Waiting for a Star to Fall

by Kerry Clare

  And Brooke agreed—but also she didn’t. She really did want to get to the next thing, and kept waiting for chance encounters, a secret tryst in the photocopier room when no one else was looking. But Derek was using the utmost discretion, refusing to be tempted by her tight sweater and her pencil skirt, and he was adamant that none of this would be cheap and tawdry. They had to get through the week, he said, until the bill was read, and then he’d be able to turn his attention to this fully. “Tomorrow night,” he promised, a week after his confession and their kiss. He’d stopped by her desk, when no one was around, and said that finally he was ready to confront this. “I’d love to take you out for dinner.” She had plans with friends, but those could be canceled. She’d already blown them off the week before because of work things, so they practically expected it now.

  She said, “Sounds good,” and tried not to seem too eager, too needy. She’d always been the levelheaded one, and she didn’t want to give that up, her single advantage.

  He wanted to pick her up at her place, but it wouldn’t have looked right, and her roommates would ask questions. So instead they met at a restaurant after work—he’d come straight from meetings. It was a place not far from the office, a café with super-attentive waitstaff and fuchsia wallpaper with a flamingo print. Derek had secured a booth with lots of privacy, and ordered oysters and a bottle of wine that cost a third of Brooke’s rent. “It’s a special occasion,” he told her. “Finally.”

  “It’s been quite a week,” she said.

  “Oh, I know it,” he said. “Everything. Work, and the bill. Us.”

  “Us.”

  “So I’ve decided,” he said, “that instead of just being an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s doing, I’m going to pretend that I do.”

  “You’re not really convincing me,” said Brooke.

  “I’ve been thinking about it all week,” he said. “Everything. Kissing you. And thinking about where we go from here.” He would be as methodical about this as he was about everything that mattered to him.

  Which meant that she’d have to take over managing this project or they’d never get anywhere, because romance wasn’t policy. She said, “Well, I have some ideas.”

  * * *

  —

  They didn’t even finish the wine, skipped dessert—the oysters were filling enough. They were in a hurry to get where they were going, which was back to Derek’s condo, where she’d been many times before.

  They’d been kissing in the cab, in the elevator, against the wall in the hallway, and now here they were. His hands were under her shirt. He said, “I’ve thought about this so many times.”

  “This week.”

  He said, “This week, and always. I don’t remember when I didn’t—” He pulled away from her and looked at her. “You’re amazing, you know that? I’ve always thought that. And now you’re here.”

  But they had been together like this before, that other time, in his basement in the summer.

  He said, “I was clueless then. I’m sorry. I knew we needed to get here, but I didn’t know the way. Plus, there was Trevor.” Brooke’s boyfriend, who’d worked in their office as a data analyst, but he’d left and moved to China to teach English to kindergarteners, so there was a Trevor no longer, and neither she nor Derek was drunk, or at least they hadn’t been when they’d started this evening, and some of that wine had been left in the bottle. Sitting on the edge of his bed, they were both clearheaded, which was important, but it made things difficult too. She lay her phone down on the bedside table, and imagined it could belong there. Then she started unbuttoning his shirt.

  He said, “Slow. I mean.” The ridges on his chest, an unknown topography.

  She was nervous about it too, because she didn’t know what to expect.

  And now his comment had alarmed her. “Does it hurt?” she asked. The scars. She didn’t know. He’d pushed her hands away.

  He said, “No. I just.” He moved to turn the light out, but she held him back.

  “But I want to see,” she said.

  He said, “You really don’t.” Grimacing as she unfastened the rest of his buttons, which certainly dampened the mood, but she didn’t stop, because she didn’t want him to think he had anything to hide. The way he always did, about his scars, which was so unlike him because he was open about everything else, the stories he told about the pain that didn’t show, and how it powered the work that he did. But the scars from the fire were different. He had a giant hot tub at his place up north, but he never went in it. He’d dated a woman who ran a water-ski school, but Derek wouldn’t even jump in the lake.

  “It’s awful,” he said to her now.

  “It’s not,” Brooke promised him. It wasn’t. She’d shaken off her own shirt, and he unfastened her bra, and she put her arms around him, their skin pressed together. She moved down to kiss his shoulders, his chest, and then she felt his body seize, like this was torture. She returned to his face then, his lips, this kissing. Running her hands down his back, his skin like no other skin she’d felt before. Pink and scarred, those ridges, still looking raw, although it had been that way for so many years. The skin he had. A body’s ability to repair itself comes with limits, and Derek knew these, even after years of painful surgeries. And Brooke thought about that boy in the hospital, how young and unformed he’d been, and the ways in which the accident had made him. An unscarred Derek Murdoch would have been somebody else altogether.

  She said, “I love your skin. I love your scars. I love your body, all of it.” They’d moved to his bed, and he was kissing her chest, her nipple in his mouth, and then the other.

  He said, “Your body is incredible.”

