Thirty-four
Nadine slapped her arm over her eyes to block the light. Why did her back hurt? Why was she damp? There were birds chirping. They seemed too close.
“Did we fall asleep out here?” Wes’s rough voice came from nearby, and she sat up to see him looking around through puffy eyes. “Stop the sun. It hurts.”
Nadine assumed she wasn’t looking her best after sleeping out in the pagoda, but the way Wes smiled at her made her feel like she was dressed like a million bucks. She stood up, holding her lower back in both hands as she tried to stretch.
Wes unraveled himself with an unsettling grace her creaky joints resented and reached out to massage her shoulders. “I have a suggestion.”
“What?” She leaned back into his hands, happy for his touch that melted the knots out. She knew his hands were magic, but this was next level.
“How about a quick dip in the grotto to wake up?” he asked, digging his thumbs in and making her knees buckle.
“What time is it?” She checked her phone. It was dead, which had to be the number one cause of anxiety for people in the modern age, but here with Wes, it didn’t seem to matter as much.
Wes’s phone was dead as well, so they had a pleasant debate about the time based on the location of the sun as they went to the grotto.
“Holy shit.” Wes shivered, having gone for the all-at-once method of water immersion while Nadine tested a single foot. “This water is colder than I thought.”
The surprisingly frigid pool turned what was planned as a refreshing and potentially naughty dip into something that felt disturbingly chaste and healthy. They were back out in minutes to separate for more comfortable showers.
In her ornate bathroom, Nadine stood under the spray, thinking about Wes. They hadn’t talked about last night, but at the same time, she was talked out. And she felt comfortable with what they’d discussed, even if there was work to do. That might not be the sexiest thing in the world, but she had a lot going on in her life and only wanted to know that:
1. She and Wes were good.
2. They had a future that was stable and they could work on.
3. Having fantastic sex was still a go.
Drama-free was liberating.
That being said, she thought as she dried off, there was always the chance for things to go seriously off the rails as they so often did.
Luckily, it wasn’t at breakfast, where a bowl of fruit sat on the table along with toast cut into little heart shapes. Wes poured the coffee and looked at her as if waiting for her reaction.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the coffee. She wanted to give him a kiss and, after a brief hesitation, leaned in and pressed her lips to his. “I love the toast hearts.”
His entire body relaxed, and he pulled her in for a much longer kiss than she had risked, making her confidence sing. “I thought you might.”
They sat down to eat. As Wes handed Nadine the (salted) butter, he said, “I’m glad we talked last night.”
“Me too.”
“To confirm, because I want to be sure. Are we in a relationship?” Wes asked.
She grinned, heart pattering. “You want to be?”
“With you?”
She poked him under the table with her foot. “No, Erma.”
He glanced at the cat, who was grooming on the counter. “That’s a nasty idea on every level. So yes to you, no to Erma.”
As if sensing the rejection, the cat jumped down, paws landing with a slight thump, and stalked out of the room with her tail high. “Don’t be a sore loser,” Nadine called after her.
“Are you competing with a cat?” he asked.
“Looks like I don’t need to.” It was so easy to be with Wes that she was almost giddy at seeing him across the table.
Wes helped Nadine clear up, stealing small kisses that caused her heartbeat to soar high enough to hit a satellite in geostationary orbit, then pulled her to the couch as they passed through the salon. “We need to talk about the story,” he said. “To make sure we understand each other.”
Right, because they weren’t staying at Dot’s house as a sort of happy honeymoon retreat. Nadine ran her hand along the silky tassels. “We only have a week left until Brent needs us out. I don’t plan on saying anything to the Herald until we’re completely finished here.”
“I’ll do the same at the Spear .” He shrugged when her eyebrows rose. “What happened is in the past, but I’ll refrain from mentioning it again or to anyone else.”
“How should we talk to them about a joint investigation?”
They sat thinking, and then Wes said, “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. We have time left. Let’s decide after we have evidence no one can debate. A slam dunk.”
Nadine mimed throwing a basketball, and he laughed, kissing her cheek and making her smile.
***
Six hours later, they had nothing.
Ten hours later, nothing.
The next day, “Nothing,” reported Wes as he went to the window for some fresh air. Confident they’d seen everything in the house but that damn basement, they’d decided to power through the rest of the attic boxes.
