“No. We’ve sent her the standard letter. And are prepared to send her the more strident one if we keep hearing from her. It helps that you’re not at your apartment. This one lives in the city.”
Jesus. It was sad that we had levels of “Fuck off, Crazy” letters that we’d had to send to some people.
We’d even had to do a restraining order against one.
Women. Girls. They were all female, and all knew that we were “meant to be together” because they’d loved the character Aidan Colly and assumed he was me.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
“It’s probably nothing, but I wanted you to know the name. Just in case she showed up on your doorstep or something.”
“Yeah, I appreciate it.”
“Okay. Keep me posted on your timeline and I’ll let you know how lunch with Adina goes next week.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up. I stayed behind my desk, but said to Syd, still engrossed with something I’d written on a cocktail napkin, “I didn’t expect to see you tonight. How was the party?”
She lowered the napkin, putting it into a pile next to the couch. One of several she’d already made since she arrived. The woman worked quickly.
“It was good. Lily and her boyfriend dropped me at the dorm. They were going somewhere to be alone, and Jane was staying at the Stratton’s, so I decided to change and come over here and get a couple of hours of work done.”
It was nearly eleven. I had been thinking about packing it in and heading home before Nora had called. Now I was happy that her call had made me stay until Syd arrived.
“Oh, I wanted to ask you something,” she said as she extricated herself from the pile of papers on—and around—the couch and came over to me, pulling something up on her phone.
I rolled my chair back and moved my laptop over so she could sit on my desk and face me, as she often did when we were talking about one of my student’s papers that I asked her opinion on, or one of my characters that she was working on.
My desk chair was kind of cool in an old-school kind of way, but with its high, curved, wooden arms, it wasn’t ideal for her to sit on my lap, or straddle me.
Though we’d tried like hell a couple of times. We had kind of gotten it to a point though, if she straddled me, but put her legs up high, over the arms, then leaned back to the desk—
“Is this the guy from the wedding?” she said, holding a pic on her phone in front of me, pulling me from my carnal memories.
“What guy? What wedding?” I said, as I took the phone from her. She hoisted herself to sit in the space on the desk I’d cleared for her.
“From Betsy Stratton’s wedding. The one who Jane kissed.”
I looked at the photo. It was of Jane Winters in a green dress, looking very different than she normally did, standing next to a young man in a tux. I enlarged the photo to see their faces better.
It was obvious they didn’t know Syd had taken the photo—they only had eyes for each other. What may have begun that night on the dance floor of Betsy’s wedding had definitely developed into something…deep. I almost felt like I was prying in on a very private moment.
“Yeah, that’s him. His hair’s not in the ponytail, but it’s him.” I handed the phone back to Syd who studied it again.
“Hmmm, the plot thickens.”
She went on to recap Jane’s party, which, for reasons Syd didn’t know for sure, had been held at Caro Stratton’s estate. A home I knew a little bit from when the gang would go for an occasional weekend away from Brown. It’d been a lot of years since I’d been there.
“It’s all tied to Joe Stratton running for governor?” I asked Syd when she’d finished.
She shrugged. “I guess. There was a big undercurrent of secrecy all evening, but I wasn’t sure of what. But, my take is that this guy—Stick is his name, by the way—is doing some auto mechanic work for Mrs. Stratton, and somehow met Jane and…Ithinkthey’ve got something going.” She was still gazing at the picture.
“It would appear that way from the way they’re looking at each other,” I said.
“But why keep it secret?” she said, more to herself than me. She seemed to remember she and I were in a top-secret relationship, because after a moment she softly nodded, like she understood. She clicked her phone off, and put it down next to her hip on the desk.
“I wish…” I said, not really sure I could tell her everything Ididwish about her and me. About us. “I wish we weren’t secret. I wish I could have been your date tonight. Besides being with you, it would have been nice to see Caro.”
Her legs swinging softly into the desk well, she said, “That’s okay. It was really small. You didn’t miss much.”