  And she said, “I love you,” by accident, and kept talking so instead the sentence she’d uttered was “I love your body.” Again. Also true, and less embarrassing. Pulling off the rest of his clothes, and taking him in her mouth—the way he moaned. As though she hadn’t known Derek Murdoch until this very moment of sheer vulnerability, and it was laid bare now. He was gorgeous, and sweet, and he touched her body with his characteristic care and consideration.

  Derek in his life never did a single thing halfway, and so it was incredible and magical what happened between them, but her very favorite part was waking up beside him in the morning.

  Thursday Afternoon

  Recalling that feeling of closeness and satiety that first morning they spent together only underlined the hollowness of the moment now as Brooke sat alone in a basement watching Derek on TV, her whole life in pieces around her—and now his life was broken too. If she had known then what was in store for them, would she still have let any of it happen? Could she have dared to laugh him off that night at the bar with the Coke when he took her hand, and then gone—alone—on her merry way? A thing to entertain, this notion that any other destiny was possible, that she could have fought what was coming, but she knew it was ridiculous. Even now, after all that she’d learned, she was still invested in what was going to happen to them, and waiting for the twist before the end, the part where everything between them—this impossible dream—would somewhere turn out okay.

  From the start, she had imagined that intimacy with Derek—finally moving past the image and persona to see his skin, to touch and taste it—would clarify things. She’d had this feeling that maybe sex would be the key to understanding him properly, Derek at his most essential, and finally she would be able to hold together all the other disparate impressions of him at once. But it only made things more difficult, because once she’d glimpsed this side of him that so few others got to see, it only compounded her sense that none of it was real.

  He was an incredible performer—all the speeches, the rallies, the parties he’d hosted on evenings when he was thoroughly exhausted. The way he led them all in the party, in the office—authority was a performance too. And when they were together, just the two of them, la
te nights together in his bed after hours of working, and the pleasure and release he received from her body, from both of them together—it was so convincing…but then it all was. And Brooke wondered again what he thought about when he was alone, if Derek had much of an inner life at all, because she had rarely seen a glimpse of it.

  On TV that morning he’d been more composed, as though he had some control of the narrative again, and she hoped this was true. She hoped that this interview would overwrite his performance at the press conference and that maybe all this really would blow over. Girls in their forties, though. That had been a slip. And wasn’t true, as far as she could recall. Maybe he’d dated someone twenty years ago who was in her forties now?

  Her phone rang—actually rang, an unfamiliar sound, as she barely knew her own ringtone—disturbing the silence and making her jump. An unknown number—who was calling her? It was a question she didn’t even think to ask, because she knew. It would be him. Finally. Derek wasn’t one for phone calls usually, even though he was old enough to be, but then he wasn’t one for emotional performances on breakfast television either, so all things were possible. She’d just seen him on TV, as close as they’d been in weeks, and it made sense that he’d be thinking of her too.

  But it was someone else, a woman’s voice, not Nicole. “Is this Brooke Ellis?” she asked, and Brooke wanted to answer, “Who’s asking?” but her first instinct, as always, was not to be rude.

  “You’re a hard one to track down,” the woman said. “But I got your number from a friend of yours. Diamond? Found her in a local Facebook group.” Goddamn Jacqui Whynacht.

  “I won’t take more than a minute of your time,” the woman said. “My name is Shondra Decker, and I’m a reporter with the Daily Observer. I think you’ve been getting my emails?”

  Brooke said, “What’s this about?”

  Shondra Decker said, “I wanted to talk to you about Derek Murdoch. I understand you worked for him.”

  “We worked together, yes.”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions, in the context of the allegations against him now. About the workplace environment, if you had experiences of harassment, anything inappropriate. That kind of thing.”

  Brooke said, “I don’t have anything to say to you.” And she should have just hung up there, but she hadn’t been brought up that way. At that moment, she was ruing her mother’s lessons.

  Shondra Decker was saying, “Nothing? Because my understanding is that the two of you had a particularly close relationship.” What kind of an understanding, exactly? “And I just feel like you might have a unique perspective on this story, a way to round the whole thing out. Add a bit of, I don’t know, some nuance.”

  “Nuance.” Brooke shouldn’t have answered the phone. She didn’t know where the woman was going with this, if it was leading to the most obvious destination, the sorry details of her personal life origamied into tabloid fodder. Brooke had survived everything Derek had thrown at her so far, but she did not want to have to face this. How could he have abandoned her here?

  The reporter said, “I would love to give you the opportunity to comment. Tell us your side of the story in your own words. Your voice would really matter here.” She was right about that. Brooke knew things about Derek that nobody else did, and this story was not as straightforward as the press was presenting it. Perhaps the one benefit to no longer being on the inside was that Brooke was finally free to say what she wanted—and if she said it, maybe the reporter would leave her alone.

