Waiting for a Star to Fall

by Kerry Clare

  He said, “Don’t be like that.” They’d been together for almost six months now, and the tension was becoming harder to ignore. Brooke was mostly content to just go with the flow, but it made her uneasy how afraid he seemed of their relationship becoming a spectacle. What did it mean if the worst thing Derek could imagine was people finding out that they were together?

  But most of the time, things between them were very good, which is why these spats never went on for long. Because all Derek had to do was get into bed with her, all sweaty and gross, his towel falling on the floor—and this was something, because Derek’s condo was pristine. He was a neat freak.

  He would say, “What can I possibly do to show you?”

  She’d tell him, “Well, there is that.”

  And while they might not come into the office with their arms around each other, and she still sauntered in in her own good time, she’d get to spend the day with the satisfaction of knowing she was the reason he’d been forty minutes late.

  * * *

  —

  Brooke was well versed in workplace romance, the only kind she’d ever known since coming of age, so she was accustomed to some awkwardness, the tension, and she knew not to bring her personal issues into the office. None of it was that difficult to navigate, and frankly she didn’t know how anyone found time for a relationship with a person they didn’t see between the hours of nine and five, especially since the day usually stretched much longer than that. She would never have seen Derek at all if she didn’t get to be with him at work.

  Which wasn’t to say that things were always straightforward—when the summer intern reported her crush on Derek, Brooke had to keep a straight face, and then even smile kindly. Afterwards, she filled Derek in on the details with a tip that he should probably be careful. And Brooke could see how the intern might have gotten the wrong idea about Derek, because he was a funny, charming guy, the consummate politician who had a talent for making you feel like the most important person in the room, and women who aren’t generally subject to that kind of attention from a man can interpret it as potentially romantic.

  “Do you trust him?” Carly had asked Brooke at the very beginning, when she was still getting the lay of the land.

  “Of course I do,” said Brooke, and she also knew how foolish she sounded, how naïve. She remembered that first summer with Miranda, and also Kelly and Eliza, and all the summers that came after. But if she didn’t trust Derek, she wouldn’t have been with him—she hoped that Carly could give her enough credit for that. And understand that she wanted Derek more than she wanted to spend her time clinically examining all the flaws in her judgment. Not everything had to be logical.

  So she had to sit back and watch Derek do his thing, creating these wrong impressions, having most of the women he encountered entertain the notion that he might be in love with them, because this was how a politician gets elected, after all. Which sounds terrible, but in comparison to his counterparts a generation older, with their certainty that women’s minds and bodies were theirs for the taking, Derek really was a gentleman.

  Brooke rarely got the best of him, though. After days of listening—to other people’s stories, to criticism and abuse, to questions from the other party that were talking points vaguely framed as inquiry, to sad and sorry people who’d never had a person listen to them in all their lives—Derek would come home entirely spent. He couldn’t listen anymore, and he didn’t want to talk, either. So Brooke would find herself hanging around his house like a redundant appliance, getting in his way, and eventually she learned that there were some nights when it was just better that she go back to her place. She knew not to take it personally.

  Other than while traveling, their best times were arriving back to his condo together at the end of the day, both of them exhausted, but excited and inspired by what their team had accomplished. She’d helped write a speech he’d delivered with aplomb on the floor, or else a long-planned event had gone off without a hitch. These were days when it felt like they were partners, both in life and something larger. Like when they used to go out running together, except that she’d managed to keep the pace.

  There were precious stolen moments—a few weekends at his house back home when they got to spend all day in their pajamas, reading the papers together. Before Derek, Brooke had always gotten her news online, but he taught her the value in ink on your fingers, the charm of unfolding the sheets of paper and reading with both arms flung out wide. And she loved being in the car with him, no matter where they were going. Zero distractions, except for music on the radio. He said she made an excellent travel companion, and he started having her assigned on all his trips. He got nervous flying, and he’d squeeze her hand. He told her, “I love going anywhere with you.”

  But then they’d arrive and get off the plane, get out of the car, and things between them would once again become formal. She liked to brush the shoulders of his suits just to touch him, and then she’d stand back in the crowd watching him in action. Thinking about how nobody else in the room knew that he was hers—but they also thought he was all theirs, so she wasn’t sure it counted.

  “You’re really happy with all this?” all the people who purported to love her would demand.

  Her friends organized a night out for her birthday, but Derek would not be attending. “They’re all so hostile about us,” he said. “You’ll have a better time without me there.”

  He had tried to win them over at first, the way he won over everybody, but his tricks weren’t as effective on those whose concerns were that he was like a politician, in the worst way. They thought he was smarmy, because they didn’t know him like she did.

  “He only tells you what you want to hear,” said Nicole, before Nicole gave up on being critical of the relationship because she feared her criticism was driving Brooke away from her, which it was.

  Carly showed less restraint: “I know Derek Murdoch,” she said. She didn’t trust him at all. “This is his pattern.”

