Window Shopping, page 15
Somehow I want to laugh and cry at the same time. “Aiden…”
“I should pass these out and get back to work before I embarrass myself.” He swallows, his eyes running a lap around my face. “Have a good day, Stella.”
He’s gone before I can respond and I know it’s for the best to walk away. Just walk. And with a squaring of my shoulders, I do. But I can’t help but glance backwards as I leave the merchandise room and I find Aiden watching me go with his heart in his eyes. As for my heart, it stays locked inside my throat for the rest of the day.
12
Stella
It’s the Monday before Christmas—the last week to shop before the big day.
I’m sitting cross-legged in the window box eating a ham sandwich from the deli, the glass no longer able to muffle the increasing din of humanity crowding the sidewalks outside. The exclamations as they pass my red dress window make me smile into a bite, but it fades pretty fast when I remember the morning of the unveiling. Aiden’s face when he saw it. The way we touched in the backseat of his car, pulling and pushing at each other like we didn’t know what to do with all of the gravity between us.
Avoiding each other turned out to be the only solution. I haven’t seen him since Saturday morning when he gave me the Christmas party invitation. Although, when I unlock the window box every morning and step inside, I swear the scent of peppermint is lingering in the air. Then again, that might just be wishful thinking on my part. I mean, come on. It’s not like he’s coming in here and pining for me before the store opens.
Right?
I’m not ready to let go of the belief that you’re mine yet.
“Hey!”
I squeak a little when Jordyn clicks into the window box on a pair of electric-blue heels, wiping away the visions in my mind of a yearning man in a bow tie. Almost.
“I came to check your progress.”
There’s something a little jumpy about my new friend’s demeanor today. Even after knowing Jordyn for only a short period, though, I know better than to ask what’s on her mind right away. We’ll get there eventually. Or more likely, she’ll reveal something under her breath and pretend I wasn’t supposed to hear it.
I swipe some sandwich crumbs off the lap of my black skirt and stand, re-tucking the edges of my dark green, long-sleeved shirt into my waistband—and I did not wear this to be festive. Definitely not. The green is just a coincidence. “It’s coming along well,” I say, looking down at the mannequin that is the focal point of the window. “It’s nice not to be in a huge rush with this window. I can take my time with Norma.”
“Excuse me,” Jordyn says. “You named the mannequin?”
“Oh, she has a whole persona. She’s thirty-nine. A single, career-driven lady who is about to make partner at her firm. But with one month to go until she turns forty, she realizes how little self-care there is in her life. When was the last time she pampered herself? Never, that’s when. And she isn’t planning on it now. There is work to be done.” I reach down to brush the fine edge of Norma’s bangs. “She has some good friends, though. College roommates. And they know her better than she knows herself. They see she’s only doing for others. All she gives herself is pressure. So they give her the gift of rediscovering her physical beauty with a smoky eye kit from Chanel and the 24k Gold Mask from Peter Thomas Roth.”
“Ah, that’s why you asked me to order more stock.” Jordyn steps back, seeming to look at Norma in a new light. “I see what you’re doing here. You’re treating the window as her mirror. It’s like a two-way glass into a woman’s bathroom and she’s getting ready for the night.”
“Everyone has an inner voyeur. It’ll be impossible to pass by the window when a woman is looking right at them applying mascara.”
The corners of Jordyn’s mouth lift into a smile. “You kept your word. This is definitely going to send customers to my department.” She runs a finger along the collar of Norma’s cherry blossom silk robe. “They’re going to want this little number, too. You spoke to women’s apparel about having extra on hand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good, I might have to snag one for myself,” Jordyn mutters, tugging on an ear.
There’s my opening. “Oh? Have you got someone to impress?”
“Haven’t decided yet,” she says breezily, clicking to the other side of the window to examine the candle sconces affixed to the rear wall. “Would you believe Seamus asked me to the Christmas party on Thursday? He wants me to walk in with him. Like a couple. I’m going to look like a chaperone taking her step-nephew to the prom or something.”
