2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
I couldn’t even really tell you why. Probably it was because I’d already said it: I’ll be in by eleven, and going against something I’d told my supervisor wasn’t in my nature even when I was explicitly going out of my way to do things that weren’t in my nature.
Instead, I went to a coffeeshop and got a drink.
After that, I visited a bookstore. It was nice. Really nice.
No sirens and no complaints. Just me showing up a couple hours later than normal.
I’d spent two decades treating this building the way I’d treated Debbie, the way you’d treat a demigod you needed to appease with constant sacrifice. As if dropping the ball, being late—being human—was some kind of mortal sin.
And of course it wasn’t.
I’d just started sifting through my e-mail when a knock on the doorframe made me glance up. It was Brenda.
“Hey, Tom,” my supervisor said. There was a tightness around her eyes that could have been from me or from something else entirely. “You doing okay? Everything get sorted out?”
Had it? McKenna’s voice echoed in my skull. Debbie made Bailey sign up for the Sweetheart app…
“For the most part,” I said, nodding. “Not entirely out of the woods, but things are looking up.”
Brenda blinked. I think she’d expected me to demur: to insist that nothing had been wrong, to apologize for being late. The fact that I didn’t surprised her.
But didn’t seem to upset her, I noted.
“Good,” she said with a brisk nod. “I hate to do this to you the second you walked in the door, but the sales-numbers meeting this afternoon got moved up to—” she theatrically checked her Apple Watch, “—about ten minutes from now? I know we usually just give the team your deck, but since it’s not ready yet, can you do a quick presentation?
It’s in Conference B. I’m heading over there now. ”
A spike of fear erupted in my gut. Public speaking had never been my forte, and I didn’t have the numbers in front of me.
Maybe if I’d rehearsed, I wouldn’t feel so nervous, but the thought of standing in front of Mark’s department and talking about a bunch of sales figures I didn’t remember gave me hives.
“I…” I started.
Then I closed my mouth.
Oddly, it wasn’t Mark or Brenda I was thinking of. It was Miki. The nail tech.
Sitting across from me as she worked my cuticles, asking so what do Monday mornings at the bank look like for Tom Cottrell?
What had I told her?
Meetings. Meetings that could have been e-mails.
I laughed.
It was about the last thing Brenda expected. I saw her hand tighten on the doorframe, confusion filling her features. “If you can’t do it on such short notice, I understand,” she began. “I’m just kind of behind the eight ball here—”
“Did you send me the agenda?” I asked.
Brenda was looking at me a little bit like she’d never seen me before. I could see the unspoken question on her mind: what happened to you this morning?
“I did not,” Brenda admitted. “Sorry.”
I already had my e-mail open. “Never mind, I’m sure it’s the same as it always is. It’s just the same agenda every week with the dates changed, isn’t it?”
When I glanced up at Brenda, she actually chuckled.
“I do just change the date,” she admitted. “I probably shouldn’t be admitting that to you, but it’s true…”
I was already flipping through my files. “Cancel the meeting,” I said.
Brenda’s chuckle turned nervous. “Tom?”
“I’ll have the sales numbers to the team in the next thirty minutes,” I assured her, making sure the work was close enough to done that I wouldn’t have a problem hitting that deadline.
Then I sat up straighter, turning away from the computer, and gave her the full force of my gaze.
“Brenda, between you and me, the salespeople hate those meetings. Mark hates those meetings, and they’re mostly for him.
I’ll bet you twenty dollars he shows up thirty seconds after you send the cancellation e-mail to thank us both. ”
“Tom—”
“This whole thing should’ve been automated months ago,” I said.
I frowned. “I should’ve taken the lead here and done that.
It’s my responsibility.” A note of wonder entered my voice, as if I were just realizing this for the first time.
“I put being a people pleaser over respecting the time of this department. Over respecting your time, Brenda.”
Brenda’s mouth worked soundlessly for a long moment.
“Let them know that the agenda is the same and that the deck will be delivered in a half-hour,” I told her. “And that ‘if anything needs a decision, Tom’s door is open until five.’ You can use those exact words.”
I watched the wheels turn soundlessly behind my supervisor’s eyes. She weighed the consequences of cancelling the meeting on such short notice, versus the relief of never having to sit through another boring Monday-morning quarterbacking again.
And I saw her come to the same conclusion that I already had.
She let out a chuckle. “That’s good initiative,” she said, thumbing the message into her phone’s e-mail client. She glanced up at me. “You can really get it out in thirty?”