Nadine fell backward on the floor, a sheaf of papers at her chest. He left the window to lie beside her, appreciating her closeness almost as much as the breeze from the fan. By unspoken agreement, they’d started working as a team. While he’d enjoyed the game of the earlier search, it was nothing on being able to spend time with Nadine talking about everything and nothing, and what they were or were not finding. He was dozing off when Nadine sat up.
“Hey, do you have your notes up here? I want to check something.”
“No, they’re in my bag.” He stood and looked down at her. She must be thirsty. “You want a drink?”
“Yes, please.” She bent her smooth neck over another box. He laid a kiss on her bare nape, causing her to shiver in a very interesting way, and then left.
It was when he was staring at his bag that it came to him that he’d left the papers at work. Wes slapped his hand on his forehead, seeing the scene. He’d gone in after their fight, upset and wanting to bury himself in his writing. By the time he was done, he’d been more depressed than angry and was distracted as he was packing up, just as Tyler and a few guys had come in from the bar to grab their things. The printout of the story—he’d never gotten over the habit of printing out a first draft after his computer died when he was under a tight deadline—was in his leather portfolio. At least it was in a pile of papers in an office buried in more paper, so he was confident it was safe and hidden enough no one could stumble across it.
He grabbed two cans of sparkling water out of the fridge and returned to Nadine. Her legs were folded under her skirt, giving her the look of a modest debutante, which was only partly disturbed by her frown as she unfolded a stained newspaper. She looked up as he told her about his notes.
“I’ll get them after work when the rush hour dies down and no one’s in the office,” he said.
“Sure.” She sounded distracted.
“Is there something bothering you?” Despite their talk last night, he worried that her mood was directly correlated with him.
In response, she passed over the paper in her hand. It was an old obituary from 2001, a poet whose name Wes remembered from school. He scanned the sheet until he found the poem “Thoughts on Bread.” It was about a woman in a bakery examining the day-old sale goods and was a rumination on the role of women in the home. He couldn’t make the connection between the poem and whatever Nadine was thinking, and he looked up.
“Did you like the poem?” he asked.
A half smile passed over her face. “Not particularly, but that’s not what I was thinking about.”
He sat beside her and leaned back against a box. “Deep thoughts about the ephemerality of life?”
“Sort of.” She propped herself on her arms behind her, arching her back in a way Wes found absorbing. “When I went to the Herald , Irina told me they’d put in a temporary obituary editor after Raj left.”
He kept quiet and waited for her to finish.
“My first thought was resentment.” She sounded astonished at herself. “That was my job. How dare they give it to someone else?”
“Did you feel that way about Raj?”
“Then, I was too upset about being punished.” Nadine went red. “Also I like Raj, and he did a good job. This person doesn’t care as much.”
“That bothers you?”
“Yeah.” She looked thoughtful. “It does. I’ve been thinking about this since that day with Dot. We live in a world where we can access someone’s recordings and audio for eternity after they die, but since that person is gone, it leaves a strange dissonance. An obituary gives closure to someone’s time here with us, when they were still alive, and we could interact with them.”
She put the empty can aside to shake out her wrists. He took her hand and began to rub along the delicate bones. “You don’t have to be on the politics beat,” he pointed out.
“You don’t need to be on the I-team.”
“I know. But I want to. Nothing else calls to me like that, and it’s the reason I got into journalism in the first place. I felt alive working on those stories. It sounds like you, on the other hand, might be thinking about opening up your opportunities.”
“Do you think so?” Then she gave her head a decisive shake. “No, I want to cover politics. I can make a difference there.”
“From what you said before, you can make a difference with obits as well.”
“Maybe.” She sounded thoughtful. “We should get back to work.”
“Or,” he said, “we could start in a minute.”
She gave him that heart-stopping smile that, for ten years, had always made him feel things. “In a minute,” she agreed.
Wes did not in general consider himself a particularly lucky man. He wasn’t unlucky—more things had gone his way than hadn’t—but he figured that was about average for most people. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t.
However, with Nadine reaching for him, he was the human equivalent of a horseshoe, four-leaf clover, and maneki-neko all in one. When she straddled him, her hair falling over his face, he couldn’t help but shut his eyes to try to separate out the feelings. She tucked in closer and leaned down to kiss him, keeping him in place with her hands on his shoulders. Her mouth tasted like her cherry-mint lip gloss, and Wes knew, deep in his bones, that the scent would come up when remembering the most precious moments of his life. Then Nadine shifted and pulled him down, and he forgot about everything except the soft feel of her thigh under his hand and how that birthmark didn’t look like a rabbit at all once he got close.