What We Know Is True, page 17
I brought my hand back up and knocked once, then harder. When the door started to open, I almost had to force my feet not to turn and run in the other direction.
“Hi, can I help you?” Jerrica peered at me. “Oh, wait. Do I know you?”
“I’m Karis. I work with Reid.” I was trying not to stare at her, her puffy lips, her messy hair, her beautiful, long legs exposed by the short t-shirt she was wearing. She looked gorgeous. “Is he here?”
She smiled. “Of course. Come on in.”
In the three weeks since Augusta had given birth to Phoebe, everything had been going at top-speed at work. Reid and I were still alone in the office, but crew from California was due to arrive any day and we were preparing for that. The deal with PanyaCreates was moving forward. Three new products were in the development pipeline, including the one inspired by my poor taste in clothes and faulty accessorizing.
And Reid and I had gone back to being friends—mostly. We were talking pretty normally, we were laughing and working well. We hadn’t gone running and we hadn’t done anything together outside of work except when we saw each other and talked a little at Augusta’s house while visiting the baby (who was, without a doubt, the most wonderful and perfect human ever created. The golden ratio, personified). But behind everything, I could tell that he was being careful, careful not to cross any lines or blur any boundaries. It made total sense. And it was making me very, very unhappy.
Then I read in her blog that Jerrica was coming to town and wow, that it much worse. Reid had taken the day off on Friday, not telling me why or where he was going, but it was right there online for me to read. And now it was Monday; forty-eight hours had come and gone. Why was she still here?
“Hang on, I’ll get him for you.” She ran her fingers through her tousled blonde waves and stretched as she walked to the partially enclosed room off the main space, the bedroom. Her t-shirt pulled one way and the other as she bent and then extended her arms over her head, exposing perfectly small hips.
I hated her.
“Reid,” she said, as she opened the door to his room. The walls were really just partitions that didn’t extend to the ceiling, so I could hear every word.
Jerrica laughed. “Get up, lover! Did I wear you out?” Her voice was husky. Oh, gracious. I didn’t want to know this.
Reid mumbled something back.
“Your assistant is here from work, the little, frumpy girl that Augusta knows,” Jerrica continued. “Come talk to her so I don’t have to.” I heard her giggle. “Scoot over! God, it’s good to be back together again.”
I stood as if stuck to the floor. As much as I wanted to run away, as fast as I could go, I couldn’t stop listening. And I had to try to get him to come back to the office with me—I had no idea what I would do with the PanyaCreates people alone.
The door to the bedroom opened again, and Reid came out, tugging on a shirt. He looked dreadful.
“Karis. I’m sorry, I slept in,” he said, sounding groggy.
It was after nine o’clock. “Panya and Matías will arrive soon, I checked their flight and it’s on schedule, so…” One, two, three, four, five, my fingers tapped out, then counted back to one.
“Jerrica must have turned off my alarm. If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll get ready and we can go to the office together.”
“Reid,” Jerrica called from the bedroom, and both of us looked toward the sound of her voice.
“Oh, no, no thank you. I’ll meet you there,” I said. Finally, my feet started to move and I backed away from him in the direction of the exit. I turned and practically ran out, slamming the heavy door shut behind me and not stopping until I got back to my car, my little, frumpy car. I felt my lower lip tremble so I bit it. She was right about me, except the part about me being his assistant, but there was no reason to cry over it. Who cared what Jerrica said, I told myself.
I did. I went back to the office and checked all of her social media to see why she was still in Detroit and what she was doing. If she had said anything new about Reid.
He came in only about fifteen minutes after I arrived. “I’m sorry. How much time do we have before they get here?”
“Not too long, depending on traffic.” I couldn’t look at him, so I busied myself looking at my screen, some papers, my shoes.
“I don’t know if you heard what Jerrica said—”
“Nope,” I interrupted quickly. “I don’t know what you mean.” Unless he meant that Jerrica had called him lover and me his frumpy, little girl assistant, and said they were back together. “I’m sorry I bothered you at your loft. I had been calling…”
“I know. I saw your messages after I got up.” He sighed and sat across from me, looking only slightly better than when he had rolled out of bed that morning. I meant, he always looked good, but he didn’t look well.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked curiously.
“It was a busy weekend,” he answered briefly. “Let’s go over what the lawyers sent on Friday about Panya. Page four, paragraph two…”
We were still reviewing documents when the Panya team arrived. This was their turn to see us in action, but mostly they seemed interested in going to the casinos in Greektown after they visited us. Our office was looking better, with real furniture, art (no nudes), and a stocked kitchen in preparation for the arrival of the team from California, and both Panya and Matías were impressed by it and the view. We had explained that more employees were making the transition to Detroit, but the giant, mostly unpopulated space still must have seemed odd to them. And they both thought it was unusual that Reid and I sat at one big desk together, when there were many, empty, separate desks where we could have spread ourselves out.
“We like it like this,” Reid explained. “Let’s go have lunch. There’s a great Uruguayan restaurant nearby. You’ll like it,” he said in an aside to me.
