What We Know Is True, page 21
“You were telling me in Florida that you had to make things work with that Daniel because you had a goal to accomplish. What were you talking about?”
“Nothing much.” I realized I was still pressing myself against him and pulled back. “Reid, what are you doing?”
His hand stilled in its path on my back. “I don’t know, Pru. I kissed you in Miami because I couldn’t seem to help myself. Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” I said, so fast he hadn’t quite finished the sentence. “I don’t want you to stop.”
“We work together. You work for me. I don’t—”
“No, no,” I interrupted. “I won’t let anything interfere with my work.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I knew what he was talking about. He was afraid that I would be mooning around the office in front of the people coming in from California. He was probably also thinking ahead, afraid that I wouldn’t understand that he was just playing around until he met someone else, that I would cause emotional scenes, things like that. Given how I had acted in front of him, the crying and carrying on, it made complete sense. “I’m always, always going to act professional at work. Always, no matter what. You know I need the job.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. I don’t want you to think that anything that happens between us outside the office will affect your job. It won’t, ever. Those are two separate spheres.” He was looking down at my face, intently and seriously. “You don’t have to worry.”
At the moment, all I was worried about was the feeling that I was going to explode, that I needed him to kiss me and touch me and more, right now, immediately. I had never felt like that in my life. I put my arms around his neck, trying to get closer. I wasn’t thinking about a plan, or the future, or the probability of problems occurring. For once, I wasn’t thinking at all.
“Ok,” Reid said, very softly. “Karis,” he breathed, and he bent his head and I stood on my tiptoes. He brushed his lips over my forehead, my nose, my cheeks, my lips, gently back and forth. Then just the very tip of his tongue glided across the seam of my lips until I opened my mouth and pressed up to him. He lifted me then so that my feet dangled above the floor and he kissed me harder, his tongue dancing inside my mouth, twisting and curling with mine. My heart pounded and all I could do was feel, his arms, his lips, his body against mine as he held me.
Reid walked us to the kitchen counter and eased me on it, then settled himself against me. He reached under my butt to pull me to him. A sound left my lips as our hips met and a jolt of pleasure from that spot, that private place between my legs, massaged against his body. Reid’s lips were at my ear, kind of nibbling, and then he moved to my neck and found another spot that made me gasp and shiver. He stayed there, biting gently, kissing, nuzzling, and I found myself pressing my core against him, moving my hips up and down. Oh, it felt…
He returned to my mouth and kissed me again. “Pru, you’re a fireball.”
I certainly felt incendiary at the moment. I reached my lips to his and kissed him, wrapping my legs around his hips so he thrust against me and we both moaned. His lips were on mine, firm and gentle and soft and hard, everything was soft and hard, rubbing and stroking against me. It felt so, so—I was going to, almost—
Reid gently broke our kiss and rubbed his nose against my cheek. He picked me up off the counter and put me back on my shaking legs and held me against his chest. I could hear his heart pounding again like it had at the baseball stadium, but now I knew it was because of me. I had made his pulse race, I had made him excited. Titillated. He reached and tilted my chin to look at my face and met my huge smile with one of his own.
∞
“Um, you can go…” I looked around at the desks that were still available. “What about that one?”
She didn’t look happy. “I really need to work near Nanda.”
I had no idea who Nanda was. Somehow I had gotten to be the one in charge of settling all the new employees starting today at their new desks. It was something of a logic puzzle. Like a magic square in math, but a lot less fun because people were generally unhappy about how I was solving it.
“Can you just go there for now, temporarily?” I asked, pointing across the room. “I think we’ll need to reorganize, but if you could just sit...” And get out of the way, so I could get everyone else to sit. She nodded, unconvinced, but walked over to put her box on an unclaimed desk.
“Who would like coffee and bagels?” Ione carried in a huge tray, and already two of the newly-transferred male employees were trailing behind her, staring at her lovingly. That hadn’t taken long. As of today, she was our new receptionist, and I was so glad to work with her again without having to actually do her work. And it turned out that free food was a universal panacea for office problems. The California transplants descended on the bagels and everyone was much happier and more at ease after a snack.
I yawned behind my hand as I chewed a salt bagel. It had been another long, long night with my father. My mom was with him this morning, but it would be my turn tonight, alone, while she went to work. When Reid had dropped me off the day before after the baseball game and dinner at his loft, I had found both my parents asleep on the couch, my mom clutching my father’s hand.
Reid. I couldn’t even think of him without my body kind of clenching inside, and it felt strange and wonderful. We had kissed more, over the plates of delicious Polish food, then later sitting on his couch. Once he had started to lay me back down on the pillows but he had stopped himself and sat up, pulling me with him. We had talked and laughed and kissed and I thought that he had forgotten about what happened on the balcony at the baseball game. Maybe he was even forgetting about wanting to leave Detroit.
