CHAPTER FOUR
“You hiding back here?” William wanted to know when he located me sitting on a stone bench deep in the orchard as dusk approached.
“Just thinking,” I said.
William glanced over to the table where his sons were hunched over a tablet our mother had spontaneously produced to keep them quiet. “I’ve got to get going in a little while,” he said. He rubbed the back of his neck briefly and then scowled. “The boys are supposed to be back at their mother’s place in an hour.”
My brother looked tired. The past year had been a brutal one for him, and if I could have spared him any of that pain, I would have. But William wasn’t one to air his troubles out loud. We had that in common.
“You okay?” I asked. I’d asked that before. And like before, the ghost of a frown slipped away from his face and was replaced with a smile.
“I’m doing fine, Audrey.”
I smiled back. “Just let me know before you leave. I want to make sure I get a chance to squeeze those precious boys one more time.”
“Will do,” he said. He started to walk away, then gave me one more glance. “Don’t sit here all alone with your thoughts for too long.”
“I won’t,” I promised, and watched him return to the party. I was surprised my mother hadn’t come barreling over here to drag me out of the orchard yet, but perhaps after the Sheila Closterman conversation, she’d had enough of my social skills.
When I visited home my thoughts often strayed uneasily back to the ugly years when my adolescent rebellion veered off into addiction and ruin, but that wasn’t where my mind was right now. Thoughts of Jason Roma kept intruding.
Not just thoughts.
Memories.
Memories that were six years old.
Memories that were now surfacing after I’d tried so hard to keep them at bay all this time. Yet they were as vivid as if they had just happened.
My fingers were still colorfully mottled from the vending machine M&M’s I’d been eating at my desk, a post-breakup staple in my diet, when Marilyn from Human Resources stopped by my desk with a new employee who was introduced to me as “Jason Roma, the new project coordinator you’ll be training.”
I swallowed the last melted blob of chocolate that I’d been rolling on my tongue and said, “What?” in a high, surprised voice, because no one had said a word to me about training or new employees.
Marilyn immediately began to look impatient, but that might have been because she suffered from infamous bladder-control issues and needed to use the bathroom about thirty times in an eight-hour workday.
“Didn’t Frank explain to you that you’d be training a new member of the project team?”
“No. Frank’s been in Flagstaff since last week dealing with the university library delays up there.”
Marilyn shifted her weight. “Well, it’s Jason’s first day and he’ll be shadowing you all week. Jason, you’ll be in good hands with Audrey. Please stop by my office before the end of the day and I’ll issue you an employee handbook.” She’d barely uttered the final syllable before scurrying away in the direction of the restrooms and disappearing around the corner.
For a second I was too exasperated to speak. As a lowly project coordinator who had been on the job for only a year and was aiming for a promotion someday, I also had to serve as backup to the frequently forgetful managers who sometimes failed to cross their own t’s and wound up endangering million-dollar projects. And I was still in the process of consoling myself, because only a few weeks had passed since discovering my boyfriend with his tongue in another girl’s vagina.
No, this was definitely not a good week to be trailed by some dewy-eyed trainee.
But since I was aiming for an eventual promotion to project manager, I couldn’t very well refuse. I plastered a charming smile on my face and took my first good look at this Jason Roma person hovering beside my desk.
HELL-O!
He wasn’t just good-looking. Jason Roma, with his thick black hair, defined cheekbones, and CrossFit kind of body, could be classified as whatever category came after “fine.”
“It’s Audrey, right?” He raked me over with a pair of dark eyes that set my lady parts to tingling and held out a large hand that did not wear a ring. “My friends call me Jay.”
I offered my hand. “Nice to meet you, Jay.”
His large fingers curled around mine for what should have been a simple handshake, but the moment of contact did strange things to me. There was his powerful hand holding on to my dainty manicured one for a heartbeat longer than necessary. There was the instant acceleration of my pulse. There was the way I boldly checked out the size of his thumb and blushed over the recollection of an old wives’ tale. Then he released me and I noticed that my fingers were still coated in candy residue and were almost certainly gross and sticky to the touch.
