Sick Day (7 page)

Three Years Ago

W
hile I set the dinner table, I came face-to-face with an interesting paradox. I had made two promises—one to the woman who was singing in the shower upstairs, after a long week of being underpaid and abused by arrogant white-collar mind-rapists; the other to the woman who stood outside my townhouse in the rain, watching me from the shadows of the neighbor’s minivan. But keeping one of them meant breaking the other.

How bizarre
, I thought, noticing her pale face in the darkness. I stepped away from the table-setting to see if I had hallucinated the sight of Hope McManus after all of these years. How bizarre that keeping one promise meant breaking another, and here was one of those promises standing outside the home I owned with my fiancée.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, staring out the large window and straight into Hope’s eyes. I raised a hand to her, almost like a wave, but she only stared back at me. Because of the rain, I couldn’t tell if she was crying or angry or a freaking ghost, really.

“Cam!” Riley called from upstairs.

“What?” I yelled back, but I refused to pull my eyes from the sight of Hope,
my Hope
.

“Do we have time for a quickie? What’s left on the timer?”

Shit.
A quickie with Hope standing outside?

“No!” I said.

“Okay, I’ll be right down,” Riley promised. “It smells amazing!”

Fuck, even worse.

“Wait, wait!” I shouted back. “I’ll be right up.”

I didn’t know if there was twenty minutes or twenty seconds left on the timer for whatever it was I had placed in the oven. All I knew was that if Riley came downstairs, I would have to pull my stare away from Hope. And I also knew that once I broke this stare between us, she would disappear.

Again.

“Hurry up!” Riley shouted. “I’m already wet, and I’m
gonna get started without you! Damn, I’m fucking horny tonight!”

“Uh huh,” I mumbled, raising my hand to Hope again. Except this time I gave her the “one minute” sign, which probably looked like the “this is my pointer finger” sign as well.

Backing away from the front window, I hurried to the front door, taking my eyes off her for less than five seconds as I searched for my shoes, then decided to bypass any footwear because it would take too long to tie the laces. Then I ran outside to find exactly what I had expected.

She was gone.

Our exclusive, executive community had our row of townhomes facing another row, with a common laneway between us. It led to a mound of pretty landscaping and a gazebo that apparently justified the $500 per month in common fees. I searched that laneway, looked up and down. On the down search, I caught sight of Hope running away. Not toward the gazebo, which would’ve been the easiest thing.

“Hope!” I yelled, then launched into a sprint after her. I pumped my legs harder than I had in the past few weeks because I had been too busy at Harris to even see the gym, let alone start any kind of workout. But I was quick, and I was gaining on her as she steered off the grounds and onto the busy four-lane street.

“Hope!” I begged

“No!” she yelled, glancing back to see how close I was getting.

“Stop for a minute! Please! I’m gonna fucking die here!”

“Then fuck off and die, Cameron!” she screamed.

Once I was close enough, I lunged at her and tackled her to the drenched grass next to the community center. The lights from the indoor pool where old people did water-cise activities flooded onto us. I glanced inside the pool area, but nobody seemed to notice the shoeless young man who had just taken down the soaking wet young woman outside their group exercise class.

“Hope, stop!” I begged her.

But she didn’t stop; she kept squirming and fighting in my arms, even as I held her in this tight spooning position.

“Shit, will you just stop already?” I screamed, then kissed the side of her face because I missed her. Oh, fuck, did I ever miss her, the taste of her face on my lips, but I also didn’t know what else to do.

That kiss did it. The ferocity of her squirming and fighting lightened.

I kissed her again and again and again, until she turned her lips to mine and rotated her body so
that she lay underneath my weight on the spongy grass. The rain pelted my back as we made out like two rabid teenagers whose parents wouldn’t lend them their cars so they could screw in the dry privacy of a backseat.

When I pulled back from Hope’s reciprocated kisses, I realized that I was pinning her wrists above her head, and she had wrapped her legs around my waist.

“Look at us,” I said, and we both burst into crazy laughter.

“I missed you, Cameron,” she panted. “Shit.”

“Hope, what are you doing here?”

She sighed, turning her face toward the swimming pool window and aiming her stare on the activity inside like it offered the answer to the meaning of life.