I looked at him now, discussing with a contractor putting up the partition to go around our big desk in the corner of the office. We had pushed over it over early in the morning before anyone else arrived. “There. This will be our own space,” he had said, wiping his hands together. I had agreed, looking at his lips and thinking about kissing him. He had seen the direction of my eyes and made a move toward me, but stopped himself. We were at the office and it was all professional.
But my mind was not. I kept thinking of him at the beach, all that bronzed skin, and yesterday, his bright blue eyes so close to mine, and his mouth on my neck, and—
“It’s Carol, right?”
I snapped out of it. “Karis. Hi, um…”
“Eligio. You can call me Eli. You live around here, right? Can I ask you some questions about the area? Locals only information.”
I was the Michigan expert, it appeared. I pulled in Ione, who had a different take, and even texted Augusta, who knew everything about where to shop, eat and drink, and have fun. Some of the new people appeared to be having major culture shock due to their move from the Bay Area, and there were questions. Why was why gas was so cheap—why was everything so cheap compared to California? Why were the neighbors spontaneously saying hello? People really used turn signals when they drove here? Where were all the burrito places?
By the time we took everyone out to lunch for a traditional Detroit coney island, they had all settled in fairly well, and the partition was underway for my little space with Reid. In between working to get everyone settled in, I had done some actual work, too, and while Reid and I sat across from each other at our big desk, I had noticed some eyes on us.
“Why do Reid and Karis sit together?” I heard the woman I had identified as Nanda ask Ione as we all walked back to the office together after lunch.
I turned to see Ione smiling. She had taken one look at me when she walked in that morning and somehow known what was up. “Because they—” she started to say.
“Because we work jointly on a lot of projects,” I explained to Nanda. “It’s helpful to sit near each other. Like you and, um, Sarah?”
“Sarai.”
“Tell us more about California. The property tax structure is different from Michigan, isn’t it?” I suggested, a little desperate to change the subject, and thankfully, it worked. Nanda went on and on about the problems of California real estate. I tugged Ione into the ladies’ room when we got back to the office.
“Hey, I’m not sure what you think is happening between me and Reid…” I started to say.
“Karis, it’s obvious! You’re spewing out happiness, like a volcano!” she told me. “I really want to paint you again with this aura. Clothed, this time,” she assured me. “I hope you found a good place for my other painting, the nude.”
I couldn’t tell her its fate: Reid had placed it, still wrapped, in the dumpster. No one was ever going to have to look at my naked form again. Except, maybe…
“Yes! That’s it.” Ione got very excited. “I want to paint you with exactly that face. Like you’re wanting something dirty.”
“Oh gracious, is that how I look?” I was sure I’d been looking that way all morning.
She nodded happily. “Like you’re thinking about sex.”
Yikes. “Um, what do you think about Reid’s aura?”
Now she frowned a little. “Well, he seems, hm…”
“Yes? What? He seems what?”
“He seems confused,” she told me.
My heart sank. “Not happy?”
“Some happy, some sad. Confused. That was what I thought when I first met him at my house and he was so angry at me. He felt that way because he thought I had hurt you, and that was a good thing, because it meant he cared about you.”
“Really?” I asked her.
“Of course! It’s very obvious that he does. But he was very unhappy, too. I still think he seems unhappy. All the good feelings directed toward you are mixed up with sad ones. No wonder he’s confused.”
“Oh.” My heart sank a little. “I can’t believe you’re getting all that just by looking at him.”
Ione nodded sagely. “I’m pretty good at reading people. Also, I asked him.”
I froze. “What? You what?”
“At my party, later, after you introduced us, I asked him if he was angry at me because he thought I had gotten you fired, and we talked about it. I asked him about his accident, because you had been so upset about it, and I wanted to know if he was ok. It was obvious from what he said that he wasn’t ok, not at all. Then when I had my second interview last Thursday for the job here, he said, ‘Do you have any questions for me?’ So I asked him how he felt about you, because you had admitted that you loved him.”
“I didn’t admit to loving Reid.” My face turned red. “Did you tell him that? Hang on, Ione, you asked him—”
“Of course you admitted to loving Reid! When I said I might be interested in him, you told me that you loved him. Maybe not those exact words, but I knew what you meant. Sometimes you’re very hard to read but that was pretty obvious.”
I was panicking. “Wait, obvious to who?”
“Anyone with eyes!” Ione told me, smiling. “It’s wonderful! It makes the whole office glow.”
“Ione, I can’t believe that’s true. Wait, I want to go back to what you asked him in your interview.”
“Well, first I asked about the health plan, because you drilled that into me, and about retirement benefits, which I also know about thanks to you. Then I asked how he felt about you, and he said that you were integral to the company. So I said, ‘I think she’s integral to you,’ and he said yes, you were. Not in those words, but I knew what he was saying.”
I put my hands over my face. “Nothing in words, just a feeling you have. Basically your intuition is that he cares about me. I know that he does, because we’re friends. He stops me from running into things, and he’s concerned about my father living at home. He set up a run-in with Steven Whitaker to tell him about how I got fired.”