I grabbed a tissue and handed it over as words tumbled out of my mouth. “God, I’m sorry. I was eating M&M’s and I was on a conference call and they were melting in my palm. They really do that, you know. And I still ate them, but now it looks like I’ve been finger painting. Would you like some hand sanitizer?”
Jason took it all in stride. He balled up the tissue in his palm and fired it into a trash can fifteen feet away without looking to see if he reached the target. He was that sure of himself. I was fascinated. And when he smiled at me, all the noise in the room vanished. A man who had the power to make entire landscapes disappear with one grin was a force to be reckoned with. And even though he was obviously young, intimidatingly good-looking, and represented a very inappropriate selection as my new coworker, I couldn’t deny that I had an instant crush on him.
Over the next few days as we worked side by side, I was surprised to learn that Jason was sharply intelligent with a cutting wit. He caught on to tasks with lightning speed and always seemed to know how to make me laugh. It didn’t seem fair to stuff so much excellence into such a perfect package. How were ordinary people supposed to concentrate when there were Jason Romas running around in the world?
And to top it off, he was a lot of fun. Since I had a corporate credit card and received HR’s blessing to have working lunches while I was training him, we hit up a different downtown restaurant every day that first week. He was a recent graduate from ASU, living with his best friend close to the university. His family used to own a local construction company, and The Man had known his father back in the day. I got the feeling things weren’t all rainbows and unicorns on the home front, because he got quiet and changed the subject when it came up. I could relate to that. My own father had demanded spontaneous Breathalyzer tests until a little over a year ago, when I finally had the resources to move out. I always submitted and never argued, though I hadn’t taken a drink since my last rehab stint, but it stung a little that he wouldn’t recognize how successfully I’d changed.
At first Jason’s questions for me mostly centered on the job, but by Friday he was getting a lot more personal. I didn’t mind at all. I’d been on my guard for far too long, and something about Jason’s humor and casual manner set me at ease.
“So, Audrey, you’ve never mentioned a boyfriend,” Jason said over plates of hummus and pita wraps. He’d already told me several times that I could call him Jay, but I couldn’t get used to the nickname. A man like this deserved more than one syllable.
I looked him in the eye. “Neither have you, Jason.”
He hadn’t mentioned romantic entanglements of any shape. I thought I saw him glancing at a few tits and asses during our lunch dates, but that might have been my paranoia. Honestly, I was half hoping at this point that I was barking up the wrong tree with my newfound infatuation.
But Jason laughed loud and hard. When he was finished, he crossed his arms over his chest and peered across the table at me. “Boyfriends have never been in the picture.”
“Girlfriends?”
“They think so.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “It means I’m into having a good time. Not really looking to slap a label on anyone’s ass.”
“That was blunt.”
“Yep.” He leaned forward and playfully tapped my hand. “So are you going to tell me if there’s a boyfriend worth mentioning?”
I sighed and told the story of Dole. How we’d been together for about nine months, practically an eternity on the Audrey Gordon Relationship Scale. But now when I thought about it, I realized that near the end we weren’t really feeling the heat anymore. Still, that didn’t mean Dole was free to go shoving his patrician nose into the first willing crotch that came along.
“So you caught him?” Jason asked.
“In flagrante delicto.”
“That sucks.”
“Yes, it does.”
“’Cause if I was planning to go down on a girl at a party, you’d be my first choice, Audrey.”
I dropped the pieces of pita bread I’d been tearing up as I talked about my asshole ex. Jason took a casual sip of his water.
I must have heard him wrong. I had to have heard him wrong.
“What do you think about that?” he asked.
I thought I might like to shove my panties down, stand on the table, and swallow Jason’s absurdly handsome face between my thighs.
“Um, I’m not sure.” I picked up a new slice of pita bread and began savagely shredding it.
“What can I do to make you sure?” His deep voice was velvet and butter—all things sinful and delicious.
I was having a whole lot of trouble sitting still. “You can tell me what you want.”
He chuckled. “That would be a hell of a filthy conversation to have here among the lunch-hour crowd.”
I looked him in the eye. “Then let’s have it later, Jason.”
He nodded with approval. “Later works.”
“I have my own apartment, no roommate.”
“Good.”