“Not this.”

} i {

R
eturning to the townhouse, drenched and barefoot, I didn’t exactly know what to expect from Riley. I stood on the front porch for a few moments, wondering for a second if Riley had managed to get off before the timer buzzed on the oven, then turned the doorknob and stepped inside. I braced myself for the worst, but was surprised when she stepped into the foyer, wearing a bathrobe and carrying a glass of wine. She simply looked me up and down with a questioning look on her face.

“Where the fuck were you?” she asked with a hiss, opening her bathrobe just enough to reveal that she wore nothing underneath. For the first time in forever, the sight of Riley’s naked body did nothing to arouse me. Normally, her beauty alone had an
insta-hard-on effect that lasted hours. Not tonight.

I chuckled and tried to step past her, but she stopped me.

“So? Where were you, Cam?” She bit her fingernail.

“In the basement,” I lied. “Where the fuck does it look like I was?”

My tone offended her enough that she stepped back and tightened the robe. I moved into the kitchen for some food because that was what a normal person would do.

“How was the ham?” I asked.

“It was a roasted chicken,” Riley answered. “And I’m going to bed.”

“Goodnight,” I breathed once she was gone, then found the roasted chicken and dumped a bit onto my plate. How could I have forgotten that it was chicken? Damn, seeing Hope had seriously messed with my head.

I walked to the table with my plate. Seeing as tonight had been the first time that I spent time with Hope in roughly seven years, it made sense why I was a little disoriented, confused, whatever. The loss of appetite surprised me, though, as I toyed with my dinner—two thin slices off the breast along with a spoonful of vegetables—and wondered why I had dumped so much on my plate. I wasn’t hungry. At all.

Yet upstairs, Riley was probably waiting for me to come and kiss her ass, apologize for the tone and the words and sarcasm. Then start sucking on her toes
while holding her ankle with one hand and massaging her clit with the other, exactly what she had been expecting before dinner.

I moved my eyes from the plate to the stairwell leading to that clit-massage, then back to the plate. This wasn’t the type of decision that should confuse someone who wasn’t even married yet, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted the chicken or my fiancée’s nipples in my mouth.

I settled on the chicken. It was just a little easier that way.

} i {

T
he first time I told Gordo about Hope was that Monday morning after dry humping her on the grass outside the community center in the pouring rain. Both Gordo and I had great jobs at Harris—he as an Executive VP, me as a Senior Manager. We had no idea what awaited us in the coming week. So in the most general terms, we absolutely loved life at this bank. A lot.

That Monday morning, I stopped at Gordo’s office en route to mine, and he knew right away that something fantastic had happened.

“No fucking way,” he said, stepping away from the mini-putting green and dropping onto his leather sofa overlooking the Chicago River. “You tried anal, didn’t you? Jeez, man, what did you think?” He made a fucking motion with his hips and wiggled his eyebrows at me.

“It wasn’t anal,” I said, the smile melting off my face courtesy of the bile rising up my throat. “That’s fucking gross this early in the morning; why would you think that? Of all things, Gordo…”

Laughing, Gordon completely ignored the severity of my mood and sat straighter on the sofa. Keeping his back rigid, he ran his hands down the sides of his mouth. “This looks serious, Cam.”

I nodded.

“Are you leaving Harris? You know there’s nothing better out there right now. These banks are just getting back into hiring. And even then…”

I shook my head, grinning at the ridiculousness of his suggestion. “No, nothing like that. I can’t leave this job. You know that. I love this place.”

“Then what is it?” he asked. “If it’s not anal and it’s not the career, then I fucking give up.”

Deep breath. “Well, when I was high school, I promised this girl that we’d be together forever.”

Gordon howled, clapping his hands. “Are you serious? This is turning out to be a pretty awesome Monday! Let me guess, you gave this girl a promise ring, didn’t you?” He laughed some more.

“Well, we obviously didn’t end up together. Because I hooked up with Riley after that first semester at Northwestern.”

He became serious again at the mention of my fiancée. “Yeah, Riley’s got that kind of body, that I can-fuck-this-forever kind of body, and the blonde hair of fucking wet dreams.” He pulled his attention from whatever semi-pornographic images of my fiancée had just occupied his mind and looked at my face instead. “I’d say things turned out okay for you, Cam.”

