by JD Hawkins
“I don’t think they’re that bad,” Eddy says.
I slide some folders away, knowing that resisting their decision to eat here is futile, and they dump the bags on my desk.
“Hey, Nate,” Sam says with a conspiratorial grin, nodding at Eddy. “Check this out. It’ll blow your mind.”
Eddy shoots Sam a dark look, then proceeds to pull out a couple of poke bowls from his bag. “I got one for you if you wanted,” he tells me, “spicy tuna or beef?”
“His wife must have really cracked the diet whip this time, huh? He didn’t even get a dessert!” Sam laughs, then pats Eddy on the shoulder. “No worries, buddy. I got the kid an extra meatball pasta so you can have both those bowls of rabbit food yourself.”
Eddy pretends to look conflicted at me for a few moments before I take the carton of pasta from Sam with a smile. Eddy shrugs and settles down in the chair opposite my desk with the bowls. Sam drags over a chair and makes himself comfortable, feet up on my desk and a napkin over his chest.
We concentrate on eating for a while, but when I mention the report I’m working on the way they dismiss it seems a little odd. Returning to the food, I get the strange sense that something’s up. Eddy and Sam entering my office suddenly isn’t out of the ordinary, neither is them eating here, and maybe my own sense of disorientation since I got back is just putting me on edge again, but there’s something strange in the air…
“By the way,” Eddy says casually, already done with one of his poke bowls and reaching for the other, “Maria’s making dinner this Friday evening—she’s obsessed with Arabic food these days. She insisted I invite you two and your partners along.”
“Sure. I’m there,” Sam says quickly, then turns to me. “Nate?”
I let out a regretful sigh and shake my head a little. “Uh…I can’t. Hazel made plans for us already,” I say slowly, searching my muddled mind for a clean excuse. “Some concert…theatre thing…I dunno. But she’s been looking forward to it for weeks.”
“Well, we could work around it a little,” Eddy says, “have dinner before, or after.”
I shrug and wince again. “I doubt it. You know theatre stuff—lasts forever.”
“That’s a shame,” Eddy says, and I half wonder if the look Sam is giving him means anything. “Half the reason she wanted to do this dinner was to meet Hazel. She loved you when she met you at Henry’s retirement to-do last month, and since I told her about Hazel she’s been dying to meet her.”
“Sorry. Next time for sure,” I say, stuffing my mouth with a meatball to excuse not having more to say.
“Okay, well, you tell me then,” Eddy says, and I know something’s up now with the fact that he decided to keep talking instead of taking a bite of his food. “Anytime next week—I’m sure Maria would be up for cooking again.”
I pretend to still be chewing my food a little more, swallow, and then say, “Hmm…let me check with Hazel and get back to you.”
I turn back to my food and fork another meatball, but in my periphery catch them swapping a look that’s definitely meaningful. In the quiet eating that follows there’s a tension like one of us threatened the other, instead of the casual conversation we’re supposed to be having. I glance up at them, showing a poker face as I eat, pretending to be interested in my food most of all.
Suddenly, Sam casually tosses his food carton on the desk, pulls the napkin from his chest and starts wiping his mouth. Then he says, “What’s going on, Natey-boy?”
“Sam,” Eddy says as if warning him.
I glance from one to the other. “What?” I say.
They swap another look.
“Sam,” Eddy repeats.
Sam looks at him and shrugs. “It’s got to come out some time,” Sam tells him, then turns back to me.
“What are you guys talking about?” I demand firmly, dropping my fork into my food and leaning forward.
There’s a heavy silence, and it feels like a standoff.
Eddy looks at me sympathetically then says, “Tomorrow we’re meeting with Warren to give him our final thoughts on you.”
“Your final thoughts?”
“You think Warren would make a decision based on a few conversations and some good work?” Sam says. “We’re the ones who’ve been working with you for the past three months. Who’ve been spending time with you. Who’ve seen what you’re all about.”
I frown at them sternly. “So you’re saying you’re the ones making the decision, essentially.”
“Somewhat,” Eddy says, still sounding like the good cop.
“Okay,” I say, shrugging this piece of information away. “So? You want to tell me I wasn’t good enough?”
I say it like a challenge, but neither of them bites. Whatever it is they’re thinking, they’ve been thinking it long enough not to balk.
“We like you, Nate,” Sam says seriously. “You’ve got more talent than anyone at the firm—we don’t need to tell you that.”
“But?” I ask, still sounding confrontational.
They swap a look again, Eddy like he’s regretful he’s here, Sam like he’s preparing something.
Eddy talks slowly, “But it was never so much about the work as it was about character. And we like that about you too, Nate. You’re a good guy.”
Sam throws in, “A little intense sometimes.”
“Sure,” Eddy agrees. “Could be a little more personable.”
“Sometimes got an attitude.”
“But you’re honest,” Eddy says. “Reliable. You work hard and do what you say you’ll do—”
“Look,” I interrupt, my voice growing in aggressive energy each time I use it, “three months with me, you should know I don’t like to play games, I don’t like to dance around. So why don’t you just cut all this out and tell me what the problem is.”
