Calculated Exposure (18 page)

“I wish I had friends.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing.” She climbed into her Jeep and gave him one more wave before he turned and walked to his car.

What an odd statement. He was pretty sure he’d heard her right, but why wouldn’t she have friends? Weren’t women supposed to be social creatures? Wasn’t that how they were wired–to be community-minded?

He brushed it off. He had too much on his mind as it was to worry about who else she spent her spare time with.

Hours later when he pulled onto his duplex’s small parking pad, his usual spot was blocked by a massive SUV he recognized as his…well, there was no easy way to define their familial connection, what tenuous one there was. It was Sharon’s vehicle. Sharon was Carla’s best friend and Carla’s brother’s wife. Sharon and her husband shared the god-parenting responsibilities of Emma, Adam, and future Fennell kiddo with Curt. So, he supposed that made them godparents in-law. Or something. He shrugged and pushed in the door, knowing it’d be unlocked.

“Hey, asshole,” Grant said as Curt entered. Grant sat on the living room floor in front of his suitcases, taking teeny unisex baby clothes off plastic hangers and shoving them into the bag. He glowered at Sharon nearby.

Sharon, an elegant, though thoroughly modern, woman of around Erica’s height and with similar dark hair, could be mistaken for Erica, he supposed. If the person doing the mistaking was aged two-and-a-half. There was no way the two women were interchangeable. Sharon was straight up and down, and compensated for her somewhat boyish shape with well-cut clothes.

Erica was all fit curves. The way that woman wore her jeans should have been illegal in a Bible Belt state. She was probably leading souls astray with just the sway of her hips. Good thing he wasn’t so worried about his soul. It had been corrupted long before she found him.

Sharon snapped her manicured fingers in front of Curt’s eyes. “Yoo-hoo. Did you hear me, Curt?”

“I’m sorry, no. I was thinking about something.”
Someone
.

She stretched her lips to show a bare hint of metal from the braces she’d recently had placed, and let her amusement reach her eyes.

“What?”

“I want to talk to you for a minute.”

“About what?”

Grant sighed from the floor and flung another hanger toward the trashcan.

Seth narrowly dodged it as he walked past. He mumbled an oath in Russian and continued his weary trek to the refrigerator.

“She’s probably going to harangue you about the sex of the baby,” Grant said.

Curt shook his head at his friend and eyed Sharon. “But I don’t know it.”

“Told you,” Grant said when Sharon darted her gaze down to him.

“Why is this such a secret?” she said with a little stomp of her stiletto.

“It’s not, Shar! I promise. The kid just wasn’t cooperating during the scan. We’ve got another one coming. Chill.”

She sucked in some air and squared her shoulders. “Our mother-in-law is going to kill me if I don’t get that information. She thinks Carla is repaying her for some slight she can’t figure out.”

“More power to you both,” Curt said. He propped his laptop bag against the sofa side and carried his duffel to his bedroom.

He heard shuffling in the hallway behind him as he dumped the contents of his bag into his hamper and turned to see Grant standing in the doorway. “How’d your interview go?” Curt asked.

Grant shrugged. “Good.
Felt
good, anyway. You know it’s hard to tell with those academic types since they’re all emotionless automatons and never wear any evidence of their mortality on their faces.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it.” Curt tossed his bag into the closet and walked over to his spindly desk to stab the power button of his desktop computer. “It’ll be great to have you back in the area.”

“So how goes it with the Cuban sparkplug?”

Curt laughed. “Are we turning into chicks? Why are we having this conversation again?”

Grant leaned his rear against the dresser and scraped his dark hair back from his eyes. “Because it’s fucking fascinating. How long have I known you? Almost a decade, right? In all that time you never saw the same woman more than once or twice.”

True.
“And?”

“Morbid curiosity, I guess. It’s kind of like you’re a lab rat and I’m waiting to see if you’ll take the bait and electrocute yourself.”

“Go feck yourself, Grant.”

“Love you, too, asshole.”

Curt opened his email and scanned for actionable subject lines. Seeing none, he turned back to his friend. “Do you think it’s unusual for a woman to not have friends?”