“Oh, I love chivitos!” Panya enthused. “Do you think they can do a paleo version?”
“I doubt that,” he told her.
Matías and I ended up walking a little behind them. “I brought you something,” he told me, then handed me a little bag.
I opened it. “The Chinese Shawl? I love this book! It’s one of my favorites!” I told him, just as enthusiastic as Panya had been about the Uruguayan food. I opened the cover and read the familiar words. “It’s a first edition! Did you—you didn’t mean for me to keep this, did you?”
Matías laughed as we reached the elevators. “It’s not much of a gift if I take it back,” he noted.
“Well, thank you.” Reid and Panya were watching me.
“What do you have there, Pru?” Reid held out his hand and I gave him the book. But he looked at Matías instead of the cover. “You remembered she liked this,” he said.
“It’s not often that I meet someone with the same odd hobby,” he answered, and Panya laughed too.
“Don’t get him started about his other hobby, number theory,” she said, and nudged Matías.
“Wait, really?” I asked, and we were off and running.
Reid just did not look right. The whole time we were at lunch eating chivitos I was observing him, and I didn’t see him take one bite of food. Maybe Jerrica had made him sick. Or maybe he was too tired to eat because he had been going at it like Dionysus all weekend. The thought of that made me choke on chivito and start coughing until Reid reached over to pound on my back.
We said goodbye to Panya and Matías in the late afternoon and they went out to explore the city and gamble. Before they left, Matías asked if he could call me.
“Sure,” I answered. “I’m available anytime.”
He smiled at me. “It was very nice to see you, Karis.”
“Thank you again for the book.” And he left, following after Panya who had given both me and Reid multiple cheek kisses.
“Want to go for a run?”
“Really?” I asked Reid. He didn’t look up to it, and we hadn’t been out anywhere together that wasn’t work-related since Miami.
“Really. I need to get outside.”
May had just begun and the days were getting even longer, the air softer. We started easily and gradually picked up the pace. Reid looked down at me. “You’re running like you mean it.”
“I made five miles last week.” I could talk a lot better while I ran, now.
“You didn’t tell me that. Congratulations. Watch it.” He pulled me to the side so I didn’t step in some dog poop.
“Thank you.”
“What’s your goal now?” he asked me.
“I’m at my goal. I’ll keep running five miles,” I said. “I did it.”
“Don’t you want to go for more? Train for something bigger?”
“No,” I said, a little hurt. I thought that five miles was pretty much the pinnacle for me. “I don’t need to keep pushing. I got what I wanted and I’m satisfied with that. I just need to keep it up.”
Reid ran for a few more paces before he answered. “You and I have different ways of thinking, Prudence. I don’t know what will ever be enough.”
“Five miles is far. I’m proud of myself for doing it.”
“I mean, in anything. I’m being deep,” he explained, and laughed a little.
“Well, I’m satisfied all around. I have good friends,” three of them, since I was now counting baby Phoebe, “and my mom is doing well. I have a job I really enjoy, I’m back to saving and not worrying so much about our finances. Things are pretty good.” Except for my dad moving home with us soon, and me being farther than ever from my New Year’s goal. And, oh yes, the man I was secretly, hopelessly in love with was wrong for me and back with his ex. Besides that, things were good.
“Matías seems like a nice guy,” Reid commented.
I nodded. “It was nice of him to bring me the book.”
“You got that he’s interested in you, right?”
I stumbled a little. “What?”
“When he said that about calling you? He didn’t mean about work.”
“Yes, he did.” I took a quick look at Reid’s face to see if he was joking. “He didn’t?”
“Nope. And you said you were available anytime, so I’d expect to hear from him if I were you.”
“That’s not what I meant!” I protested. “I meant, if he had questions about…” Once again, just like in my dating profile, I had made it sound like I would meet up at a motel. “I told you before that I needed social practice,” I said, and Reid smiled a little.
“You’ll figure it out.”
But I wasn’t interested in Matías, anyway, even if he his hobbies did seem to line up with mine. I summoned my courage to change the topic to something I was interested in. “Jerrica stayed in Detroit for a long time. Is she giving up on the forty-eight hours rule?”
“No. She took a break from the schedule to talk to me. She wants me to come back out on the road with her.”
I stumbled again and I would have fallen if Reid hadn’t grabbed me. “I’m ok. I have it,” I said, and pushed away from him. I was suddenly panting as hard as I did when I first started running. “Are you going to?”
When he didn’t answer, I thought I understood. “Is that why you were acting so strangely today? Because you made the decision to leave?”
“I was just tired from everything we did over the weekend.”
Oh gracious, it was some kind of Dionysian orgy! “Really? What did you do?”
“First, we flew to Chicago...” He started naming all the activities, all the places, all the fun, and I started getting tired just hearing about all they had accomplished.
He hadn’t answered my question, though. “Did you decide to go with Jerrica again? Permanently, on the road?”
“No.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “I think that’s a good decision.”
“I mean, I haven’t made any decision, not yet.”