“It’s three-quarters done already,” I told her.
She tapped the screen of her work phone. “Sent,” she said, giving a little laugh like we’d both just gotten away with something. “You’ve just made the next ninety minutes of my life a lot easier, Tom. Thanks for handling that.”
I nodded. Somewhere in my gut, I half-expected the explosion. For the ceiling to come crashing down on my head, for a dozen angry e-mails to flood my inbox chiding me for daring to change the way we did things at CreditCore.
A couple of heads emerged from cubicles, popping up like prairie dogs. Mark’s people—the salescritters—checking to make sure Brenda and I hadn’t lost our minds. When they realized the meeting wasn’t happening, they sat back down and got to work.
How about that? I thought. I was a lot less powerless than I thought. I’d been behaving like a man drowning in the ocean when I’d really been floating in a fish tank. Brenda wasn’t mad at me—if anything, she looked grateful to see me taking something off her plate. To be taking initiative.
And again, the thought hit me: was it always that easy?
To change the things about my life I couldn’t stand? To stop listening to the nagging voices assuring me I needed to be a good, loyal doormat?
To reach for the girl I wasn’t supposed to have and make her mine?
I was still thinking about it when Mark’s head appeared in my office doorway.
“Yo, Tommy! Good to see you, man. Hope the weekend was dynamite.” He shot me a smile that said he knew exactly what I’d been doing at the Armada Hotel on Saturday night.
“You two finally turned that boring Monday meeting into an e-mail, huh? Past time.”
Brenda stared at Mark, dumbfounded.
I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “You owe me twenty dollars, boss.”
“I…” Brenda started to chuckle. “I never took that bet!”
“You two are betting and you didn’t tell me about it?” Mark asked.
“It’s nothing,” I told him, bailing Brenda out instead of throwing her under the bus even more. “Just a joke.”
“Cool.” Mark pointed at me. “Lunch at 12:30, eh? Not the cafeteria—I’m taking you to Perk.”
Perk was a boho coffeeshop a couple blocks away. Half the sales floor got their coffee there on the way in from work. The only reason I hadn’t gone there this morning was because I’d have gotten spotted. But then, would it have mattered?
“As long as you’re buying,” I said.
Mark laughed. “Thanks again for saving me the trouble of corralling the herd,” he told Brenda. “And Tom—you owe me a story, man.”
I knew it. “Twelve-thirty,” I told him, turning back to the spreadsheet.
“It’s a date,” he said.
Brenda looked like she’d swallowed a bug.
Then I was alone in my office, working on the reports. The process was second-nature to me by now—a good thing, because if it wasn’t I’d never have been able to finish in time. I had way too much on my mind.
Mostly Debbie.
I ran the whole conversation with Bailey and McKenna back in my head as I worked, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s on what I’d send to Mark and the team. Threading the needle. Making connections.
Debbie was broke. Broke and running a scam on lonely, middle-aged men—one dangerous enough that she’d coerced her daughter’s best friend into acting as a patsy so she wouldn’t lose face with the church and her new beau if the truth came out.
I tried to tally it up in my head. My mind worked through what I remembered of the settlement numbers as I typed in sales figures, making guesses at how much she’d paid for her new place and how much Pastor Kevin had probably bilked from her while his own home was ‘in escrow.’ I didn’t want the numbers to add up—but they did.
Which meant that everything that had happened on Sunday was a performance.
I mean, I’d known it was a performance, but now it was a performance with a maxed-out credit card sitting behind it.
Fancy champagne and hardwood floors. A man cave with a massive television and a ‘nitro cooling’ system for beers that tasted disgusting.
The whole thing was a calculated attempt at intimidation—for me and Bailey. A stage play, built to support a narrative about the living the good life that ran contrary to reality.
And I slept with Bailey in the middle of it, I thought with a chuckle.
But the mirth was short lived. Because something else had just occurred to me.
If not for my ex-wife, none of this would have happened.
I kept picking the thought up only to recoil from it like it was covered in spikes.
The app that brought Bailey to me was a weapon Debbie used to rob men with my exact profile.
I owed my entire new life—the women, the mindset, the love—to the worst thing Debbie ever did.
Or at least the worst thing I knew about.
If she’d been a better person, I never would’ve run into Bailey on Sweetheart.
Never would have swapped pictures with her.
Never would have booked that room at the Armada and had the greatest night of my life.