“Yes.” He answered so quickly Curt was unconvinced he’d actually had enough time to parse the question.

“Don’t hash your words.”

Grant shrugged. “I’m a historian. From a social standpoint, there are only a couple of reasons why a woman wouldn’t have friends. The first is a matter of circumstance, moving into a new community and so on. The second is because something is wrong with her. Maybe she’s difficult to be around, sociopathic, petty. Doesn’t share nice with others. So on.”

Last one definitely doesn’t apply.

“One sounds reasonable, but I don’t know how long she’s lived in the state. Two sounds very unlikely.”

“Okay, try another on for size. Perhaps she doesn’t have friends because an external force forbids her from having them. Why do you care?”

“I’m not sure I
do
care.”

“You’re a goddamned liar. No one else can read that shit on your face, but I recognize when I’ve found a button to push.”

“Oh? You a psychotherapist now, too? Didn’t realize you’d earned another degree, you geek.”

“Stop being a dick, and I’ll let you in on a little secret about your girl.”

Curt rubbed his eyes and blew out a breath. “She’s not my girl. She’s just–”

“Right. Not your girl. Anyhow, your not-girl called Carla.”

“About what?”

“Wouldn’t say.”

“To be a fly on the wall.”

“Yeah. I have an idea, though.”

“Lay it on me.”

Grant grinned and opened the bedroom door. “Hey, Shar?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you do Curt a favor in the name of love?”

Curt balked. “What?”

Sharon squee’d. Sharon was a sucker for love.

* * * *

“Hi, Jean? This is Erica…uh,
Ercilia
Desoto. I’m calling to find out if you’ve been able to carve some time into your schedule for my interview.” Erica took a deep, centering breath and shoved the newspaper’s camera back into its case after recapping it. She’d missed her shot. She missed her fucking shot.

The camera’s memory card had corrupted or the battery had shitted out or…hell, she didn’t know what was wrong with the damned thing. It wasn’t the first time it’d happened, but after it’d been sent off for repair and returned to her, Tate assured her she wouldn’t have that problem again. The first time the camera shut off on her was during a big concert of a local country music star come home, which in the scheme of things shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but right as she started to depress the button to take a picture of the band’s bass player for the newspaper’s website, gunshots pinged from the balcony.

There was genuine, newsworthy mayhem in the coliseum and her camera didn’t work. From that point on, she’d always carried a spare camera–her own.

Jean clucked her tongue on the other end and rustled some papers. “Oh yes! Yes! The prostitute.”

Erica groaned.

“Sorry, that didn’t come out right. I have memory issues. If I don’t associate prominent characteristics to people’s names I can’t keep things straight. Eventually I’ll forget that.”

I fucking hope so.

“Can you come in tomorrow morning at eight? I know it’s early, but all the staff will be here.”

“Oh! One moment, please.” Erica uncapped her DSLR with her free hand and walked onto the field of the Pee Wee football game she was covering, toward the clump of victors and despondent losers. Some other newspaper would have that winning scorer’s great feat captured in a photograph, and she kind of didn’t care.

“Fuck,” she mumbled to herself as she got in close, lurching back when a helmet tossed by some overenthusiastic victor hurtled her way. This was not how she wanted to be spending her time. She wanted to be snuggled up on the sofa with Curt, feeding him something, though she didn’t know what. She’d already run down her list of favorites and was going to have start cooking him American foods next. She tapped her index finger on her chin while she considered the possibilities. Or maybe Irish foods? Would he like that? What did the Irish eat besides potatoes?

The huddle cleared enough that Erica could get in close and snap a shot of the gutsy little quarterback holding up a trophy two-thirds his height. As she took her shots, she thought
maybe I’ll drive up there and surprise him. Take tomorrow off and do the interview, then hang out. What’s Tate going to do
?
Fuck Tate.
And fuck this newspaper.

“Yes, Jean. Tomorrow at eight. I look forward to dazzling you,” she said, voice flat.

Jean barked with laughter. “See you then, girlie.”