So he had been considering it. “There are a bunch of people moving to Detroit very soon who expect you to be here, too.” I was so busy trying to read his facial expression that I almost ran into the corner of a building. “Would you really leave them?” Would he really leave me? This was what Augusta had been worried about. She had said exactly this, that she wondered if Reid would ever be able to stay in one place. He had barely graduated from college because he couldn’t stop moving around, she had said.
“I know there are people depending on me.” He sounded resigned. That wasn’t a good approach, then. Making people feel guilty made them resent you, it didn’t convince them of the validity of your argument. I needed to try something else.
“I thought you said that you were tired of that lifestyle. That you wanted to stay someplace longer. That was what you said to me on the beach.”
“Yes, but there’s a big world out there, Pru. Jerrica made me feel like maybe I’m wasting time.”
“You’re running a business, you’re busy with family and friends.” Because, as I had forecasted, he had already made them. “I can’t see how that’s time wasted.”
Reid just looked off toward the horizon. Again, I wasn’t convincing him.
“You told me that there’s plenty to do here. Remember? You said you were going to buy a boat,” I reminded him.
“Do you remember everything I say? I guess I did mention that.”
“Well, lately I’ve been considering doing more things, too. You know, new experiences.”
“Didn’t you just say that you’re satisfied with how things are?” he asked.
“I meant, I’ve been considering since I said that.”
Reid started laughing but I persevered. “I was just thinking how I wanted to start trying new things. Like I started running, and now I’m going to start something else even newer. Probably a lot of newer things. Like, maybe this weekend I’ll try something I’ve never done before.”
“By yourself?”
“Maybe you could come, if you wanted.” I waited.
“Maybe we could do that. Let’s come up with a plan.”
Maybe I had made him think about staying, at least. “Were you sick this morning?”
“I think I ate something bad over the weekend.” He listed a vast array of foods he and Jerrica had eaten, including raw meat (he called the dish by a nicer name but explained what was in it, and raw meat was raw meat). “I felt sick last night but it’s better now.”
I kept my mouth closed about food-borne pathogens and focused on keeping down what was in my own stomach as I thought about ingesting them.
“You don’t need to worry about your job, Karis,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t mean to make you worried. You’re totally safe with me, all right?”
Maybe for my job, I was. In heart-related matters, that was just not the case. We finished up our run in silence.
∞
Ione looked me up and down. “Karis, you know what I think about external beauty…”
“Yes, I know, but right now that’s what I want you to focus on. Is this outfit ok?” Ione wasn’t my go-to for fashion advice but she had come in for an interview with Reid and afterwards I had hustled her into the bathroom with me. We were looking for a receptionist and I thought she might fit the bill. She was rethinking her stance on the drag of regular hours and the soul-killing monotony of corporate life now that she was struggling to pay her student loans without the regular and monotonous paycheck. The receptionist job would be easy for her and personally, I was going to love seeing her again.
But first, I had to get through the evening, and I needed Ione’s help. My mom had summed it up: it never rained, it poured. Two days after he and Panya had come to visit, Matías had called me. It had been a very awkward conversation about authors, mostly, that didn’t go very far, and when we hung up there wasn’t any intimation that either of us would be in touch again about anything other than our companies. Anyway, he lived in Florida. I wasn’t moving there and he wasn’t coming to Detroit on a permanent basis. I needed someone in-state.
But then, almost immediately after the chat with Matías, I got a message from Daniel, saying that he wanted to get together for dinner. It had been a few weeks since the night that ended so badly on his couch, and I thought I would give it another chance. It wasn’t like men were waiting in the wings for an opportunity with me. Reid certainly wasn’t—from what I had overheard at his apartment, I thought that he and Jerrica were back together. Maybe it was crazy to go out with him, but Daniel and I’d had some perfectly acceptable dinners. He had gotten a little excited when we kissed but maybe that was something we could fix. Maybe I could make it work with him. “Ione, what do you think about my clothes? My hair, makeup?”
Ione looked me up and down again. “Is your skirt supposed to be so long?” she asked finally. “It stops right below your knee.”
“Yes, that’s on purpose. I’m not a big fan of my knees.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Are you serious? See? That is exactly why I don’t have any mirrors! They make you focus on your own flaws.”
“Well, I don’t need a mirror to see my knees…”
She now studied her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. “Wow, I could really use a haircut.”
I rolled the waistband of my skirt until the hem rose a little higher. “Better?”
“Now it looks like you’re wearing an innertube around yourself. Unroll it.”
I did and shook my head. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Daniel isn’t interested in how I look.”
“Really? That’s great, Karis! So you guys connect on an emotional level?”
I shook my head again.
“Spiritual? Intellectual?”
“No…”
“Sexual?” she asked, and the word “No!” snapped out of my mouth before she finished speaking.
“Then, what’s the connection? I don’t get it,” she said, puzzled.
I brushed my hair impatiently. “We just, I don’t know, we’re just fine.”
Ione held out her hand and I loaned her the brush, trying not to think about lice again. “Your hair is so beautiful, Karis. I mean, looking at mine, I remember why I gave away my mirrors to the Humane Society,” she said.