  And Brooke had no proof to offer that it wasn’t, except that she knew with all her heart that it was different this time, which was evidence enough. Or should have been—for real friends. She was adamant about that, so she began to see these friends less often.

  And then, of course, Derek would show up on the cover of magazines with profiles focusing on his personal life, and one calling him “the city’s most eligible bachelor,” and she was furious about that one. And then, finally, for once in her life, Brooke lost her cool.

  “You called yourself ‘eligible’?” They were in his office with the door closed. The story had just gone online that day, and someone had printed out the photo and pinned it to the noticeboard, hearts drawn along the borders in pink highlighter.

  He said, “I didn’t call myself anything. You know how it goes. They’ve got to come up with a headline.”

  “It makes me look bad,” Brooke said.

  “In the eyes of who?” he asked.

  “Me,” she answered, “and don’t tell me that doesn’t matter. That it doesn’t count. It’s not fair to just dismiss me.”

  He said, “You know that these things aren’t up to me, right? What they write in magazines? And what do you want me to do about it? You knew this was how it was going to be—exactly like this. You’re the one here who has a choice in how things go.”

  “You mean, like take it or leave it?” said Brooke. “Because I don’t know that’s such a choice.” What she wanted was for there to be some space in which she could retain the smallest bit of agency, where maybe her feelings and needs could be a priority, but a person only gets to own that space when they’re dating ordinary people, and when your boyfriend is the city’s most eligible bachelor, compromise becomes a necessary requirement.

  “It’s possible to bend over backwards so far that you become a human doormat,” Nicole wrote once in an email Brooke never replied to.
/>   She told Derek now, “You only hold my hand when there’s no one around.”

  “But that’s not you, it’s just how things are. You know we’ve got to keep it on the down-low.”

  She said, “But would it really be so bad if people knew? That’s the part that really bothers me—I don’t know which one you’re scared of more: the word getting out, or losing me altogether. Or maybe the problem is that I do.”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” he said. “You know it’s not like that.”

  “But no, really,” she said. “What if you had to choose one?”

  “Come on.”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  He said, “What, like extortion?”

  “See, that’s my point,” she said. “It’s not like extortion. It’s about giving me the respect I deserve.”

  “I don’t think that blackmail,” he said, “is particularly respectful.”

  “I’m not blackmailing you,” she said, exasperated, and then she lowered her voice. “I’m making a point. It’s on principle. Just think about it. Just think about what it means that the idea of me telling the world about us makes you so terrified.”

  “I’m not terrified,” he said. He was nervous, though—she could see it. He took a deep breath and tried to soften his tone. “If I could, I would give you everything you wanted.” It was the closest he’d ever come to promising her anything.

  She said, “But that means nothing, really. In the end.”

  Derek got up from his desk and walked over to the glass walls and closed the blinds, shutting out their colleagues on the other side. Turning back around, he got down on his knee before her and took her hand. What was he doing? “Come on, you know what the terms are. We’ve got to be realistic.”

  Brooke said, “They let other politicians have personal lives.”

  He said, “It’s complicated. You know that better than anyone. That’s why it works with us, because you get it, how it is.”

  “But I don’t have to like it.”

  “I never asked you to like it. I don’t like it either.” She was still wondering why he was kneeling on the floor. Anyone walking in and seeing them there would think he was proposing, and even though she knew that he wasn’t, that he wouldn’t, just the possibility of creating such an impression had its own particular romance. “And I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “Maybe if all this is hurting you, the logical thing to do would be to call it off. But I don’t want to do that. I really don’t.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “And what’s been so amazing about all of this anyway,” he told her, “has been watching it all unfolding. It’s taken years, and it’s happened slowly. Going from colleagues, to friends, to this.”

  “To this.”

  “Right?”

  “But I mean, what is it? This. What are you going to call it?”

  “Do we have to call it anything?”

  “I think we do.”

  “You have to call a thing a thing to know what it is?”

  “That’s not unreasonable,” she said. “A definition.”

  “Definitions are limits,” Derek said. “It’s all they are. And I hate that.”

  “But definitions are also what gives something its substance,” Brooke said. “And I think that I deserve that.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “And I deserve to, just say, be able to count on you, on this. To call what we’ve got here a relationship—without the world ending, even. I really don’t think that would be so unfair.” They’d been together for months. She’d known him for years. She wondered if he’d think it was juvenile, her insistence on guiding their relationship in this direction, marking off all the clichéd milestones along the way. She aspired to be more original than that, but she also needed some orientation.

  He told her, “You know you make me feel like the luckiest guy in the world, right? I don’t know that there is a higher thing to shoot for than the esteemed affection of somebody like you.”

  “Esteemed affection? That’s what we’re calling it now?” But he had made her smile.

  He said, “You’re the one who said we had to call it something.”