“Uh…” This has me genuinely puzzled. “You’re not that much older than him, Jordyn. And if he’s not bothered by it—understatement—maybe you don’t have to be?”
She chews on the inside of her cheek. Crosses and uncrosses her arms. “Listen, I swear I don’t have a type. Nothing like that. But my ex happened to be younger by three years and he liked to remind me of that. He’d point it out all the time, sort of implying that he could be out partying, instead of home with me. Like I was forcing him to be there. Like he was doing me a favor.”
“And now you hear his voice in your head, no matter how badly you want to block it.”
“Yeah.” She looks at me, expression shrewd. “You have some experience with that?”
I nod, but keep my lips clamped together. This thing with Nicole is too current to speak about. It’s not in the past yet. “Is Seamus similar in any other way to your ex?”
“No. God no. For one, Seamus can dance.” She curses, shakes her head. “We shared a little kiss at a staff party once. It was smooth, I’ll give him that. But Friday night? I did not see the hip movements coming. He was giving me a dick preview. That’s what it was. A dick. Preview. He’s actually got me wondering about the feature presentation now. Damn it.”
My sides hurt from the sudden need to laugh. “Answer without thinking. Do you want to go to the party with him?”
“Yes.” She tilts her head back and groans. “Fuck my life.”
“Sorry.”
Jordyn sighs, fluttering a hand as if to shoo away the topic of Seamus. “Speaking of the Christmas party, you’re coming, right?”
Not a chance.
I avoid looking at her, stooping down to gather up the empty soda can from my lunch and some balled up napkins. “I’m not sure yet. Maybe?”
“How do we make that a definitive yes?” She seems to be choosing her words carefully. “I know you haven’t gotten that first check yet—and I was in your shoes once. If you need to borrow something? Or we can talk to womenswear about discounting a dress for you—”
Jordyn is cut off when a security guard walks into the window box.
He’s followed by two more security guards.
Mrs. Bunting from human resources brings up the rear, clutching a folder to her chest with my name on it. “The one in the green shirt. That’s her—Stella Schmidt. She’s our only employee with a criminal record and I’d like her searched, please.”
The ground tilts beneath me.
In the matter of a second, I’m ice cold. My teeth are chattering, the sandwich in my stomach threatening to come up.
“Searched for what?” Jordyn demands to know.
“I just ran an inventory report. We are missing two very expensive pairs of earrings. Diamonds. Miss Schmidt has been here after hours every night for a week. She must have found a way into the locked cases and taken them. There’s no other explanation.”
“I didn’t take anything,” I wheeze, pressing a hand to my pitching stomach. “I swear. I didn’t. I-I don’t have access to the display cases—”
She snorts. “I’m sure someone like you has ways.”
Am I terrified right now? Oh yeah. I’m shaking so hard my muscles are beginning to ache. But there is also a part of me that’s oddly relieved. I’m not getting special treatment. I’m getting what so many of my fellow inmates spoke about. The unfair, unfounded suspicions, the assumptions placed on them by society. I’m finally getting a glimpse of that—albeit on a much smaller scale—and I’m almost grateful it’s finally happening. The other shoe is dropping. My luck has run out. Ironic that I didn’t do the crime this time, but so be it.
“I’m going to get Mr. Cook,” Jordyn says, jogging from the window box.
My throat is closed up too tight to call after her. What would I say anyway?
No? Don’t get Aiden?
There’s no one else to intervene on my behalf.
Unless…he believes I took those earrings.
As I’m led out of the window box and through the riveted main floor, the security guard holding my purse at his side, my left wrist locked in his other hand, I can barely feel my own embarrassment. I’m too busy envisioning Aiden’s disappointment, hot pressure blooming behind my eyes at the possibility of it.
* * *
Aiden
“Are you sure I can’t send a driver to pick you up on Thursday?” I ask Edna through the receiver of my office phone. I’m picturing all kinds of sweat-inducing scenarios that end in my tiny aunt getting abducted or lost in the wilds of JFK airport. “I’ll come get you myself.”
