.
“You made it,” Dominic repeats, like he’s talking to a small, slow child. “This is all for you.”
“Who are all these people?” I hiss, and this time he laughs.
“Your new coworkers,” he says. “Turns out ExLibris is a pretty large company.”
He leans down to kiss me again, and I’m feeling so slack-jawed by the situation that I barely remember to kiss him back.
But somehow? I manage it.
When we break apart at last, Teresa is beaming at me, and beside her for some inexplicable reason, stands Frank Venal. He looks exactly the same as he did the day I first met him, right down to the orange spray tan and the open topcoat. Minus the cigar, I realize.
“Congratulations,” says Teresa. “And welcome to ExLibris.” She hands me a check made out in my name for $10,000. “Your bonus.”
I manage to stammer something resembling a thank-you, and then immediately turn and hand the check to Frank Venal. My loathing for the man is, for the moment at least, replaced by a wild sense of relief. My uncles are out of danger. The bookshop is safe.
I grab another champagne flute and drain it to cut the pain of holding so much money for so short a time.
Venal’s blank expression shifts into a furtive grin as he folds the check in half. He reaches for his inside pocket, but before he can tuck it away, Teresa Cipher plucks it out of his fingers.
“Oh, Frankie,” she says disapprovingly. “You know that’s not in the cards.”
“Frankie?
” I mutter, looking up at Dom, who laughs out loud as Venal stomps off.
“Good one,” he says, and Teresa gives a tiny bow before returning the check to me and floating away.
Staring from her retreating back to Dom, I open my mouth with the first of approximately a million questions, when the crowd of revelers parts, and Sumaya appears. She finishes stuffing an appetizer into her mouth, wipes her hands on a napkin, and then throws herself into my arms.
“What the . . . ? How?” I give up trying to speak coherently, and concentrate on hugging her back fiercely.
“Nkruna’s here too,” she says as her aunt steps through the throng. “And if you’re done with all the kissing, Terri said she’ll give me the mic for a five-minute set.”
Auntie Nkruna, dressed in a robe and matching head wrap patterned in vivid blues and greens, rolls her eyes.
“I keep trying to interest her in hair, or even esthetics,” she says with a shrug. “But it’s always with the jokes, this one.” Turning to Sumaya, she says: “Five minutes only, young lady. It’s long past your bedtime.”
Later when a second tall, beautiful black woman comes up, it takes me a minute to realize it’s Jersey.
“What are you doing here?” I hiss in her ear, as she kisses me.
She shrugs. “Handed in my dissertation, and I needed to see this in person. A friendship can’t exist on Instagram posts alone.” She flashes me her wide, beautiful smile, and I’m so happy to see her, I do a total Sumaya and throw myself into her arms.
“That man of yours is fine,” she whispers, when I finally release my grip. “Where have you been hiding him?” She narrows her eyes. “Oh, I get it—he’s the Javier Bardem in your little Eat Pray Love scenario, right?”
I can’t even muster a rebuttal.
Instead, I pull a fresh champagne glass off the tray, and watch Dom laughing with Nkruna and Sumaya. “He is fine,” I mutter. “But . . .”
“No, you’re right,” says Jersey, contemplatively talking right over me. “He’s definitely more of a young Khal Drogo than a Javier. Nothing wrong with that.”
Nothing wrong with that, at all.
Sometime later, after Sumaya—wearing her Bowie t-shirt—has brought down the house, I manage to corner Teresa on her own for a moment. She tells me that after Frank Venal’s run-in with Merv, he’d stomped into ExLibris to demand an explanation. Instead, Teresa Cipher, who knew Venal through her poker club, goaded him into a little wager over the outcome. At stake?
Ownership of a bookshop.
chapter sixty-five
Still no phone
New York City, May 1
Strangely grateful
I wake up in my own bed for the first time at five, to the outline of a very naked man silhouetted against the blinds.
“Are you bolting?” I croak. “Because . . .”
I never get to finish this thought, because his lips are on mine, and—it’s distracting.
“Not a chance,” he whispers. “You’re stuck with me now. It’s just—my interior clock is all screwed up. I was thinking about checking in with my mom. She’s due to leave the hospital this morning.”
I sit up in bed before I remember I, too, am naked. I make a quick grab for the covers, but Dom is faster than I am. He pulls them back down and then slides over to sit on them.
“Don’t worry about the bedclothes,” he says, his fingertips tracing a line along my ribs. “It’s pitch dark in here. I can’t see a thing.”
His fingers continue their journey, pausing to rest lightly at the base of my throat.
“You’re so warm,” he murmurs, and I can feel my heartbeat speed up under his touch.
“Didn’t you say you were going over to the hosp . . .” I begin, before his lips find mine again. Pretty unerring aim for someone who claims he can’t see a thing, is all I’m saying.
“I was. I am. Just not quite yet,” he mutters, and then makes an entirely convincing case for a departure delay.
* * *
—
I wake up the next time to find Rhianna curled up on my stomach. When I stretch, she kneads the covers with her claws, eyes tightly closed.