“There’s that intensity,” Sam quips, but his smile disappears as soon as it appears when he sees Eddy still looking forlorn and thoughtful. Finally he pulls his feet from the desk and looks at me gravely. “You’re hiding something.”
I meet both their gazes like I’m proving I’m not, indignant they’d even suggest it. The silence between us even heavier now, so quiet we can hear chatter from the other offices beyond the thick door, the whipping of wind against the old windows.
“What am I hiding?” I say, spitting the words out like I’m disgusted by this whole conversation.
They swap a look and then Eddy shrugs before answering.
“Honestly, Nate? We’re not sure. But we know there’s something.”
“You hide your wife from us like you’re embarrassed about her for months,” Sam says, “then we meet her and she’s literally the perfect woman.”
“Fiancée,” Eddy corrects.
“As if you’re afraid she’ll say something, or reveal something,” Sam continues. “And now you’re back to hiding her again.”
“You call her Nicole and then it turns out she prefers to be called Hazel.”
“You take a random trip to Los Angeles to cover a few financial ‘loose ends’—but the one thing we know for sure about you, Nate, is that you never leave financial loose ends.”
“You were at a wedding on Saturday.”
I grunt and smile in disbelief, glaring at them with tense muscles and a sense of righteous indignation. “What? You guys having me followed? Got a detective chasing me or something?”
“No, nothing like that, Nate,” Eddy says calmly. “I just had a friend who was at the wedding also.”
“It’s our job—your job—to find the issues,” Sam says. “To find which things add up and which ones don’t, Nate.”
“Listen,” I say, leaning over the table now, the calm hardness in my voice not quite enough to conceal my anger, “you can go tell Warren whatever the hell you want. I don’t care. But if you think I’m going to sit here and sweat and put up with this kind of bullshit then maybe three months wasn’t enough for you to learn anything about me.”
“We wa
nt to recommend you, Nate,” Eddy says, sounding genuinely apologetic. “We just want to know what you’re holding back still.”
“I’ve busted my ass here,” I say, beyond reason and logic now, words fueled purely by frustration. “I’ve already made more money for the firm than I’d make in my first year. You want to talk about character? Eddy: Weren’t you there when the CEO of Ivex tried to lean on me because he thought I was the weak link? Didn’t you watch me hold my nerve while the whole meeting room laughed at me for the MG deal, Sam?”
“Nate,” Sam says, sounding only a little fazed, “you need to understand—”
“No, you need to understand,” I spit back. “You know everything you need to know about me. And if there’s something you don’t, it’s because it’s none of your goddamned business.”
Slowly, they look at each other, and the silence now is heavier than before. To them, that was as good as a confession—not just that there is indeed something I’m hiding, but that it’s bad enough to get me wound up like this. The fact that they say nothing is the worst thing. I’d rather they argued back, or tried to placate me.
Their silence feels like a conclusion.
“Get out of here,” I tell them angrily, picking up the fork again.
Then I realize that they’re the ones who represent this building, that I’m the one who has less of a right to be here.
I dump the fork again. “Actually, you know what, I’ll go. I clearly don’t belong here anyway.”
“No.”
“Nate, it’s all right.”
They both speak in unison, rise from their chairs together, urging me to stay in mine.
“We’ll go,” Eddy says, poke bowl in one hand, the other turning Sam’s shoulder as they move to the door.
I watch them leave, Sam through the door first, Eddy hovering there for a moment.
He turns back to me, his expression as confused as it is sympathetic. “Don’t be so negative, Nate,” he says softly. “You can’t control everything.”
He shuts the door behind him, but I continue to glare at it. Eddy’s words like some kind of cryptic puzzle that I torture my already-muddled mind with.
Suddenly being alone in the office feeling less like a kind of relief, and more like I’ve been left to contend with something even bigger than what they just told me.
Myself.
19
Hazel
“Are you all right?”
I look up from my position, sitting on the curb outside the hospital staring at my phone, to see Mia standing there holding two cups of vending machine coffee.
“Yeah,” I say, the word coming out like a fatigued sigh.
“I saw you rushing outside and wondered: you don’t like alien black goo anymore?” Mia quips as she hands me a cup and then sits beside me.
I laugh gently and take a slow sip, making the same disgusted face everyone does when they taste it.
“Who could ever stop liking alien black goo?” I joke. Mia laughs and then breathes deeply. “I just needed a little fresh air.” I lift my phone. “Theo keeps calling and messaging me.”
“Theo?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“What’s that jackass want?”
I shrug. “He keeps begging me for Nate’s number. He still wants to give him the full ‘pitch.’ I’m thinking about blocking him.”
“Do it,” Mia says. “Isn’t he supposed to be on his honeymoon now anyway?”
I shrug and sigh and take another grimacing sip of the goo.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“You asked me that already.”
“Sorry.”
I laugh and say, “It’s all right. I’m just…‘adjusting.’”
“Still thinking about Nate?” Mia says, wincing as she says it, as if to place the words carefully on me.
“A little bit?” I reply.
