Chapter 19
CHAPTER 19
E lijah. Friday
The last morning of the work week. My mind, this Friday morning, was filled not with work like it should have been, but with thoughts of who was working one floor below me.
Unable to concentrate on much of anything else, I took advantage of the privilege she had given me of having her phone number, and texted Corinne.
Hey, I sent her, you want to sneak out to lunch together today?
Exactly the answer that I wanted came back. Love to.
I texted her a thumbs-up in response, then set down my phone and actually started to swivel back and forth in my chair, softly laughing to myself. I felt like a teenager again. Actually, I felt like an engine that I’d had to shut off when Kathleen and I had just restarted. My heart roared and hummed like a kick-started motorcycle.
Naturally, that was right when my desk phone rang. Though I muted my laughter, my smile lingered as I picked up for Barbara. She said simply, “Leo.”
“Fine,” I grinned.
My adolescent smile was still there when the door opened and my partner entered. Shutting the door behind him, he pointed to my expression and asked, “What are you so happy about? Tell me it’s a new deal brewing.”
In fact, there was a new deal brewing, but not the sort of deal that Leo was thinking of. “What, I can’t just be happy?”
He crossed his arms suspiciously and replied, “Depends on why.”
I folded my hands and looked over at him, pondering whether or not to tell him exactly what was giving me such a good mood, measuring what his reaction might be. He studied me as intently as I did him, waiting for his answer.
Finally I decided, What the hell? I’m in such a good mood, even a less than positive reaction from Leo couldn’t spoil it.
“I’m going out to lunch with Corinne.”
There was a full stop of silence after that. Leo looked at me with the half-turn of his head that he reserved for moments when he wasn’t completely sure that he liked what he was hearing. “Corinne Gordon. From downstairs. The intern who just got here. That Corinne.”
“She’s the only Corinne down there,” I said.
He sort of clenched his teeth and shook his head at me. He really seemed not to like what he was hearing. He wondered aloud with a strong note of concern, “Is that even legal?”
I arched my eyebrows, tilted my head, and shrugged at the question. “You know, I don’t seem to recall anything in the company handbook about…what would be the expression?”
“Fraternizing?” he offered.
“Okay, yes. Fraternizing between executive staff and lower-level employees. I don’t think we have a rule against it. And really, we associate with lower-level staff in all kinds of ways. We have office parties and office luncheons and so forth. There’s not really a rule about social life overlapping with work life.”
“Yes,” he pointed out. “However, those may be social functions, but they’re also work things. Company morale, that kind of thing. You going out with Corinne…”
“We’re not going out,” I corrected him. “We’re just going to lunch.”
“Fine,” he allowed. “You going out for a personal lunch with Corinne? That’s something I’m not so sure about.”
I rolled my eyes slightly. “What’s to be sure about? We’ll eat, we’ll talk, we’ll come back to work. That’s all.”
“Eating and talking is all well and good. The question is whether you’ll come back from that lunch with Corinne looking the way you looked when I walked in here.”
I just sighed at him. It had always been Leo who did the most worrying in our partnership.
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When we walked out of the lobby together and started down the street, something happened that I hadn’t been expecting — something that froze my blood, and I could only hope that Corinne could not see the way I suddenly felt.
It started with her innocent question, “Where are we going? Aren’t we driving there?”
“We don’t need to drive from work to this place,” I said. “It’s walking distance. You’ve probably passed by it yourself. It’s this little gourmet sandwich shop where I like to go.”
“Okay,” she said. “You know, after we went to Ben’s, I found this really nice little coffee house where we should go sometime.”
I didn’t think anything of her remark at first. I just said, “Really?”
“Mm-hmm,” she replied. “It’s actually not far from the gym. It’s this cute place with, like, pastel-colored walls, and there’s this woman who works there, her name is Kathleen. She’s really friendly and looks like a model you’d see posing at a car show or something…”
That was all it took. Just hearing the name, Kathleen , and Corinne’s description of her, I knew exactly where Corinne had been and exactly whom she met there. I felt as if someone had attached electrodes to my heart and turned on the juice. In that instant, I couldn’t breathe. If I’d been holding hands with Corinne, I would have probably crushed her hand in shock.
What could I do here? It was another maddening coincidence like Corinne moving onto the same block as Ben and meeting him while she was out grocery shopping, but this time, it was worse. In a city the size of Cincinnati, how did something like this keep happening? This time it was the woman that I was going out with, unknowingly running into my ex at a place that she might end up visiting again. My insides felt like freezing water running down sheets of ice.