She got on the road not really knowing where she was going, but steering the Jeep north, figuring she’d figure it out when she got there. She stopped just outside of Greensboro and looked up his student directory entry via her phone and programmed it into her GPS program. She felt like a very sophisticated stalker, but she’d been rewarded for that tactic the first time she’d used it, and figured it couldn’t hurt to try again.

She was giggly as a schoolgirl as she steered through the narrow streets near the university where Curt studied. His address belonged to a tidy Victorian duplex with a small parking pad set back from the street. The concrete slab was nearly full. There was Curt’s car, which she recognized, a moped which looked like it’d seen better days, an SUV the size of Cuba, and a couple of other vehicles in front of the left-hand unit. Typical college rental. Short on parking, long on vehicles.

Loud, feminine laughter knocked her back a couple of steps as she approached the door.

“Curt, stop it! What am I going to
do
with you?” squeaked the voice. That sure as shit wasn’t Grant.

All the wind in her lungs hissed out, and when she tried to breathe again, she felt like she couldn’t remember how. When she did manage to suck in some air, her first exhale sounded a lot like a scoff.

“Well, you caught him,” she thought out loud. “Good job picking ’em,
pendeja
. Well, you phony, since you’re here, get your shit together and tell him off. Be that much of a woman.”

She put her fist up to the door before she could talk herself out of it. She was way too good at talking herself out of shit.

The door sprang inward in seconds. “Come on, we’re not being that loud.” The owner of that deep, heavily-accented voice was a man holding the knob with one hand and a beer in the other.

“
Dios mio.
”

Her eyes widened as she took in the man’s bulk. He was big. Six-three, maybe six-four, and definitely not skinny. He could probably bench press a Buick. His hair was unequivocally red, not auburn. Not strawberry blond.
Red.
But for a redhead, he was somewhat dark-complexioned. Not tan, but pretty close as if there was a hint of something in his ancestry not quite European. He was nice to look at in a scary, giant, Soviet Bloc kind of way.

“Well, hello. You’re not the neighbor,” he rumbled.

Erica shook her head. “No.”

“Who is it?” asked a man with a brogue who was certainly not
her
Irishman. Grant. It was Grant’s voice.

“I don’t know,” the man in the doorway called back. “She’s pretty. Must be selling something.”

She laughed. “I’m not selling anything.”

“Hold it, I know that laugh. Back off, Seth.”

“Damn it,” Seth murmured around the neck of his beer bottle. He walked away from the door mumbling something about lucky Irishmen getting all the good ones.

Curt filled in the space Seth abandoned. If he was stunned to see her, he didn’t act it. Surprisingly, he grinned. “Is this a social visit, or is someone in this house newsworthy?”

“Social.” She tightened her fingers slightly around the strap she held on her shoulder. Doing so must have drawn his attention, because he scanned down her body to the small overnight bag she’d carried from the car.

He smiled broader and pulled her inside.

Any thoughts she had about his potential philandering vanished. A man didn’t look at a woman that way unless she was the
only
one…or at least she hoped.

“You run away from home again? Thought you grew out of that.”

She sucked her teeth. “Funny. Just for a night…if you don’t mind. I have an interview in the morning. Sounds like you have a party going on in here.”

He laced his fingers through her left ones and drew her down the corridor. “Nah.”

As he pulled her into the messy living room, her eyes fell upon the source of the feminine laughter. She was a beauty. Dark eyes, dark hair, flawless skin, impeccably dressed, and wearing a rock on her left ring finger that could have made a crater in the floor if dropped. Erica sagged with relief. The woman belonged to someone, and judging by the careful distance she kept between herself and the men in the room, her someone wasn’t in residence.

“Hey, Erica,” Grant said. He sat on an overstuffed suitcase and appeared to be trying to get the zipper around, in between sips of his beer. “Lovely to see you again.”

“Likewise.”

“And you’ve obviously met Seth.” Curt pointed in his general direction, not that anyone could miss the guy.

Erica broke free, reluctantly, of Curt’s grasp and extended a hand to Seth to shake. “So, you’re the physicist.”

“
Astro
physicist.” He gave her hand a hearty shake. “Do you have any single friends?”

Curt cleared his throat and collected her right as one of her eyebrows inched upward. Carla had said Seth was a character. Erica had underestimated what that meant.