I felt drunk, reckless, irresponsible. The way I used to be. The way I’d stopped being some time ago. “I should tell you that, while there’s no official policy, I get the feeling the company frowns upon romantic connections between coworkers.”
Jason’s sexy grin practically melted my panties. “Then we won’t brag about it.”
That evening Jason knocked on my apartment door, and I’m not overstating when I say we screwed each other’s brains out. Jason was a year younger than me, but someone—or multiple someones—had given him a hell of an education. There was no boundary he shied away from pushing, nothing he didn’t want to try. I didn’t kid myself that we were having some great affair. I knew it was just sex. I knew it would end sooner rather than later.
Helen from the accounting department was the only friendship I’d developed in the year I’d been working at Lester & Brown. And even though I’d told her all the dirty details of Dole, I told her nothing about Jason, not even when she went fishing.
“So the new boy seems like he’s fitting in real well,” she said over lunch plates of Thai food.
“Is he?” I asked, struggling to keep a straight face as I poured an excessive amount of soy sauce over my food and tried not to think about all the exotic ways Jason had been “fitting in” to my body lately. I had the delightfully sore muscles to prove it. But I wouldn’t admit it to Helen. Or to anyone.
Three weeks passed and I’d been fucking Jason nearly every night. With him everything happened in the moment. I didn’t think about the past or the future.
Then one afternoon he crept up behind me in the copy room.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he whispered as his hands circled my waist and traveled lower. “Want you.”
“Me too,” I whispered, dropping a few contract pages on the floor as Jason ground his hips against my ass. We’d been good at work, so stoic and professional no one seemed to suspect what was going on. But keeping up the façade was getting tough. I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door of the copy room. “Is it locked?”
He looked. “Now why the hell does the door to the copy room have a lock on it?”
I giggled. “For moments like this.”
He swiftly turned the lock and then hiked my skirt up. “And this.”
I dropped to my knees and unfastened his belt. “And this.”
He held my face in his hands, then sucked in a breath as my lips closed around his swollen dick.
“Why is this door locked?” The door handle rattled as the shrill voice of The Man penetrated the haze of lust in the tiny room. “Who locked this?” There was loud, semi-hysterical banging. “Who’s in there?”
I was already furiously smoothing my skirt down while Jason tucked himself back inside his pants. In order to look busy and not even vaguely sexual, I grabbed a stapler and started stapling together the sheets I’d been copying, while Jason opened the door.
“Beg your pardon, sir. I was just cleaning the knob and must have accidentally flipped the lock.”
The Man didn’t care. He conducted a brief, frenzied search for green Post-its in the supply cabinet and left.
I cared, though. I cared a lot. There was a time when I would have found the entire situation uproariously funny, to be nearly discovered by an authority figure as I gave head in a bizarre location because I was almost certainly drunk out of my skull. I enjoyed shocking my parents. The only time I felt like I had their attention was when I was behaving badly. And then there was the added bonus of upsetting their orderly world of status and privilege. Once my mother caught me getting high in the garage with a naked father of two who was ten years older and a sports coach at my high school. When she started screaming at me, I decided to remove myself from the situation by stealing the keys to my father’s Porsche, which I promptly crashed into the neighbor’s front-yard fountain.
But that was a long time ago, and since then I’d worked hard to shed all traces of my bad-girl persona. I’d grown up. And even though I wouldn’t admit it out loud, I desperately wanted my folks to have a reason to feel half as much pride in me as they did in my brother. More important, I wanted to be proud of myself. I’d never get there by giving Jason Roma blow jobs in the copy room.
It was time to put an end to whatever this was.
Since Jason was trained and busy with his own work, there wasn’t much reason for us to interact throughout the day. We were both present in an afternoon department meeting, but I sat way on the other end of the conference table and tried to avoid catching his eye. I wasn’t blaming him. Every time Jason showed up at my apartment door, I’d practically pounced on him. It was my own sorry-ass fault that I now found myself in a less than desirable position of having fucked my new coworker a few dozen times. Now I just needed to tell him that all this reckless screwing needed to end. He’d understand.