  But it would have to be simple. Brooke knew how a person’s words could be twisted, and she didn’t want to make things any worse than they already were. She told Shondra Decker, “Derek was never anything but a gentleman to me. He’s one of the good guys. He’s one of the best guys.”

  “But can you elaborate on your relationship?” the reporter asked.

  Brooke said, “I have no further comment.” She’d already said enough, more than enough. She had to cut the conversation off before she really got in trouble, so she ended the call, the reporter still in mid-sentence, even though Shondra’s voice was the only one she’d heard all day that wasn’t being broadcast from a television studio. And this sad state of affairs was why when her mother, who was possibly psychic, shortly afterwards sent a text commanding Brooke’s appearance at home for lunch, she replied with OK! As short on excuses as on food in the fridge, and she had to escape that apartment, her loneliness, because there are only so many hours a person can spend underground observing passing feet. She too wanted to be part of the movement, the momentum. And now she had a destination, and there was something restorative about that, a reason to get dressed and brush her teeth, her hair. Locking the door behind her when she left, she rose to the over-ground. But of course, the world was very quiet, because it was a Thursday and the middle of the day. Everyone else had already arrived at where they needed to be.

  The walk home was uphill, streets Brooke had known her whole life, and she avoided the direct route that would have taken her through downtown, past her father’s restaurant and Slappin’ Nellie’s, where the vomit on the sidewalk from the night before was probably right now being rinsed off with a bucket of soapy water. She kept to the residential streets, some of them without even sidewalks, because extravehicular activities around here were always considered a bit suspect. If there were any neighbors home, they were probably all peering at her through their curtains now—but it seemed like everyone was out.

  Her parents’ house was quiet too, one car in the driveway and just an oil stain where her dad would park his car when he got home. Brooke climbed the steps to the door and hesitated for a moment, unsure of her jurisdiction. It had been this way since she’d moved back to town. Knocking didn’t seem right, but just opening the door like this was her place and she lived here was too familiar when it felt so strange.

  Luckily, she didn’t have to decide either way, because the door flew open and her mother appeared. She had been looking for Brooke out the window. She was recently retired from her job at the high school, and the days were long for her now too. “What are you waiting for?” she asked, before enveloping her in a hug. “Brookie Cookie,” she said, employing an old childhood nickname, and holding her daughter close far longer than was natural, underlining Brooke’s certainty that her mother was worrying about her in a way that made Brooke feel guilty for the trouble. Her mother said, “I made soup.”

  Which is what she did, Brooke’s mother, for all occasions, from head colds to Thanksgiving. She could conjure a soup out of anything, and today it was tomatoes and basil, the final harvest from her garden. She’d made grilled cheese sandwiches to go alongside, and they sat down together in the breakfast nook, which as a child Brooke had pretended was her office. When she was little, Brooke dreamed of growing up to be Melanie Griffith from Working Girl—which her mom still had on VHS—and now she didn’t even have her own desk.

  Her mother said, “Eat.” And she didn’t ask anything else so Brooke was able to eat, and the food was good, the cheese in the sandwiches so perfectly melted that it all held together. She needed to get around to learning how to cook, Brooke considered. When does that happen anyway? When do all these important life lessons begin to kick in?

  Her mother said, “You watched it, then?” Of course she wanted to talk about the interview, the situation in general. And she wouldn’t know what to say, exactly, or what she was really asking of Brooke. Brooke knew her mother had been waiting for months for her to explain what had happened at Derek’s office, setting up all kinds of soup-adjacent opportunities for her to do so, but how could Brooke explain when even she didn’t understand? Plus, it was embarrassing. What her mother really wanted was to be told that everything was okay, that her daughter was perfectly fine, and that Derek was the same honorable person they’d been supposing him to be. Both Brooke and her mother would have liked to go on believing that this was true, but maybe
they’d finally reached a turning point. Her mother said, “I think it’s over for him. I watched that interview, and it was all I could think about, those accusations.”

  “The accusations are ridiculous,” Brooke reminded her.

  Her mom said, “It doesn’t matter. And you know what they say about smoke and fire.”

  “I don’t know why they say it,” Brooke told her. “It’s not even a good metaphor. Where there’s fire, there’s smoke, it’s true, but it’s not always the case the other way around.”

  “I don’t know if the metaphors are the problem,” said her mom. She was sitting at the table with her hands together before her, leaning forward avidly. Her mother said, “How are you? And not just with Derek, and everything. I mean you.” As though the two weren’t impossibly intertwined. Symbiosis. Except symbiosis went both ways, and that wasn’t always the case here. It was possible that entire days went by and Derek didn’t think of her at all. “Your dad and I, we’re worried about you,” her mom continued.

  “Not helpful,” Brooke said. Pushing her plate away even though she wasn’t finished eating. This conversation put her on guard.

  “But we want to help,” said her mom. “With you so close now, back home, we can. So why not? I don’t know what you’re trying to prove here.”

  “That I’m capable of taking care of myself?”

  She said, “But you don’t have to.”