“I’d feel better if you weren’t going home to an empty apartment. I know you’re fine, but sometimes I think about you being there by yourself and I have to admit, I’m not crazy about it. I’m more thinking about myself, though,” he’d said. “What if there was a mouse here? Who would get on the table with me? It would be fun, too. We’re good together.”
“It would be safer to have him as a roommate,” I said, echoing his argument, but Taylor immediately reminded me about the low crime rate in our area. “Bad things can happen anywhere,” I also reminded her. “He said that we’re good together.”
They looked at each other. “You’ve told us about him wanting to live alone, too,” Kiya said. “Now he’s saying, ‘We’re good together.’ What?”
“People can change,” Taylor intoned.
“No. I knew that my Cado wasn’t the long-term type,” Kiya stated. It had been a while since we’d heard her refer to Channing in that way. “I knew it, but I wanted to pretend to myself that he could suddenly be different. But I wasn’t going to turn into another person and neither was he. If Ronan said that he likes living on his own and he doesn’t want a girlfriend, then we have to believe him.”
“What about the stuff he’s saying now?” Taylor asked her. “It seems like everything is different and that’s not against the law! People can change their minds.”
Kiya’s eyes narrowed. “Are you talking about him, or yourself?”
“He hasn’t changed his mind,” I told them. I was thinking back to the dinner after his brother’s wedding. His mom had said something about me, and she’d used the term “girlfriend.” He had immediately corrected her, saying that I wasn’t, and I had agreed just as fast. I wasn’t.
“Ok, but now he’s—oh, Christ!” She held up her phone to show us the time. “We have to go!”
We all hurried. They did because their bosses were concerned about tardiness, and I did because I was along for the ride. Back at my desk, I texted Ronan. It took a while for him to answer that he was really busy but he’d call me from the hotel. I sat and worked on some marketing stuff, and then I went up to the Marketing Department to discuss it with Taylor. She also invited one of her higher-positioned colleagues to look at the campaign for the Junior Woodsmen that the two of us had been doing in our downtime.
“Taylor, this is great,” the guy told her, sounding very pleased as he looked over her work. “I love this. I want to show Mary.” That was the big boss of the department, and Tay got really excited. “Have you talked to Antonio about your video idea? Let’s get him, too.”
It hadn’t begun as an organized meeting but it turned into a much bigger thing, and before I knew it, the head of the department had also joined us and was asking me about the budget.
All their heads turned toward me. “It’s really up to Mr. Gowan,” I said. It was really up to whatever he would sign, without knowing it.
“He hasn’t contacted me or anyone else here,” she mentioned, and I swallowed.
“I would bet that he hasn’t put numbers together. Yet. What would a budget look like for a campaign like this?”
She was very nice about my ignorance and I learned a lot about marketing and budgets, and also about how they all regarded Mr. Gowan.
“They think he’s an idiot,” I told Ronan later, when he called me that night from the team hotel. “They didn’t say it directly, but everything in the discussion was about going over or around him. No one suggested including him. One guy looked at the ceiling and did a little headshake whenever he said the name ‘Beau.’ And they all call each other by their first names, too. Mr. Gowan had asked me to call him ‘Mr. Gowan’ but no one else in the organization seems to do that.” Maybe, if he got canned, I could work in Marketing like Taylor and call my boss by her first name. Or maybe I would be shown the door, too.
“So, he’s not so perfect after all. Ah, hell’s bells.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked immediately.
“My back. It’s all right.”
It was not all right. He’d mentioned a minor tweak, a little twinge, a slight soreness. All of it meant he had an injury and I questioned him carefully now about what the team doctors and trainers had said about that.
“They said it’s fine but they also said, ‘Stop riding in tiny cars, especially not to the grocery store,’” he answered. “It was oddly specific.”
“You only went shopping that day because you said that you wanted to listen to my engine, since you thought you’d heard a knocking sound. You hadn’t,” I reminded him. “I would have told you if there was something wrong.”
“I don’t know, Cate. You didn’t tell me about your dad.”
I froze. “What do you mean?”
“You should tell me if something’s bothering you before you end up crying in my kitchen about it. Ok? If you’re sad or you have an issue to deal with, tell me.”
Tell him? That seemed like an easy request but the issues I could have brought up were much more complicated. I thought about the many forms Mr. Gowan had signed because I’d tricked him. I thought about Ronan’s own suggestion that we should live together, which had put me completely off balance. I thought about other stuff that I never discussed, but that had made me the person I was today. I was a person who…well, if we lived together, he would find out who I was.
No. I was fine and I had achieved a lot. I could count those things up, all the great things I had done mostly on my own. I was better on my own.
“I’m going to renew my lease,” I heard myself announce. “I really like my apartment.”
There was silence.
