Chapter 17 More Cahoots
More Cahoots
When, a few days after Thanksgiving, Jack suggested they knock off the last episode of The Bear, Blair said she had to work late. She couldn’t afford for him to get any deeper into her head.
Blair: I have to work tonight, sorry.
She was being weird. Normally she would have teased him about initiating watching TV, even if she had to decline the invitation. She started typing something to that end, but his answer came in before she could hit send.
Jack: OK.
Jack was being weird, too. She would have expected him to question her, to try to persuade her. She had been prepared to tell him she had never gotten her year-end stuff done, which wasn’t even a lie.
His easy agreement confirmed that he was onto her.
But what could she do but keep her distance and work on resetting herself?
This was her third bout with the cyclone.
Both other times—after her deb ball and during COVID lockdowns—she’d found her footing again.
In each case, she’d weathered a few months of storms, but eventually she’d come out the other side.
She had to trust she would this time, too.
She and Jack had been taking their morning walks, but Blair kept them brisk and mostly silent. There was precedent for that. Historically, sometimes they talked on those walks, and sometimes they didn’t.
She missed him, though. Which was a strange thing to think about someone she was walking next to daily, but it was true.
But when the second week of December rolled around, she had to get over herself. If she was going to throw an entire freaking Christmas party as a stealth opportunity to get Jack to sing, she was going to have to actually invite Jack to said stealth Christmas party.
Of course, she was also throwing the party to meet her self-imposed goals. She had done the restaurant. Now on to the party. She hadn’t had an episode since Thanksgiving. Maybe this season of the cyclone was passing and she was finally on the upswing.
So, in a fit of hopefully not misplaced optimism, she marched over to the pool house and rapped on Jack’s door, and, oof, when he opened it, there he was.
There he was.
Listen to her. Of course there he was. He lived there.
But damn, he was wearing the ratty Prince T-shirt, and he was just so… compellingly disheveled. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen him on the morning walks, but… she hadn’t really seen him. She’d avoided looking directly at him, had walked ahead of him more often than not.
“Hey,” he said, as if everything were normal between them.
Maybe everything was normal. Maybe Jack didn’t think about her as much as she thought he did.
She sucked in a breath. “OK, listen, I am here to invite you to a Christmas party, don’t get mad, but it would be great if you could come, it’s Friday, just a smallish affair, and as I told Tiffany, every party needs a grinch, she might have that covered, but we all know you do, too, I know you don’t want to, but do it anyway, OK? ”
Wow, holy run-on sentence, Batman.
“OK,” Jack said.
“It’s a Christmas caroling party.” She smirked. “It’ll be exactly your thing. There’s going to be a champagne bar.”
Wait. She’d kept talking as if he’d said no, as if she’d needed to convince him. It had taken her brain a moment to process that he’d accepted the invitation.
“I’m not sure what part of a Christmas caroling party you think is exactly my thing.”
“The singing part.”
“So, what, you gather around a piano and sing carols?” He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Yes.” She realized belatedly that there was music coming from inside the pool house. She’d never heard him playing music before. “What are you listening to?”
“A band Esme turned me on to.”
“Wait. What?”
“She told me this band had a grumpy lead singer with a PhD who wrote, and I’m quoting here, ‘pretentious but stupidly compelling songs.’ She said I’d like them.” He shrugged. “She was right. I have to say, I think music criticism might be exactly her thing.”
Blair didn’t know whether to be tickled or annoyed that her kid and her surly literary genius houseguest were communicating without her as an intermediary. She decided not to worry about it, to quit while she was ahead. “Well, OK. I’ll see you Friday, then.”
“Come in and watch the last episode of The Bear with me.”
“Now?”
“Yes.” She hesitated, and he added, “Come on. You’ve left me hanging for weeks.”
“About that…”
“It’s OK. You’ve been busy.”
She had not been busy.
“Come in, though. Let’s finish it off.”
What harm could it do? It was well after dinner. There would be no dishes to worry about. What was the worst that could happen? She might refold a quilt or two?
“You could have watched it without me.”
“I would never do that,” he said, and something in her chest fluttered.
“You just need me as an excuse to watch TV.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He reached out and towed her inside. When his hand made contact with her forearm, the chest fluttering ramped up. But it was a good kind of fluttering, not the kind of fluttering that heralded the cyclone. His hand was so warm.
“Do your hands ever get cold?”