I winced.

“Was that offside? I mean, I just meant to say that Riley’s hot, it’s not exactly a crime to fall for the pretty girl.”

I shrugged. “Wasn’t offside, Gordo. But a promise was a promise, and instead of taking her calls or answering her emails, I just disappeared.”

He chuckled again. “You know how many guys make high-school promises?”

“This was a pretty big promise,” I said, shrugging and wincing at the same time.

He just shook his head. “I can’t tell you how many times I promised to marry girls at parties, just for a blow job. And that was just last weekend!” He frowned when my eyes widened. “Kidding about last weekend, by the way. So, why are you thinking about this bullshit on a Monday morning anyway? Don’t you have a big presentation to the C-team on how we’re going to improve retail-client profitability?”

I took another deep breath and stared down at the putting green and the half-dozen balls assembled at the cup. “Because this girl showed up on Friday. No warning or anything. She just showed up, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her since.” When I raised my attention to Gordon’s eyes, I told him what was really troubling me. “Now I don’t know if I should be marrying Riley next month.”

}
i {

I
worked late every night that week, lying to Riley about some made-up client-behavior reports because I just couldn’t stop thinking about Hope. And being at home made me antsy in an ADHD way.

Gordon knew it, too. Each night before he left at seven, he stopped at my office, leaning on the doorframe with his laptop bag hanging off his shoulder. “Is this distraction supposed to show up tonight?” he asked. It was the same question he had been asking since Monday. Even tonight, one week since last Friday’s run-in with Hope, it was the same thing.

“Yes,” I answered with a convincing nod, but Gordo could somehow tell that I was lying.

“Really? She
told
you she would show up? Every day this week, or just tonight?”

“She’ll show up,” I told him, not really in a mood to play his games. “And when she does, I don’t know how it will turn out.”

Shaking his head, he let out a deep sigh. “Crazy week we’ve had, huh? Monday, you were talking about promises you made to some girl in high school. Now we’re sitting here wondering about the promises our bosses have made to us about the security of our jobs. Well, that’s what the rest of us on the floor are wondering about. And you’re up here on a Friday night, thinking about the first girl you ever fucked.”

“She wasn’t the first. But it was a promise, Gordo. Can we drop it?”

He waved at the emptiness behind him. “How many times have we been promised safety and security, dude? You know, we survived that financial crisis, we fought for our fucking lives, raping and pillaging at every fucking turn because of a promise. So do you really want to talk about what that word means? I’ve got two kids and two nannies at home; I rely on promises to get me from week to week, to keep my wife smiling and those kids happy.”

I shook my head. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. It’s that happiness you’re talking about. Hope is my promise, and I was hers. We fit together so well.”

Either he didn’t hear me or he didn’t care to listen. Gordon just kept talking like I hadn’t said anything. “But just like this bullshit with Harris head office, Cam, what the fuck happened? Just like I’ve been sitting in my office since that meeting Wednesday morning, wondering why they’ve suddenly changed their minds about the great work all of us do on this floor. I have to wonder why you didn’t honor
your
promise to this Hope girl. Why did you disappear in the first place? I mean, all week you’ve been bitching and moaning about how much you miss her, and now you’re contemplating bailing on your wedding to Riley, which is a matrimonial promise, isn’t it?”

I had no response for him as he pushed away from the doorframe, shaking his head at me.

“Just like these cocksuckers broke their promise to me about how safe and secure we all are, you broke yours to this girl.” He let that sink in, and then added, “You broke your promise to Hope, and there was a reason for that. Don’t forget it before you go and ruin the rest of your life, and Riley’s life, on something that was never meant to be.”

He walked away, but before he was completely out of sight, I called after him. “Hey, Gordo!”

“Go home to your fiancée, Cam!” he yelled back from somewhere down the hall.

“Have a good weekend,” I mumbled, turning to my computer and powering down.

It was time to leave, time to find Riley and forget about this craziness of the past week. I decided on picking up flowers, some salts for the tub, and that Canadian wine we discovered a few weeks ago. Maybe she could slip back into that bathrobe, too. And this time, I wouldn’t be putting anything in the oven. I’d be fucking her instead.

} i {