“Hey, do you have your notes up here? I want to check something.”
“No, they’re in my bag.” He stood and looked down at her. She must be thirsty. “You want a drink?”
“Yes, please.” She bent her smooth neck over another box. He laid a kiss on her bare nape, causing her to shiver in a very interesting way, and then left.
It was when he was staring at his bag that it came to him that he’d left the papers at work. Wes slapped his hand on his forehead, seeing the scene. He’d gone in after their fight, upset and wanting to bury himself in his writing. By the time he was done, he’d been more depressed than angry and was distracted as he was packing up, just as Tyler and a few guys had come in from the bar to grab their things. The printout of the story—he’d never gotten over the habit of printing out a first draft after his computer died when he was under a tight deadline—was in his leather portfolio. At least it was in a pile of papers in an office buried inmore paper, so he was confident it was safe and hidden enough no one could stumble across it.
He grabbed two cans of sparkling water out of the fridge and returned to Nadine. Her legs were folded under her skirt, giving her the look of a modest debutante, which was only partly disturbed by her frown as she unfolded a stained newspaper. She looked up as he told her about his notes.
“I’ll get them after work when the rush hour dies down and no one’s in the office,” he said.
“Sure.” She sounded distracted.
“Is there something bothering you?” Despite their talk last night, he worried that her mood was directly correlated with him.
In response, she passed over the paper in her hand. It was an old obituary from 2001, a poet whose name Wes remembered from school. He scanned the sheet until he found the poem “Thoughts on Bread.” It was about a woman in a bakery examining the day-old sale goods and was a rumination on the role of women in the home. He couldn’t make the connection between the poem and whatever Nadine was thinking, and he looked up.
“Did you like the poem?” he asked.
A half smile passed over her face. “Not particularly, but that’s not what I was thinking about.”
He sat beside her and leaned back against a box. “Deep thoughts about the ephemerality of life?”
“Sort of.” She propped herself on her arms behind her, arching her back in a way Wes found absorbing. “When I went to theHerald, Irina told me they’d put in a temporary obituary editor after Raj left.”
He kept quiet and waited for her to finish.
“My first thought was resentment.” She sounded astonished at herself. “That was my job. How dare they give it to someone else?”
“Did you feel that way about Raj?”
“Then, I was too upset about being punished.” Nadine went red.“Also I like Raj, and he did a good job. This person doesn’t care as much.”
“That bothers you?”
“Yeah.” She looked thoughtful. “It does. I’ve been thinking about this since that day with Dot. We live in a world where we can access someone’s recordings and audio for eternity after they die, but since that person is gone, it leaves a strange dissonance. An obituary gives closure to someone’s time here with us, when they were still alive, and we could interact with them.”
She put the empty can aside to shake out her wrists. He took her hand and began to rub along the delicate bones. “You don’t have to be on the politics beat,” he pointed out.
“You don’t need to be on the I-team.”
“I know. But I want to. Nothing else calls to me like that, and it’s the reason I got into journalism in the first place. I felt alive working on those stories. It sounds like you, on the other hand, might be thinking about opening up your opportunities.”
“Do you think so?” Then she gave her head a decisive shake. “No, I want to cover politics. I can make a difference there.”
“From what you said before, you can make a difference with obits as well.”
“Maybe.” She sounded thoughtful. “We should get back to work.”
“Or,” he said, “we could start in a minute.”
She gave him that heart-stopping smile that, for ten years, had always made him feel things. “In a minute,” she agreed.
Wes did not in general consider himself a particularly lucky man. He wasn’t unlucky—more things had gone his way than hadn’t—but he figured that was about average for most people. Sometimes it worked out, sometimes it didn’t.
However, with Nadine reaching for him, he was the human equivalent of a horseshoe, four-leaf clover, and maneki-neko all in one. When she straddled him, her hair falling over his face, he couldn’t help butshut his eyes to try to separate out the feelings. She tucked in closer and leaned down to kiss him, keeping him in place with her hands on his shoulders. Her mouth tasted like her cherry-mint lip gloss, and Wes knew, deep in his bones, that the scent would come up when remembering the most precious moments of his life. Then Nadine shifted and pulled him down, and he forgot about everything except the soft feel of her thigh under his hand and how that birthmark didn’t look like a rabbit at all once he got close.
Thirty-five