Staying calm, I weighed my options and decided there was only one thing to do. In this situation, honesty was the best way to go. I had to come clean with her or run the risk of Corinne going back to Kathleen’s coffee shop and getting friendly with her, and the two of them talking about past relationships. For what I had to do next, we both needed to be sitting down. I decided to wait until we got to where we were going.
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We got to the sandwich shop. I got us a couple of hoagies and a couple of bottles of iced tea, and a table. Once we were comfortably seated, I decided there was no time like the present.
“These look wonderful!” Corinne said, preparing to take a bite out of her hoagie. “You have good taste in lunch places.”
“Um…thank you,” I said with trepidation for what I had committed to doing and was now about to launch into. “Listen, before we start, there’s something I should probably tell you.”
On the brink of her first bite, she looked innocently over at me. “What’s that?”
“You remember the funny little coincidence of you already knowing Ben before I brought up going to his gym?” I began, seeing that as the best way to set this up. Before I could get another word further along, another rude jolt to my nerves came in the door.
His voice turned up the juice on those imaginary electrodes wired up to my heart. I could have jumped up and keeled over. Right behind Corinne, with his biggest, most devilish smile, who should come swaggering in but Kane.
Of all places, of all times, Kane!
I felt too sick to eat. Why him? Why now?
“Hey, hey, hey, Elijah!” he called, walking swiftly to our table. “Stepped out for a bite, did you? Who do we have here?”
As I looked on with a pit opening up in the bottom of my stomach, Kane came around the side of our table to get a look at Corinne. Having no idea who or what was now confronting her, she looked up at him. A question scratched away inside my head, Can I just die now, please?
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked Corinne in that way that he had of getting too familiar with women too quickly. This was the kind of behavior that had gotten him called out for harassment.
Her eyes darting back and forth from Kane to me, she said, a bit tentatively, “Um…hi. I’m Corinne.”
“Corinne!” he crowed as if he’d known her for years. He offered his hand and said, “Put ‘er there!”
Smiling politely, not knowing quite what to make of him, Corinne shook hands with Kane. The thought of him touching her, even in such an unassuming and unaggressive way as a handshake, made me want to jump up, tear him away from her, and pound him into the floor of the sandwich shop.
“Well, Corinne, how do you know my old buddy Elijah, here? You know, Elijah and me, we go back for years. Years .” He eyed me and said, “Don’t we, pal?”
“Yeah,” I replied, careful of my tone in a public place. “Years.”
“Oh…really,” said Corinne, still unsure of how to react. I wanted so badly to tell her that her instinct to be suspicious of him was right on the money.
“So how did you two get together?” he asked us.
I couldn’t take another minute of this. I suddenly needed to leap to Corinne’s defense, even though she wasn’t in trouble — yet.
“She works for me,” I told him. “Corinne is one of the new interns at my company.” That was the politest way I knew to tell him she was off-limits.
“Is that right?” Giving her a look that was just this side of sleazy, he said, “Well, my old buddy sure knows how to pick some pretty-looking employees, doesn’t he?”
She gave a faint, feeble sort of laugh, taking the compliment, but still wary of him, and rightly so.
I realized I had just given myself the perfect out. I quickly said to Corinne, “You know, speaking of work, I just realized there was an important detail that I forgot to cover on something I was working on just before we stepped out. Do you mind if we wrap up lunch and take it back with us?”
Slightly confused, she said, “Um…I don’t think we’re supposed to take food with us back to the Call Center.”
I waved off her concern, having bigger concerns of my own. “It’s okay. You know, you can eat in the break area.” I reminded her of where she was sitting with those two other guys when we first saw each other, when she unwittingly shushed the boss. “Or you can even eat at your station just this once. If anyone gives you a problem, tell them the boss said it was okay for today.” Getting up, I offered her my hand. “Come on, let’s go to the counter and get some doggie bags.”
Bewildered, she stammered, “O-okay, sure.” She got up with me and shot a funny look at Kane. “Um…nice meeting you.”
He smiled at her the way she had smiled at her lunch. “Nice meeting you too, sweetheart. Hope to see you again real soon.” Then, to me, he said, “It’s good to be the boss, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, really good,” I told him. “See you later, Kane.”
As I hustled Corinne away from there, the truth of those last words sank grimly into me. Kane was going to keep turning up again and again, whenever I least expected him or wanted him. And, I never wanted him.
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I went tearing out of there with Corinne and our doggie bags, and as soon as we were safely back out on the street, she said, “Okay, that was a little weird. You didn’t seem too happy to see him, and I got a strange vibe from him. Exactly who was that?”
“Eh, just someone from my past,” I replied vaguely and hoped she would leave it at that as I kept her hand in mine and hurried her off back to work.