I stayed at work an hour late to finish completing an extensive materials order. When I finally left I was startled to find Jason there in the parking garage, leaning against my car as if he were having his picture taken. He flashed his trademark devastating grin when he saw me, and my resolve to inform him I couldn’t take my clothes off for him anymore almost vanished.
I set my bag on the hood of the car. “I thought you left.”
“I did. Went down the street, grabbed some tacos, and came back.” He held up a white paper bag. “You hungry? I picked up a few extra.”
I slumped beside him against the car, lowering my head. “Jason.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re mad, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Bullshit. You’ve been bent out of shape ever since that jackass came pounding on the copy room door.”
“Quiet,” I hissed, and looked around furtively. But there was no one else to hear except for some scattered vehicles still waiting for their owners to call it quits for the day. “That so-called jackass happens to be the owner of the company, and I can’t justify being on my knees in the copy room in the middle of the day.”
His arm nudged me. “It’s not the middle of the day now. There’s probably hardly anyone left up there. Let’s take another crack at it.”
“Not funny.”
“Not trying to be.” He faced me, bracing his palms on either side of me against the frame of the car, issuing the kind of seductive challenge that weakened every argument. “And you know whatever I get I’ll give back just as good.”
“Jason.”
“Audrey.”
“I can’t,” I whispered. “We have to stop this.”
He nipped at my neck. “Why?”
Because you’re like a drug, one I can’t get enough of, and I have a rotten history with addiction.
“Because it’s going to mess things up at work,” I told him, pushing him away.
He took a step back and raked his hand through his hair. “I swear I’m not trying to screw things up for you. We’re having fun. Nothing wrong with that.”
“I shudder to think what would have happened if we’d been caught today.”
“You mean caught with my dick in your mouth.”
My jaw clenched. “Yes.”
He laughed. “I would have liked to see the look on the old man’s face.”
“Shut up,” I spat. “Can’t you take anything seriously?”
He pretended to think about it. “It’s Thursday. Gravity is reserved only for Monday, Wednesday, and sometimes Friday.”
“You’re such a child.”
Jason rolled his eyes. “Look, Audrey, I like hanging out with you, and we have a good time together. Not looking for something permanent.”
“Neither am I.”
“Good, then let’s go back to your place and spend some time reenacting the copy room scene. It was hot. I’ve been thinking about it all day. We can pretend that boss man busts through the door just as I come in your mouth.”
“Jason!”
“It would have added to the shock value if you’d had your tits exposed.”
“Grow the fuck up,” I said, annoyed he still was making this a joke.
Jason looked at me. There was a flash of something in his dark eyes—irritation or anger or hurt; I couldn’t tell the difference when it came to him.
His voice was tight. “Rest assured, I’m fully grown, Audrey.”
“You’re a twenty-three-year-old man-child who thinks with your dick and apparently couldn’t give two shits about your job, a job only acquired because someone in management knows your father, who ran his own company into the ground.”
This time there was no mistaking the anger in Jason’s dark eyes. Immediately I regretted what I’d said. I knew very little about Jason’s family—it was bitchy of me to lash out like that when all I wanted was to end things on an amicable note. I started to apologize but Jason cut me off.
“Give me a fucking break, Audrey Gordon. You think there’s a single damn person in that building unaware of who you are? Your father and his cronies probably run half the city. And you can fuck right off with your conceit over the job. I asked around. I know you didn’t even bother to finish college, probably never had a steady job before working here, and you have a few legal demerits on your permanent record. Your family name and maybe a timely phone call from Daddy opened the door for you, sweetheart, and you damn well know it.”
“You asshole,” I whispered, balling my fists up. It was the truest and most devastating speech anyone had ever flung in my direction. Jason thought he’d cut me down, but he didn’t know me at all. He didn’t know how hard I’d worked since I started at Lester & Brown, how badly I wanted to forget about the reckless girl I’d been. Jason didn’t know these things because we didn’t usually have meaningful conversations. And there was certainly no point in having one now.
Jason was smirking, triumphant, probably figuring he’d bested me with a few harsh observations. He’d done nothing of the kind.
I straightened my back and glared at him. “Go fuck yourself, Jason.”
He snorted. “Nah. But I’ll have no trouble finding someone else to do the job.”