  “I need to know that this is serious. That I’m not wasting my time.”

  “I don’t waste time,” said Derek. “My own, or anybody else’s. You know that.” And then he put his arms around her shoulders and pulled her down so that she was kneeling beside him on the floor, and he kissed her. He said, “I’m going to do whatever I can to make this easier on you.”

  “You could start by taking the photo down. And I don’t care that it makes it look like you can’t take a joke. I honestly can’t take this joke. Even if nobody knows. It’s disrespectful.”

  “It’s disrespectful,” he repeated. “I’ll take it down.”

  She said, “I don’t want to be a human doormat.”

  “You’re not a doormat,” he said.

  “I just wonder if it would be easier for you if we didn’t do this. If you didn’t have to hide. Because you also have a choice here. This isn’t all on me.”

  He said, “You think losing you would be easy?”

  “I don’t even know what’s what.”

  “I’d be wrecked,” he said. “If you walked away from me.”

  “But another girl would come along,” she told him, shrugging her shoulders like this was no big thing. “They always do.”

  “You aren’t ‘another girl,’ ” he said. “You’ve never been. Haven’t I been clear about that?”

  “You haven’t been clear about much,” she said. “Definitions are limits, remember?”

  And then he sat back, and leaned against his desk, looking small and totally drained. “You really don’t get it?” He looked baffled. “Because I thought we had an understanding.”

  “I thought the basis of our understanding was that we didn’t talk about our understanding.”

  “Because it didn’t need to be said,” he told her. “But maybe it did.”

  “Maybe it did?”

  “You know I don’t go around falling in love with just anyone.”

  In love.

  “You’re really going to make me spell this out?”

  “It might be necessary.”

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Brooke, it’s never been like this for me. Never. And so many times it would have been easier if a girl walked away, because it’s hard to make other people understand. But not this time. This right now, you and me, is the easiest, most straightforward thing. I don’t even have to try and make it make sense, because we just click.”

  “We click?”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “I do.”

  “And I don’t know, maybe you click with everyone. Maybe you and Trevor—”

  She said, “Don’t talk about Trevor.”

  “Mr. Frosted Tips.”

  “I swear, I will smack you with a stapler.”

  He said, “No, I’m being serious. For me, it’s never been the easiest thing, being in a relationship, making it work. It’s always been so hard, everything out of sync. There’s so much I want to do, and it’s hard to get all the priorities aligned, but with you it’s just there. It’s the most amazing thing. We wake up in the morning, and there you are. It’s as simple as that.”

  She said, “Kind of like a doormat.”

  He said, “No. Doormats don’t talk.” She started to say something smart in response, but he interrupted her. “And I love it when you talk. I love it when you argue, or ask questions, and tell me things that I don’t know, which is a lot of the time. I love it when you edit my speeches, and tell me jokes, and when you laugh at my jokes.” He was getting up on his knees again, and they were face to face. He reached out and placed his finger in the dip between her breasts
, her blouse open to the third button. He said, “And doormats are flat. You’re not flat.” He kissed her. Murmured, “I love you, Brooke Ellis. It’s not even hypothetical. Or theoretical.”

  She was sitting there with the dumbest smile on her face—she could feel it there, hanging, big and goofy. From the incredible lightness of all her patience and faith being rewarded. And she told him, “One day you’re going to kiss me when the blinds aren’t shut.” It was really going to happen. Derek needed her, and there was nobody else who knew him the way that she did.

  So she believed him when he put his hand on his heart and said, “I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  They took their relationship to the next level after that, which meant their colleagues knew, and when she accompanied him on trips, they stopped booking her a separate hotel room. It also meant that all conversations would end abruptly every time she walked into the lunchroom, however. But sometimes when other people were around, Derek held her hand, or else he’d rub her shoulders as he leaned over her desk to see what she was getting up to.

  And there were whispers, rumors, posts on social media and shady political blogs, but Derek insisted that it didn’t freak him out. “If it gets out, it gets out,” he said. He was attempting the posture of a person who really was that cool, but Brooke had been the one to see him, a quivering mess kneeling on his office floor with the blinds shut. So even though he was almost convincing, she saw through it all the same, but the effort he put into the act, into trying to be strong, only made her love him even more, and she told him so. She admired the way he buried his fears for her, for them. That she mattered to him enough to do that, which should have been enough to convince Carly, Nicole, and everyone.

  He didn’t tell his family, though. He said it would be too hard. “They’d be all over you then,” he told her. “And you don’t want that.” Even though he was so close to his family—they still took vacations together, and celebrated birthdays, and holidays. Derek’s official Christmas cards every year featured a photo of all of them, his parents, his sisters, his nephews, brothers-in-law, and his ninety-six-year-old grandma. They were a huge part of his life—his mom visited the office all the time and Brooke had been introduced to her on several occasions, although she’d never had reason to set Brooke apart from the gaggle of women in Derek’s employ.