Chapter 18 #3
Regardless, it’s not a big deal, except that Will can tell from the moment she shuts the car door that Catherine herself is conscious of it, and irritated.
She’s pulling at the side seam of the dress she’s wearing, and at the hem of the blazer thrown over it, even as Will swallows and says, “Catherine, hi. Sorry, I know I’ve missed a few calls from you?—”
“Oh, have you?” Catherine’s eyes, Will notices, have picked up a wild, dangerous edge since the last time he encountered her in person.
“Have you missed a few of my calls, Will? Because, you know, I’ve only called you three or four times— a day !
Sometimes an hour , what could you possibly have been?—”
“Oooh,” Selma says, in cheerfully scandalized tones, and raises a hand to her mouth in a pantomime of shock. “Harassment! Right out of the gate, too, what fun?—”
“Excuse me,” Catherine snaps, turning to glare at Selma, “but I was speaking, all right, about a very important business deal. Didn’t anyone ever teach you it’s rude to interrupt?”
“It appears no one taught you that it’s rude to chase people down the road like a cartoon villain,” Selma says, arching an eyebrow and offering Catherine an unpleasant smile.
“If we’re asking that question. But, if you’re so bothered, you have my apologies for interrupting you.
I just like to keep score—you were describing harassing my client, so I wanted to note it.
Just the kind of thing that might come up later, you know? ”
“Your…client,” Catherine says, glancing from Selma over to Will, and then, in tones of great betrayal, hissing, “You hired a lawyer ? I thought we had an agreement!”
Will knows that they did not, in fact, have an agreement; being friends with Selma all these years has had its advantages.
He’s careful about verbal contracts, so he knows he didn’t agree to anything the first time he met with Catherine, and he’d certainly remember and have kept copies of anything printed or written down.
And yet, even though he knows this must be a tactic, her trying to trick him into siding with her out of guilt, he does feel guilt flare within him, a sense that he owes it to her to deal with her one on one.
And then, God love her, Selma says, “Hired me? Ha. I mean, technically, okay, I made him give me the traditional dollar as a retainer and, yes, that means that he hired me by the letter of the law, but this man has been my best friend for many years, and if hadn’t brought me in on this, I would have murdered him.
” She pauses, pulls out her card, and, her eyes hardening, passes it over to Catherine as she adds, “There was, and is, no version of this deal that doesn’t go through me.
Sorry you’re the last to know, but facts are facts. ”
Catherine’s face puckers up as she glances over Selma’s card, as though reading it has filled her mouth with lemon juice. Her voice is very dry and flat, however, when she says, “Oh.”
It is at this point, out of the corner of his eye, that Will sees the market door open.
It’s Noel who appears first, sticking just their head out.
Will, turning helplessly to look, is expecting or at least hoping to see Casey, and feels his face flush slightly in embarrassment when he meets the teen’s eyes instead.
Noel looks shocked for a second; then they grin; then they let out a whooping noise and disappear back into the market.
Not fifteen seconds later, the door opens again. This time it flies fully open, as though the person opening it has all but ripped it away from the frame; this time, that person is Casey.
Will swallows, or tries to. He finds that his throat and mouth, however, have both gone suddenly bone-dry, as though the sheer intensity, the heady, half-panicked heat, of the blood pounding through his veins has evaporated all the moisture within him.
A little part of Will, the bit that started turning to comforting facts instead of processing overwhelming situations as a very small child, begins to list plants that could survive such a temperature shift, and for how long, and in what kind of initial condition, and what type of soil, and?—
God, Casey is looking at him. Casey is looking at him and his face is not collapsing into anger and rage like it had that first day, in the market, after that stupid, inexplicable, perfect moment of connection that Will has never quite stopped thinking about.
He’s…well, he’s staring, mostly, his mouth dropping open, his eyes widening, and then narrowing, and just for a second, Will thinks he’s going to scowl and turn around and slam the yellow door shut behind him, before?—
Casey’s face breaks into a grin, and he starts to run.
“Okay, Will,” Selma says, very low, just for him to hear, putting a hand on his shoulder, while Catherine is distracted by turning back to her car, opening the back driver’s side door, and digging around frenetically for something in her briefcase.
