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Radio Static
Very little guesswork was required to determine the precise moment at which Emmett had stepped out of the elevator and onto the bullpen floor on Monday morning.
"Men of Sherwood," he bellowed, plainly audible through the open conference room door. "I am returned. Fetch me a leg of venison and your finest mead."
The noise which greeted this outburst was overwhelming, causing Edward to look up from his laptop with a confused expression. I jumped out of my chair without bothering to explain why and faked left around Marcus to greet the Great Field Leveler. Emmett was surrounded by the entire population of the newsroom, and they were all clapping him on the back and laughing. He spotted me as I made a path toward him, and knocked several well-wishers out of the way to grab me in an ursine embrace.
"Hey, little girl," he chuckled against my cheek. "I'm here to make sure you're not taking candy from strangers. Or stealing any from babies."
I squeezed him in return and then slapped his shoulders in a silent plea to have him release me. "Thanks for saying you'd do this, Em - I really appreciate it."
He slid me gently back down to the ground. "No problem. Where's the Pulitzer Kid?" I jerked my thumb in the direction of the conference room, where Edward was leaning up against the doorframe, watching the welcome wagon in action. Emmett nodded in his direction, and Edward returned the nod with a neutral expression on his face before he strolled over to join us.
"Hello, Cullen," Emmett grinned. "Emmett McCarty." The two men shook hands as I watched along with the rest of the boys. Emmett looked him up and down. "So, where d'ya keep your medals?"
"Box on a shelf in the hall closet," Edward answered calmly. "I think."
Emmett nodded again. "Classy. Nice to meet you." He stared briefly into Edward's eyes, sending him a message which I imagine contained the information that medals meant nothing to him, before turning back to me with an affectionate smile.
"So, Sheba," he said, gesturing behind him at the boys in the bullpen. " Your new kingdom pleases you? Your peons look dirty and more than a little stupid, to be honest." Tyler took the opportunity to toss a rubber-band ball at the back of Emmett's head, which Emmett then picked up and flicked into Edward's surprised hands. "Go on," Emmett encouraged. "Take him down like a duck in a shooting gallery. He needs to remember his place."
Edward bounced the ball thoughtfully on the inside of his left forearm a few times, catching it with his right hand while he shifted his appraising gaze from Emmett to Tyler. "Seems to me that the chair was empty when he sat in it," he finally said, lobbing the ball for Tyler to catch. "And since it's not my ass looking for a seat, I figure it's not my fight, either."
Emmett and Edward regarded one another carefully for another moment before Emmett broke out into a grin. "You're pretty slick for a show pony, I'll give you that. Of course, I'm slick central, so this should be fun." He scanned the faces around us. "Where's Peter? He still owes me twenty bucks and, if memory serves, a fan dance in a bikini. Were you there that night, Bella?"
I nodded, remembering the unofficial Christmas party at Donovan's two years ago. "Please don't hold him to it, Em. Nobody needs to see Peter in a bikini."
"Fuck that. A bet's a bet."
"Peter's wearing bikini?" Tanya strolled into our gathering. "I will lend him mine. Is purple with gold coins on the hips." Emmett took her in with his eyes as she rolled the word "purple" off of her tongue, making it sound filthy and far more interesting than any color should actually be. "Who is this big mountain of man? You block the sun."
"Yeah, but I radiate my own special light. Emmett McCarty - Bella's producer," he introduced himself. "You're new," he added after a brief and appreciative pause.
Tanya eyed him speculatively. "I'm not that new," she answered, conveying several layers of fact in the brief response. "You know Bella before this? How you know her?"
Emmett laughed. "Oh, I like you already. Edward's producer, right? Jesus, remind me not to underestimate him anytime soon. Okay, give me the topline; where are we going, and what do we need?"