“You haven’t spoken to him since he left?”
“I thought about it…but I just can’t imagine what we’d even say… ‘Hey Nate, still really shitty that we live on opposite sides of the country, huh? Anyway, see you on the flipside.’”
Mia laughs sadly and then reaches out to rub my back a little.
“I just need to move on,” I sigh. “Except…it doesn’t feel like moving on, it feels like moving backwards. I’m over Theo, now I have to get over Nate. And then it’s back to being single and working and being generally happy except for that one thing…until that one thing is big enough to get me back to dating and all the wonderful agony of that until…well. Rinse and repeat.
“It’s just kind of weird…you spend all this time building a life. A career, a place to live, a routine, a lifestyle…and then those things you worked so hard to gather and build up can become like a kind of prison. A trap. And you realize how much other stuff there is that you’ll never get to do or see because of it.”
We sip our coffees, and Mia’s quiet for a long time. More than I’d expect her to be. Not even consoling words, until I realize she’s as lost in thought as I am.
“What?” I ask eventually. “What are you thinking?”
She breaks her trance-like gaze across the parking lot to turn to me and purses her lips. “I was just thinking about how you and Nate might really have been something special together.”
“Gee, that’s not going to make me more depressed,” I laugh sarcastically.
“I was thinking,” she continues without acknowledging it, “about me and Colin…”
I turn to look at her attentively as she stares off, as if seeing something in the distance. After a long time she picks up where she left off.
“It seemed impossible at the time…like there was just too much stopping us, too many reasons it couldn’t happen, and only one that it could. I mean…it seems inevitable now, but at the time…it felt like I was taking this giant risk. A huge leap into the unknown. All or nothing…”
“Are you trying to make me feel better?” I ask, genuinely confused.
Mia seems to come to for a second, then smiles at me and sighs. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say,” she laughs, but then that distant, serious look comes over her face again and she turns purposeful eyes back onto me. “Actually…I do know.”
“What?”
“I’m saying: don’t give up on him.”
“It’s not about me ‘giving up’ on him,” I say. “It’s the fact that we’re so far apart—in terms of physical distance, lifestyles, work…”
“Who cares?” Mia says, her voice suddenly full of conviction. “Look at Maeve and Toby. I never thought either of them would settle, let alone with each other. I thought I’d carefully plan and take every aspect of my ‘perfect’ relationship slowly, methodically. Then the next thing I know, in the span of a few months, I meet Colin, fall madly in love, get pregnant, and…well, the rest is history.”
“So, what you’re saying is…I should take the rest of the day off work, book the first flight I can find to Chicago, show up at Nate’s door, and hope for a happy ever after.”
“No,” Mia says, waving away my sarcasm as she laughs. But then once again something in her expression shifts and she turns back to me, this time angling her whole body toward me on the side of the curb, putting her coffee down as if to show she means it. “Actually…why the hell not?”
I laugh fully, and then when it fades, and I see Mia maintaining her serious expression, I laugh again.
“Sure,” I say, still smiling, but almost weirded out by Mia’s sudden enthusiasm. “And just forget about everything else?”
“Everything else doesn’t matter. Jobs, money, places you live…they all come and go. But the chance to be with someone you love for your whole life comes along once—and even then, only if you’re lucky.”
“I never said I loved him,” I reply defiantly.
Mia smiles. “You didn’t need to.”
I’m shocked for a moment. You never expect to hear that you love someone coming from a third party’s mout
h. I don’t even know if Mia’s right, but she’s definitely close to it.
“I don’t…I can’t give up what I have for something that I might not get,” I say.
Mia looks away as if to think about it, but only for a few seconds.
“Let’s say you quit,” Mia begins, “and you went to live in Chicago. You could get a job there. Or just have Nate take care of you for a little while—it sounds like he makes enough to do it easily. And if it doesn’t work out in six months, or a year, or even two…you could just come back. You could take your job again. I’d certainly make sure Santa Teresa hired you, and Jackie would absolutely hire you back in a second anyway.”
“Ugh,” I say, shaking my head. “You make it sound so easy.”
“I know it’s not easy, but it’s definitely possible, right? And what if he doesn’t even get that ‘big position’? You said he’d take it hard. Maybe he wouldn’t even think of asking to come here. He seems like a guy with too much pride to ask something like that. But if you were there…you could maybe help him get over it. Bring him here and show him a whole new life, a fresh start…”
“Why are you even doing this to me, Mia?” I say, looking away as if I could erase the conversation by breaking her gaze. “Do you think I’m not driving myself up a wall over all of this enough?”
Mia doesn’t answer, and after a while of working my way through the goo I look back at her to see that she’s frantically working something on her phone.
“What are you doing?” I ask suspiciously.
“Booking you a ticket.”
“Mia!” I exclaim, leaning over her to see that she’s telling the truth.
“You can get to LAX by two, right?”
“Two?! Mia, I have half my shift to go!”
“Oh forget that,” Mia says, waving my complaint away without peeling her eyes from her phone screen. “Not like it’s the first time we’ll be understaffed.”