“Stay focused. I understand that you’re experiencing the end stages of a Midwestern courtship ritual and that’s very distracting, but there’s work to be done here.
Give me three more minutes of even your most half-assed attention and then, I swear, the two of you can run off into the corn together and, I don’ t know, commune sensually with the woods while wearing as much flannel as possible, or whatever people do down here?—”
“You’ve lived in Chicago for more than two decades,” Will hisses, without actually looking away from Casey, who is approaching quickly. “Technically, you are a Midwesterner, however West Coast your roots may be, so I think the David Attenborough routine is maybe a little over the top?—”
“You bite your tongue,” Selma chides. Then, in a rather different, more evaluative tone, she adds, “He looks strong. Like the kind of guy who could help a girl move several large pieces of furniture from one side of her apartment to?—”
“I’m literally not even dating him, Sel.
I think maybe you want to keep your plans to make him cross state lines and do manual labor for you under wraps a bit longer, yeah?
” Will’s heart is barely in this—Casey is nearly upon them—God, this close Will can see he hasn’t shaved .
Will’s never actually seen the man with more than a five o’clock shadow before, but he’s past that point now, a scruffy but undeniable beard that runs a shade or two darker than his blond hair unmistakable on his face.
He looks tired, Will thinks. And—nervous. And…happy.
“Hi,” Casey says, when he reaches them. Though he’s stopped running, he seems to be bouncing on the balls of his feet, as though staying still is too much to ask in this particular moment.
Will thinks maybe he, himself, is experiencing the reverse feeling; he feels crystalized in time, frozen stiff and still, his lips barely moving as he replies. But his voice, at least, comes out warm, rich with that same heat that burned the moisture from his mouth, as he says, “Hi.”
“HI!” Catherine Rose nearly screams this; it’s so jarring that Will physically jumps, an all-over shudder he can’t fight or conceal.
He turns to her, aggrieved, and gives her a dirty look, but this time she hardly notices; she is bearing down on Casey instead, brandishing what appears to be a newspaper at him in fury.
“It was you, wasn’t it? Who did this? That’s what I came here to do, to ask you how you plan to pay the enormous sum you’ll owe me in damages for this?—”
“Owe you?” Casey says, and laughs. “What could I possibly owe you ? Lady, I had nothing to do with this. It’s not my fault if, every once in a while, somebody wants to get up to some actual journalism around here.”
“Oh, a likely story,” Catherine snaps. She takes another step towards Casey; Will, feeling a thrill of daring, leans forward and plucks the paper from her hands.
She doesn’t notice, too fixated on Casey to change course, and Will looks down with interest to see a copy of the Glenriver Gazette .
It had been a weekly paper when he was a child; now it’s a monthly, and he knows from talking to the editor a few times over the last couple of weeks that it’s struggling even to manage that.
But the headline makes the intended impact in bold black and white all the same: From Tranquility to Turmoil: Controversial Plans Threaten Community’s Future . Will skims the story below, glancing over the photos, and finds he recognizes both details and images.
He looks at Selma, who is gazing innocently down at her nails.
She doesn’t meet his eyes, but, when she realizes he’s glancing her way, she does smirk, which is as good as a confession.
He bites down on his smile—really, he should have known.
She did say, or at least imply, that she’d disseminated the information, after all.
“Why would I do this now ?” Casey’s asking, sounding bewildered, as Catherine stalks towards him. “If I’d had this info all along—why sit on it? What would be the point?”
“I don’t know, to ruin my life ?” Catherine cries, clearly at the end of her rope.
“To ruin this deal , to ruin my year , to carry on Bill stupid Robertson’s infuriating legacy of making every visit to this armpit of a town my living nightmare ?
Do you have any idea how long I promised these people I would deliver them this deal, okay, it was years ago, and when that old bastard finally went into that home, I was sure!
Sure that I could get it to them in time, but you got in my way, and you made everything so difficult, and you made sure no visitors were ever allowed in, so I had to wait until he finally bit the big one and then ?—”