“I’ll hear of no such thing,” she says, cackling down the line. “You don’t have time to traipse out to the airport in the middle of your busiest shopping day of the year. I’m an independent woman—” She muffles the receiver. “Hank, if you roll your eyes at me one more time today, I’m going to carve them out with my painter’s knife.”
I know better than to utter a single syllable when Aunt Edna and Uncle Hank are having one of their classic stare downs. It’s a scene I can picture in my head clear as day and it’s probably taking place in their screened-in porch. Paints and canvases and half-drunk glasses of sweet tea are taking up every surface. Hank is probably patting at the sweat on the back of his neck, watching Edna on the phone like it’s a spectator sport, never actually getting on the horn himself.
“As I was saying, I’m more than capable of getting a taxi to the party. Just send me the address and don’t worry about a thing. Save your fretting for coaxing me off the dance floor.”
She curses when something scatters in the background. A mason jar full of beads or some such art supply. “I’ll clean that up later. Now are you going to tell me about the girl or are we going to drag this out another twenty minutes?”
I sit up a little straighter in my chair, shooting a glance toward Leland. Keeping my voice low, I say, “How did you…?”
“You’re doing a hell of a lot of sighing, Aiden Cook. Tell me what’s up.”
“You are,” Leland stage whispers from across the office. “Sighing a lot.”
“You can hear this?” I shoot back, pointing at the receiver.
He becomes engrossed by something on his computer screen.
I sigh again. Loudly. Lord, how many times have I done that? No wonder Edna is on to me. I sound like a deflating bouncy castle. Feel like one, too. It’s not getting any easier keeping my distance from Stella. Granted it’s only been three days since the last time we were face to face, but a year might as well have passed. I woke up in the cookware section at three am this morning with a whiskey hangover and had to do the walk of shame past a dozen judgmental mannequins to the outside world where I took an Uber home to shower. Now I’ve got a headache and a big chunk carved out of my chest. Sighing doesn’t relieve me of the hollowness, so I have no idea why I’m doing it or what it’s for.
Maybe when a man is flat out miserable, his body insists on letting the world know about it. Like an unconscious cry for help. I have the heartache version of a man cold.
Reaching toward the front of my desk, I brush a finger over the binoculars she picked out for me the night we traded gifts. “I wish I had something good to tell you,” I say, trying for a chuckle but it sounds like someone stepping on a bullfrog. “You’d…love her.”
There’s a pause. “Well if I’d love her, she can’t be stupid. I’d consider it pretty stupid if she let you get away.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Complicated is a love triangle with a rodeo clown. Hank.” The zing of metal on the other end of the line tells me she’s made good on her painting knife threat. Or at the very least, she’s brandishing it like a weapon. “I swear. Roll your eyes one more time. I never loved that clown like I love your crabby ass. But we lived in the same house and you hadn’t spoken to me in nine months. Nine. Not a bless you or a how’s it hanging.”
There’s a grunt in the background.
“I’m crazy about you. But I’ll still carve out your eyeballs.”
Grunt. This one more affectionate.
Edna returns to the conversation with a sniff. “I can’t convince Hank to come with me to New York. He thinks there are too many people in our local Dairy Queen, let alone Fifth Avenue.”
I picture Hank standing in the middle of Times Square in his coveralls and it almost makes me want to smile for the first time in days. “You’ll bring him back something nice.”
“I’ll consider it. Now back to this girl. Why is it complicated?”
There isn’t a whole lot I can say in front of Leland and that’s the issue, isn’t it? I want to talk about Stella freely, but even the fact that I am harboring a reservoir of feelings for her is against policy. The company’s and my own personal one. Damn, I’ve wanted to break the rules every other minute since I walked out of her apartment. I’ve gone down to her window box just to catch the scent of her, to stand in the space she occupies every day and feel close to her. Countless times, I’ve thought to myself, go downtown. Make love to her. She will come around. She will see that we’re right.