And that was the bitch of it. It chilled me to the bone. That I had Debbie to thank for all of that, even though she’d never meant it and would probably be horrified at what she’d accidentally unleashed inside of me.
I couldn’t square that circle, no matter how hard I tried.
I’d promised Brenda I’d get the deck to the sales team within thirty minutes.
It took less than ten, but I waited a few just so I didn’t look like quite as much of a show-off.
Once it was done, my list of tasks for the day looked a little lighter.
It surprised me how easy it was to get caught up, but maybe it shouldn’t have.
I was only two hours late to work, after all.
The meeting time came and went. Nobody went to Conference B.
About twenty minutes before Mark came to collect me, my phone vibrated. I fished it out of my pocket, holding it behind the desk. I figured it would be a text from Bailey, making sure I wasn’t freaking out too hard about our conversation from this morning. I was wrong.
It was from Miki.
Huh, I thought. Weird coincidence. A few minutes ago, I’d been thinking about her.
Apparently, she was thinking about me.
I won’t lie. That made me feel more than a little warm and fuzzy inside.
She’d sent a photo from the nail salon—Sakura’s current playlist on a little screen next to the Bluetooth speaker, her perfectly-manicured hand just barely visible on the side.
As I squinted and tried to zoom in on the songs, a text came in. soundtrack audition #1, Miki wrote, with a little emoji of a sparkle next to it. if you hate it, we can’t date. them’s the rules.
I shook my head, grinning like I was a teenager again. Game on, I thought.
A quick zoom-in confirmed the first half-dozen songs were all by the same band: some outfit I’d never heard of called t.t.p.v.
, all styled in lowercase the way Miki typed.
Google told me they were an instrumental math rock band out of Massachusetts, currently on hiatus, with three albums to their name.
Curious, I loaded up Spotify. Shimmering arpeggios filled my office, with a slinky bass-line bouncing back and forth underneath them.
Not bad. It reminded me of the stuff that had been playing when Bailey, Savannah and I arrived at Sakura, before Miki switched the Bluetooth speaker over to Talking Heads.
Which, I now only just realized, she’d obviously done for me.
And that gave me an idea.
I mean, it’s no Remain in Light, I wrote back, teasing her. Good soundtrack for a boring Monday at the office, though. Nice bass line.
For a second, I worried I’d gone too far. I was pretty sure she’d been joking about the whole ‘if you don’t like them, we can’t date’ thing, but what if Miki was the sort of person who took her music preferences very, very seriously?
I shouldn’t have worried. She sent me a wink, along with a link to the full playlist.
brave guy, exposing those office drones to music that’s not in 4/4, she wrote back. tell me more on friday. gotta let me know how the nails went, too.
Spoiler: they were perfect, I wrote back. Thanks for the tunes.
She sent me back an emoji of a face sticking out its tongue, a set of musical notes and a pair of headphones. least I can do to make your monday tolerable. might bug you with more sometime.
Something told me there was only one proper response to that. Tell me more, I wrote.
She sent back a laughing emoji and a sparkle. will do. ttyl, tom. can’t wait for friday.
I couldn’t, either.
“That girl is way too cool for me,” I muttered, turning my attention back to the computer.
The music continued to play in the background, quiet and intricate and somehow delicate despite the weird chords and time signature changes.
I caught myself bobbing my head along to it as I worked, even though I occasionally had to do it in three-quarters time.
When Mark appeared at the entrance to my office, I thought at first he had to be early. A quick glance at my battered old Citizen (with Mickey Mouse grinning up from the dial) shocked me: it was twenty-five minutes after twelve. Almost lunch.
Mark rapped perfunctorily on the door and took a step inside. “What are you listening to?” he asked, a confused smile stretching across his face as he heard what was coming from my speakers. “This isn’t even Savannah’s kind of music, is it?”
“Nope,” I admitted freely. “It’s, ah… something a girl sent me.”
Mark blinked. “The girl?”
I was already shaking my head. “This is something different. A date. Friday.”
Mark whistled. “Shit. You really are riding high, aren’t you, Tommy boy?”
I couldn’t exactly disagree with him.
“Where’d you meet her? Wait, don’t tell me—save it for Perk. And Tommy? I am buying, but only because you’re giving me all the dirty details. You still owe me a story.”
That I did.
I just hoped I could keep enough of the truth in it without giving away the actual truth.
I grabbed my jacket and followed Mark off of the sales floor.