Fierce (9 page)

My voice had risen, was shaking hard by the time I’d finished. The waiter, I realized with horror, was outside the door, then retreating down the stairs, and Hemi was standing there immobile, his face betraying nothing. 

Because I was right. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t care what I said, or how I felt. And I was wasting my time.

I wrenched off the beautiful shoes, one at a time, and left them on the floor. “Keep your shoes,” I told him. “I am not for sale. And I’m sure as hell not for rent.”

I had my coat on, and I was down the stairs, rushing through the restaurant, hitting the street, and running for the subway as fast as I could in my bare feet. 

It hurt. Of course it did. It bruised, and it burned. But my heart and my pride hurt more.

Plus, I hadn’t even gotten to eat any salmon. 

When Hope had pulled off her shoes and run down the stairs, I’d wanted to go after her, throw her over my shoulder, carry her to my car, and make her listen. Make her talk. Make her stay until we could work it out. By which, yes, I probably meant, “until she saw it my way.” 

And after that…well. After that, I had a list. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do any of it, because this wasn’t the New Zealand bush, it wasn’t three hundred years ago, and she wasn’t mine. 

There was that other uncomfortable thing as well. That I’d made her cry. That I’d hurt her and made her feel small. 

It was the last thing I’d wanted. I didn’t want to ruin her life. I wanted to make it better. Instead, I’d done just the opposite. I’d stuffed up, in fact, about as thoroughly as a man could. It wasn’t a feeling I was used to, and I wasn’t enjoying it.

I rang Eugene on the drive back to the house. It took him four long rings to pick up, and I nearly rang off. I didn’t ask for advice. Ever. What was I doing?

“You know I don’t work on Sunday night,” were the first words out of his mouth. “I got grandkids. Family time, man.”

“Not a concept an entrepreneur can afford to entertain,” I couldn’t help pointing out. 

A couple of pithy words told me what I could do with my opinion. “That click you hear? That’s gonna be me hanging up.”

“No. Wait,” I hurried to say. “This one isn’t business. It’s personal.”

“Mm-
hm
. We thinkin’ little and blonde?”

“Yeh,” I admitted reluctantly. “Didn’t work out quite as well as I’d planned.”

 “Yep. She ain’t tough, oh, no. Not near as tough as you. And yet here you are staring at that slammed door and wondering how you screwed up so bad. That about the picture?”

“Yeh.” I stared out the window at the Manhattan scene. “That’s about it.”

“Here’s a straight-up gold-plated tip for you, and I won’t even charge you for it. Some girls say no. Some games you ain’t gonna win.”

“So what do—” I stopped and cleared my throat.

“You know, ain’t no shame in saying it. What you supposed to do to try to get her back, you mean, now you made a big-ass mess of it? First off, how bad was it? Unforgivable bad, or just asshole bad?”

“Asshole bad,” I admitted. “I think. But she left her shoes and ran away.”

“Her
shoes?
Damn, man.”

“Because I’d bought them for her. But they were an apology, so why would she give them back?”

“You had to apologize once already? How many times you been with this girl?”

I had to think. “Talked to her three times, counting everything.”

I heard the wheezing chuckle. “
Oh,
yeah. You got a rough road ahead for sure. You make her feel like a hooker?”

“No.”

“Now, how did I know? She not a real experienced girl?”

“Not an—” I cleared my throat. “Not an experienced girl at all.”

A sigh came down the line. “We gotta call in an expert on this one. Way over my head.”

“I’m not talking to some shrink,” I said in alarm.

“Nope. Just talkin’ to Debra.”

The phone went silent, and then I heard another voice, rich and firm. “Hello? Who’s this?”

This was mad. I should ring off now. Except that I needed to know, and who else was I going to ask? “Hemi Te Mana.”

“Oh, my Lord.” I could almost see her head shaking. I’d only met her once or twice, when she’d called in at the gym. A woman comfortable in her considerable skin. Bigger than Eugene in stature and girth, and a match for him in personality, too. If he reminded me of one of the uncles, she was a Maori auntie through and through. “Now I’m gettin’ the picture.”

“More than I am,” I muttered. Charles had pulled to the curb in front of the apartment block on Central Park West, but I sat still. I didn’t want to have this conversation in the lobby. I didn’t want to have this conversation at all.

“So let me see if I got this straight from hearing one end of it,” she was saying. “You got a girl there who feels like she ain’t up to your weight. Maybe not too rich, maybe a little young. How old is she?”

“Twenty-four. And you’re right about the not too rich.” All right, I may have looked over her application. Gathering information was critical to any campaign.

“And how many dates we talkin’ about?”

“One. Well, a half.”

“A half, and she’s already run out on you? Sometimes, you just got to let it go. Some things ain’t meant to be.”

“This is meant to be,” I said impatiently. “I just need to figure out how to fix it.”

“Well, if you was
my
son? I’d be telling you, whatever you’ve done so far, do the opposite.” 

That was helpful. Not.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You give her shoes? Expensive ones?”