There’s a roadblock inside of me, though, that I can’t seem to bypass.
I won’t sell us short or start a relationship with a lie. I won’t inadvertently put her in a position to feel…required to stay with me—or worse, sleep with me—because I employ her and she doesn’t want to lose her job. By now I hope she has some confidence that would never, ever happen, but assumptions are reckless and I won’t make them, especially in this case. Especially with someone who is crossing a vulnerable bridge in her life, like Stella.
All of this reasoning doesn’t keep me from missing her, though.
From needing her like hell.
I didn’t even turn my Christmas tree lights on this morning. Just sat there in the dark like a sad sack wondering if her apartment in Chelsea gets sufficient heat.
“You’re sighing again, Aiden.”
I drag a hand down my face, bristle scoring my palm. Did I forget to shave?
“I’ll tell you about it when you get here, Edna—”
My office door flies open. Linda, the receptionist, is standing there shoulder to shoulder with Jordyn. Wait. What is Jordyn doing all the way up here? She manages the main floor. And now she’s approaching my desk in a hurry, gesturing for me to hang up the phone. I don’t know how I’m positive in this moment that something isn’t right with Stella. I just know.
“Sorry, I have to go, Edna. Call you back.” I drop the phone into the cradle and it takes me a few seconds to place it correctly, my hand is suddenly so useless. “What’s wrong?”
Jordyn twists and twists the bracelet around her wrist. “Stella…”
That single word and I’m winded, my vocal cords tightening. “What happened?”
“Look, Mr. Cook. There is no way she did it.”
My phone is ringing. Two lines. What the hell is going on? I’m not answering. I’m not going anywhere or speaking to anyone else until I have the story. My muscles are seized up in anticipation of moving. Figuring out what’s going on and moving. “No way she did what?”
“They’re claiming she stole some earrings,” Jordyn explains, her outraged expression making it crystal clear what she thinks of the accusation. “I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I just came to get you. But I think security will have taken her to human resources.”
Jesus Christ. I’m already standing up, moving toward the door, Leland running to catch up with me. Wind is roaring in my ears. The concept of pressing the call button for the elevator makes no sense, so I don’t even bother. I go for the stairs.
She has to be terrified.
This is my fault. This is my fault. I hired Stella and assumed everyone wouldn’t question that decision. That they would accept the fact that she has a troubled past and treat her with the same respect as everyone else. Like any other employee. I’d just lead by example and everyone would follow suit. That was naïve of me—I can see that now. Now she’s been brought by security to the back office. Like a criminal.
Anger filters in through the shock and denial.
It crowds into my throat and burns down my esophagus.
Cold perspiration has already soaked the back of my dress shirt by the time I reach the lobby floor and burst through the steel door. I hook a right and rush through the entrance of the first office on the left. Two security guards and Roxanne Bunting, head of human resources, turn to look at me. The guards are stoic but Roxanne looks nothing short of smug, setting off a wild hammering in my temples.
“Where is Miss Schmidt?” I ask through my teeth. One of the guards takes a step back, wisely recognizing that I’m on the verge of imploding.
“Mrs. Bunting asked us to bring her to the back room.”
I stride past them, intending to find and reassure Stella that this mess is going to get straightened out. But I’m brought up short when I see my grandmother sitting behind one of the desks, a cup of tea steaming at her elbow. Behind her, my father leans against a file cabinet, twisting the gold watch around his wrist. My gut plummets.
Here it is. This is the T I didn’t cross, isn’t it? This is the disaster I didn’t see looming.
“Hello Aiden,” my grandmother says blithely, leaning down to blow on her tea.
“Aiden,” sighs my father with a lazy nod.
My gaze travels to the closed back door, everything inside of me protesting the fact that Stella is on the other side. Scared. Probably worse than the time she locked herself in the window box. Heartburn detonates in my chest with a vengeance just thinking about it. “What are you doing here?” I ask Shirley and Brad.