“No.” He tugged a little more, and they were over the threshold. “Come and watch TV with me and I’ll warm you up.” He froze in place for a moment before letting go of her. “I don’t mean that like it sounded.”
She cracked up. “Don’t worry. I’m still stuck on the first part of what you said. The Jack Branksome begging me to…” She lowered her voice as if imparting a great secret. “Watch TV with him.”
“I wouldn’t say begging.” He closed the door behind her.
“Pleading.”
“Suggesting.”
“Beseeching.”
“Proposing.”
“Entreating.” She had missed him so much. Missed bantering with him. Missed this feeling of… unkinking she got when she was hanging out with him.
He laughed. “You win. Blair, I am entreating you to come inside and watch TV with me.”
They’d been standing in the entryway. In a parody of noblesse oblige, she said, “If you insist,” and laid her hand on his forearm as if she were a queen gracing him with her favor.
He winced. “Jesus, woman, do you have ice water in your veins?”
“My hands are always cold. My everything is always cold. That’s why I’m fascinated by your seemingly perpetually warm hands.”
He peeled her hand off his arm and closed his fingers around hers.
And then they watched TV and he kept her hand in his and they didn’t talk at all about how long she’d been away.
The next day, Blair was back knocking at the pool house door. There was no more TV to watch—they’d finished The Bear, and she purposely hadn’t suggested another show. They’d had a nice time, but she needed to be careful.
But no TV didn’t mean there was nothing to watch.
“Hi.”
She stifled a sigh. He looked like a modern-day James Dean, leaning against the doorframe in a white T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare and a pencil stuck behind his ear. Oh, that pencil. It was doing something to her.
She almost felt like his literary genius showed in his physical appearance. He had always been handsome, but since she’d read those chapters, it was like he had leveled up.
All right. Get a grip. She had a mission here. “The security company sent some footage you’re going to want to see.”
He ushered her in, and they sat next to each other on one of the sofas. “Something is coming over the fence, see?”
He squinted and moved his head closer to her phone. “Are those rocks?”
“I don’t know. They said whatever they are, they’re small enough that they’re not tripping the alarm. The sensors are calibrated so that heavy rain or hail or whatever doesn’t cause a panic every time. Nor do small animals.”
“Can’t have my crows setting off your alarms.”
“Exactly. The system is set up to detect human-size intruders.”
“So it catches Mrs. Afonso when she levitates over the fence but not whatever those things are.”
“Right. And they’re clearly coming from her yard, but what are they? If they were rocks, I’d have noticed them in the pool. But they’re obviously some kind of small object—so what else could they be, if not rocks?”
“Only one way to find out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Stakeout.”
“What!”
“Is this all the footage you have?”
“I have another clip that’s a little older. It shows the same thing happening.”
“Do you have time stamps?”
“I think so.” She went back to the original email from the company, which contained the download links to the two clips. “The one we just watched was this past Thursday at eleven thirty p.m., and the other one was the prior Thursday at eleven forty-seven p.m.”
Jack threw his hands in the air like he’d just finished a race. “Thursday night is Double Gin Night!”
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s an accident that both your clips are from Thursdays. Do you have any more?”
“They just went back two weeks, but I’m sure I could ask them.”
“No need. Today is Thursday, right?”
“Yes.”
Jack looked at his watch. “Meet me outside at eleven. Wear something black. Be quiet in your approach.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Trust me.”
Blair did trust Jack, so she went back home and started counting down the hours until the mystery operation was to commence. When Tiffany called, she welcomed the distraction.
“Are you sitting down?”
“Yes,” she lied.
“I had a meeting with this Swedish tech guy today. He asked for a meeting out of the blue last week. Well, he asked for a meeting with you, but I diverted him.”
Tiffany saw her mission, professionally anyway, as being that of freeing Blair up to be the boss. Tiffany was good at her job.
“His company recently went public, so he’s sitting on a lot of cash, and it turns out he has a bit of a, wait for it, F. Scott Fitzgerald obsession.”
Blair told herself not to get her hopes up.
“Twentieth-century American lit generally, actually,” Tiff said.
“Apparently he studied it in college before he invented some… code, HTML, something, something, something, and found himself an accidental tech mogul. He did try to pitch me on the idea of a Catcher in the Rye project, but I told him we were not those girls.”
Blair snickered.
“Anyway, he might invest if he likes the script.”