“Really?” Her eyes got huge. We retreated from the bathroom talking about that instead, and I tried to put out of my mind that Ione had been questioning Reid. I also tried to forget that while I while I was exuding happiness like a volcano, he was exuding confusion. I watched him across the desk as the partition around us went up and the other employees learned their way around the office, wondering if it was really obvious to everyone that I loved him.
Chapter 14
I stood at the sink and surveyed the mound of dishes. Our house, usually so immaculate, was a mess, from the crusted pots and plates in the kitchen, to the piles of dirty clothes and sheets in front of the washing machine, to the spring mud that we had tracked in on the hallway floor. My mom joined me in the kitchen and sat at the table, and I looked up at her, questioning.
“He’s asleep,” she assured me. “He just needs more rest. I don’t think they were doing a good job at that place settling his schedule. That’s why he’s up so much at night.”
I swallowed and viciously scrubbed at a pan. He was up so much at night because of his dementia. “It’s sundowning, Mom. It’s a symptom. They had him on a schedule, and they warned us about this.” I put down the pan and looked at her, studying the huge circles ringing her eyes and her pale, uneven skin. She looked about to fall down. “How are you going to go into work tonight?”
“I’ll be fine,” she told me, and I went back to scrubbing the pan angrily. Two weeks into having my father home and she wasn’t yet able to admit that it was a mistake. If anything, she was digging in harder, arguing that it wasn’t difficult to bathe him, not at all! She didn’t mind that she had to cook three different things to find the one he would eat that night, of course not! Sleep? Who needed it?
I did. I needed sleep, and exercise, and time spent doing other things, with other important people. I hadn’t seen Augusta or the baby since we had moved him home. I hadn’t been able to see Reid, except across the desk, and for a few quick runs during our lunch breaks. My mom still seemed so glad that my father was there but I felt anything but that. I was angry and resentful towards both of them. I knew that none of this was his fault, I really knew it intellectually, but I couldn’t tamp down the feelings. All I could do was try to hide them.
I wasn’t hiding them very well from Reid, even though I was trying to be exciting and interesting and, well, not plain old Karis Brown. I was tired at work, a little snappish sometimes. I had been looking forward so much to the previous weekend so that Reid and I could hang out together away from the office, but my father was being “difficult,” as my mom said, and I’d had to be home on Saturday. Then Reid had flown out to his California office early on Sunday morning and been gone for three days, and I had missed him. I missed seeing him every day, and I had dreams (oh, gracious, the dreams…) every night.
I felt guilty every time I started to do something by myself, or for myself, because I knew my mom was home and needed my help, but every moment I was at home, I got angrier. Every night after work, I drove back as fast as I could to relieve her from duty so she could get to her job. “It won’t be like this forever,” she kept assuring me. “We just need to get into a routine.”
“Things will get better, Karis,” she said again now. “I want you to make plans for the weekend.”
“I already did,” I told her, my voice tight with anger. “I’m going out Saturday for the whole day. I won’t be back until late.” Maybe even Sunday morning. Maybe…
“I have to work on Saturday night,” she said quietly.
“Then you’ll have to hire someone to be with him!” I shot back. She looked angry too, now, but I didn’t care. “This whole situation is ridiculous, Mom.”
“I see that you’re wishing to have more time to go have fun.”
“More time to go have fun? I haven’t had a minute to myself since we brought him home. I haven’t been able to see, um, people, or even go for a run after work! Caring for him is a twenty-four hour a day job. It’s too much. He’s too incapacitated for us to handle. I know you want him to be better—”
“He needs us, Karis! Think if I had abandoned you in that way when you were small and you needed me. What if I had just said, ‘Well, I’d rather be doing other things, so I won’t bother with my family!’”
“You didn’t do that, but he did!” I was breathing very hard. We hardly ever—never—fought like this, but I was too tired to keep it in. “That’s exactly what he did! First he didn’t care enough about you to respect your career, then he didn’t care about either of us to stay in one place so we could have a life.”
My mother stood, furious. “That’s not what happened at all. It wasn’t your father’s fault that we had to move.”
I slammed the pan I was holding onto the counter. “Of course it was!” My voice rose an octave. “It was entirely his fault! I used to believe you when you told me that the people in the schools were intimidated by his intellect. That they weren’t able to recognize his genius. I believe that he was smart, maybe even a genius, but that didn’t matter, because he treated everyone terribly. That’s why he got fired, that’s why his contracts were never renewed. He couldn’t get along with anyone, not his students, his colleagues, and certainly not his superiors.”
“They were not his superiors, no matter what their job titles were!”
“And there was the problem, right there,” I concluded. “That was what he thought, too, and you aided and abetted him the whole time. And while you were telling him how great he was, he was resenting you and me both for being witnesses. I think he blamed us for being there and for seeing him fail, again and again.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Yes, it is. He told me when I left for college that it was about time, that now he would be free of one weight. That he was like Atlas, with us as his burdens.”