“Tommy thought you were lost, girlie,” I whisper, and she rubs her chops along my finger. “But you were waiting for me here, right?”
“Uh . . .” says a voice from across the room. “You’re only half right, actually.”
I look up to see a freshly showered man standing in my doorway, smelling of the fragrant, but unlikely, combination of mint shampoo and bacon.
He is disappointingly fully clothed.
“I made breakfast,” he says. “Even though it’s now officially afternoon.”
Rolling over, I check the clock sitting on the stack of books that has been my temporary nightstand for the past two years. It reads 12:01.
“Why only half right?”
Dominic winces a little. “You might want breakfast before you look inside your sock drawer.”
What I want, before anything, is the bathroom. As soon as I sit up, Rhianna bolts off the bed. I climb over my suitcase and slip inside the bathroom door. Once the essentials are out of the way, I peer into the mirror while I brush my teeth. New Romy is grinning like a fool back at me, looking happier than I can ever remember, at least during a morning toothbrushing. My hair is piled in a rusty, chaotic mass on my head, and I’m wearing a Grateful Dead t-shirt I’ve never before laid eyes on, at least three sizes too large.
It smells of cinnamon and vanilla—that is to say, of Dominic. I may never take it off.
Tossing my toothbrush, I pull on a pair of yoga pants, in case breakfast turns out to be a formal affair. When I open the bathroom door, Dominic is standing beside my tiny stove with a cup of tea in his hand.
“First things first,” he says, and holds it out to me.
I think I may have to marry this man. But I have a few questions first.
Things I learn before looking in my sock drawer:
1. Dominic has never heard of ghosting, and claims to be insulted that I even considered the possibility he had dumped me. Counterpoint: He made breakfast, which I read as a conciliatory gesture.
2. I have never eaten French toast this good before.
3. Dominic and Teresa had a chat at the party, and she offered him a job overseeing the ExLibris adventure-travel cookbook division. He accepted on the spot.
4. She also connected him with another member of her poker club, a lawyer with a specialty in immigration law.
5. When Teresa registered her wager against Frank Venal with her Hong Kong bookie, he opened the betting up to the public. Which means that I actually did see my name in lights in Hong Kong. And which also means I owe my giant bump in social media followers more to illicit gambling than to my skill as a photographer. I’m pretty sure they’ll all dump me, now that the race is over. No regrets.
6. Most of what I learned at the party last night has vanished from my head. I remember meeting a few ExLibris employees who all seemed nice, and something about Teresa having quit smoking.
7. I’m going to need to spend some of my bonus money on new socks.
When Dom leaves to go see his mother, I gently pull out my sock drawer and carefully carry it down the stairs.
Merv is beyond delighted to have Rhianna back, but Tommy takes one look into the drawer, screams “Kittens!” and bursts into tears.
My return didn’t elicit half this emotion, is all I’m saying.
I head upstairs to dump and sort the gross laundry out of my suitcase—and, to be clear, it’s all gross laundry—to upload the contents of my photo file onto my backup drive, and to deliberately not strip my bed. Like the t-shirt, the pillow case still smells of him, and I’m not ready to give that up.
I do make my bed, though. I mean, change doesn’t always have to be rad
ical, right? One step at a time.
Just as I finish my bed, the bell on the front door tings. Tommy and Merv are still celebrating the arrival of Rhianna’s new family, so I thunder down the stairs and into the shop.
Inside, Teresa is standing with Dominic, who’s carrying a bag that smells suspiciously like cookies. He looks bright-eyed and not at all like a man who was engaged in an energy-intensive workout at five this morning. I can feel heat rising up my neck at the memory, and find I can no longer meet his eye. Instead, I focus on Teresa. She has changed her red sheath of the night before for a one-piece ski suit, which looks, I have to admit, slightly incongruous on the first of May. She’s got red sunglasses propped on her head, and she’s holding an empty cigarette holder in one hand.
Some habits die harder than others, I think. One step at a time, even for Teresa.
She beams at me, and as I introduce Tommy and Merv, the bell tinkles behind us, and the front door opens.
“Darling!” cries Teresa, and before I know it, she’s greeting Frank Venal with a kiss on each cheek. Frank, also, seems too-warmly dressed for the balmy day, in a bright blue puffy jacket over pinstriped suit trousers. He gives Teresa a sheepish smile, then firmly—and proprietorially—links his arm through hers.
There are no customers in the store, so once the introductions are done, our little group stands for a moment in awkward silence.
Teresa, who has been glancing around the store with an appreciative smile on her face, clears her throat. “We felt—Frank and I—that it was important to make this exchange formally, which is why we’ve asked you all to gather here this afternoon,” she says.
Beside her, Frank rolls up on his toes, all evidence of his previous mobster-like demeanor completely absent.
Teresa glances down at him fondly. “Frankie, dear?” she says, after a pause.
“Oh—right, right,” splutters Venal, and jams a hand into his inside pocket. “I believe this belongs to you, my dear,” he says, and passes Teresa an envelope.