“She needed better shoes,” I argued.

“Why? She barefoot? Guess she didn’t think they was worth the price. Why do I think you gave her expensive shoes, took her someplace fancy, and then let her know what her part of the deal was? And that she slapped your face?”

“No,” I said glumly. “She’d already done that. This time, she just took off the shoes and ran home.”

“Ran home barefoot across Manhattan?”

“Yeh. Well, to the subway, I reckon.” I ran a weary hand through my hair.

“You must’ve laid it on
real
thick. So what you do now is—you do things that let her know you’re not thinking about you and what
you
want, you’re thinking about what
she
wants, trying to make her happy. But only if you really are, ’cause a woman can tell.”

“Only if I’m what?”

“Only if you
do
want to make her happy. If you just want to get her in bed, if you’re faking it—she’ll know, she’ll tell you, ‘Hell, no,’ and you’ll be right back where you started. Might as well save yourself the time and find somebody else. Somebody you can buy with a pair of shoes.”

“Suppose I want to do that?” I asked, ignoring the contempt in that remark. “The making her happy bit. You still haven’t told me what to do.” I couldn’t believe I was asking, but I was.

“What I’m telling you
is
what to do,” she said. “Think about
her.
What she’s thinking right now. What she’s feeling. Do something that costs you time, not money. She don’t want your money, sounds like. Could be she wants your attention. That’s what a good woman generally wants. So give her your attention.”

I could tell you that I didn’t cry that night after I ran out on Hemi, but it would be a lie. I could tell you that I didn’t rage inside at him, and at myself for being naïve enough to believe that he’d wanted anything more from me than sex. That I didn’t rage at life for dangling the prospect of something better in front of me, for making me hope as I hadn’t dared to for so long, only to snatch the hope away. 

This was why I didn’t dream anymore. It hurt too much when your dreams died.

Was I more upset about the job, or about Hemi? It should’ve been the job. The job mattered, or I’d thought it had. It had been my future, whereas Hemi—Hemi was nothing more than another bad date. 

But all the same, when I was standing on one leg in the rust-stained bathtub in the corner of the kitchen, scrubbing at my dirtied, bruised foot with the washcloth, the tears I cried weren’t for my career. 

But tears and regret weren’t something people like me could afford to wallow in, and my job was what was keeping a roof over Karen’s and my head. So I got out of bed on Monday morning with my eyes and my stomach like lead, dressed in a twist-front blue sheath, white jacket, and sandals because they were easy, swallowed some breakfast, and got straight back on the subway again. 

Nathan’s hiss roused me from my struggle with the guest list for the Paris press conference.

“Witch on a broom!”

I sighed and kept typing. I would’ve known anyway. When Martine walked in, heads dropped down behind cubicle walls, fingers got busy, and conversation stopped. She sent a tsunami of silence before her every time she arrived. But then, bosses tended to do that. 

This time, the cone of silence stopped outside my cubicle, and I saw her Manolo Blahnik tapping out of the corner of my eye. I turned and took in the Stella McCartney print skirt—
too busy
, I couldn’t help thinking—and asymmetrical white top.  

“What happened to your shoes?” she asked.

I looked down, horrified. But no, I hadn’t forgotten myself and taken my sandals off. I always waited until she’d left for the evening. “Excuse me?” 

“I know you don’t quite know the ropes yet, but—a little word, Hope. Those don’t quite work, do they? The ones you were wearing on Friday afternoon were much better.”

If I hadn’t felt so fragile, it wouldn’t have been so bad. As it was, her words called up a mental picture of my beautiful Jimmy Choos, abandoned on the floor of the restaurant. Just before I’d run out on Hemi.

“Thank you,” I said, meeting her eyes with an effort.  

She nodded and headed into her office, and I turned back to my work.
Another day, another dollar. And appropriate or not, Jimmy Choos don’t grow on trees. Not on twenty-nine bucks an hour in New York City.

Did it get better? Well, yes and no. The work didn’t, because I was soon buried again. But three hours later, a deliveryman was standing at my cube, hidden behind one of the biggest displays of flowers I’d ever seen outside a funeral parlor.

White roses and purple stock. No tightly folded, scentless, soulless greenhouse varieties, but huge blooms that wafted their fragrance through the air like the very scent of summer. There must have been two dozen roses in there. 

It was over the top. It was glorious. And it was impossible for me to accept.

“No.” I was standing, blocking the entrance. “No.” 

“Hey.” The deliveryman stepped back in alarm. “What?”

“Take them away. Give them to somebody else." 

“Lady, I do that, and my boss finds out I did? He’ll fire me. This is a big account. Please.” 

The one argument I couldn’t resist. I was still hesitating, the deliveryman was still in the corridor, and Nathan was out of his cube and watching with interest when Martine came out of her office. 

“For me, I assume,” she said. “Bring them on in.”

“No,” I found myself saying. “Actually, they’re for me.” They weren’t hers. They were
mine.
I stepped back and let the man set them on my desk, then reached in the drawer for my purse.