On that note he turned his back and walked away.
“Jason, wait!”
He turned around, annoyance written all over his face.
I twisted my hands and blushed, hating every second of needing to ask him for a favor. I took a deep breath. “Please don’t say anything. About this. Us. Please don’t tell anyone at work.”
He took his time about answering. Then he said, “I won’t. I’m not as much of an asshole as you think I am, Audrey.”
Then he resumed his walk in the opposite direction. I didn’t stop him a second time.
I kicked aside the bag of dropped tacos and retreated into my car, pounding the steering wheel once with my fist before starting the ignition. On the drive home I comforted myself with the fact that Jason wouldn’t last long at Lester & Brown. He’d get bored and move on or else he’d get fired when he screwed up something important, as he was bound to do. That frat-boy mentality came with a short attention span. Jason would almost certainly be gone in another six months.
“Auntie Audi?” said a sweet voice, shaking me out of my reverie.
My youngest nephew stood three feet away. He yawned. “Daddy said to tell you that we’re leaving now.”
I stood up and held out my hand to Isaac before walking across the vast yard toward the party tables, which were littered with used plates and napkins. While I was out brooding in the orchard, nearly all the guests had departed.
William seemed distracted when he gave me a brief farewell hug. I cuddled the small bodies of my nephews close for a long moment, silently promising once again that somehow I’d find the opportunity to spend more time with them.
“That went well,” my mother commented in a bright tone as we watched William and the boys leave through the gate.
“The centerpieces made all the difference,” I said.
My mother threw me a look, as if she was trying to guess whether I was full of shit or not. I grinned and she laughed.
“They worked out fine after all,” she said.
“It was a nice party, Mom. I’m sure William was pleased.”
I wasn’t really sure about that at all. It was more likely William had simply endured the event. But my mother would be happier if she thought otherwise.
She looked in the direction of the wrought iron gate William had just exited. “Do you think so?”
I plucked one of the flowers out of the nearest centerpiece and sniffed it. “Sure. Who wouldn’t be delighted by a gala event celebrating the day you were born?”
Her eyes scanned me, and her brow wrinkled just a little. “You wouldn’t. Would you, Audrey?”
She sounded uncertain, as if she truly didn’t know one way or another. It struck me how little we really knew one another. This should not have been a revelation. And I knew I was as guilty of avoiding important topics as she was.
“No,” I told her honestly. “I wouldn’t.”
I started to help with the cleanup until my mother scolded me, insisting that the catering staff would take care of it. She handed me a tray of leftovers that I was happy enough to take. My father had already decamped to his study and I planned on saying goodbye, but when I reached his door, it was closed. I hovered on the other side for a moment, debating whether I ought to interrupt his probable liaison with a bottle of expensive Scotch, and then just left, clutching my foil-wrapped package of congealing mushrooms and shrimp.
On the drive back to my apartment, the things I’d been fretting over in the orchard resurfaced. I hoped that wouldn’t be happening every day now that I’d be constantly working with Jason.
I could admit I’d been wrong about him in some ways.
Jason didn’t get bored with the job and he didn’t screw up. Management loved him, and his promotion to project manager happened mere months after mine. Avoiding him completely was out of the question since we worked in the same department, but I found it was easy enough to limit contact since we were never assigned to the same projects. Jason cheerfully moved on to a variety of other conquests, and when I happened to see him around town, I always pretended I didn’t notice the youthful eye candy dry-humping him in plain sight while I clutched the arm of whatever responsible fellow I was currently seeing.
After that big blowup in the parking garage, I was afraid he’d betray me by engaging in some locker room talk with some of the guys around the office who had lunch at Hooters every day. They seemed like Jason’s crowd.
But to his credit, he proved to be discreet. He might get a kick out of subtly mocking me when the occasion arose (e.g., the Third Street handbag mishap) until I wanted to throttle him with one of his designer neckties, but to my knowledge he’d kept his word about keeping the details of our sexual exploits to himself.
In all this time I’d never heard so much as a whisper indicating he’d ever said a single gossipy thing about me. Of course I preferred things this way, even as I wondered if he thought about our time together anywhere near as much as I did.