The four of us headed down to D.C. the following morning to buzz through the sit-downs we'd negotiated for the health care reform piece, and I discovered that the world of an evening news anchor was a far different one from the world of a staff reporter. We flew first-class on the Delta shuttle out of LaGuardia, and were met by a driver at Reagan International. Edward and I spent our time on the flight going through notes and prepping for the round of sit-downs, while Tanya and Emmett sat directly across from us, apparently forging some kind of unholy alliance. By the time we were on the final approach, the pair of them were laughing way too loudly for an early-morning commuter flight, and seemed to have developed a pretty decent camaraderie. It irked me that they were able to slip so easily into a tandem work harness, while Edward and I were still fairly tense with one another most of the time.
I wasn't sure what I wanted from Edward. Friendship would have been nice, but I couldn't even define what lay between us as such at the moment, because just when it seemed as though we were finally rowing in the same direction, he'd do or say something to create some distance or make me regret feeling good about him. And if I was being completely honest with myself, I had to admit that I wanted to feel good about him. I probably wanted to feel good about him more than I should have, and that was something I definitely didn't want to look into too closely.
We'd booked two crews out of the DC bureau and met them at Dupont and Nineteenth, splitting into two separate groups to cover the sit-downs. Tanya sent a breezy wave our way as she climbed into the SUV bearing Edward and his crew, and they took off for the Capitol. Emmett and I kept the airport SUV and the second crew followed us to the sleek office buildings which housed several government relations agencies handling pharma and health insurance company interests.
As I watched Emmett blow through gatekeepers and commandeer conference rooms for our sit-downs, I couldn't help but smile. He'd been a balls-out reporter, but as a producer, his persuasive talents really showed to maximum effect, because the intimidation factor worked for him in this case, where it probably put more than a few people off during his days on the beat.
I slipped into the skin of a woman with questions which needed to be answered, and spent the day staring down corporate agendas and big money on a mission to keep that green in the family. Reform of any kind makes businesspeople jumpy, and these guys were trying to walk a thin line between concern for the welfare of the citizenry and careful protection of their sizable acreage of the American economy. We danced around the edges of sincerity for hours, but in the end, what was glaringly apparent as the central issue in the debate was that these companies relied upon the support of fair market value to underwrite research and development for new and better treatments. It was difficult to argue against innovation, and I came away with a new measure of sympathy which surprised me.
"I love it when you do the groundwork," Emmett grinned as we headed back to the car. We dismissed the crew with instructions to meet us at eight-thirty the following morning for the second round of sit-downs, and were both more than eager to stop thinking about the issue for a few hours.
"Edward thinks I spend too much time on research," I found myself telling Emmett, for no particular reason. In retrospect, I think I was looking to him to contradict the criticism and make me feel better about being such a priss about the thing.
Emmett slid into the seat next to mine and gave the driver the address of the hotel. "Well," he said after an uncharacteristic moment of hesitation, "you do have a habit of nailing everything down pretty tightly before you jump. I think that sometimes, you fight against your instincts, which is stupid, because your instincts are pretty damned good. For a girl, obviously."
I batted him on the shoulder. "Jesus, you're a Neanderthal sometimes. I don't fight my instinct. And nobody's ever had to issue a retraction or correction on my behalf, which is more than I can say for you. Remember the Scully story? I thought Victor was going to nail your hands to the wall over that."
He leaned over until his face was right up in mine. "I was right. You know it, and Victor knows it. The only reason we issued a retraction was because corporate got spooked by the lawyers and there was no way I had evidence that could have been presented without causing a whole lot of grief for a whole lot of innocent people. And we need to stop talking about it right now or so help me Christ, I will put a dent in the roof of this car with my fist."
"Sorry. Really, Em. I know it's a sore subject - I shouldn't have brought it up." In my haste to defend myself, I'd made him feel like crap about something which cut close to the bone, and that was stupid, and selfish, and pretty mean of me. Emmett grunted and shook his head, and we finished the ride back to the hotel in a gradually-thawing silence.
By the time we reached the registration desk, his normally-sunny temper had been restored. We checked in and rode the elevator to our respective floors, parting with vague plans about meeting later on in the evening for a drink to catch up.
I slipped the key card into my door and breathed in the anonymous sanctuary of a five-star overnight accommodation at The Hay-Adams. The room was dark and still, a welcome break from a day full of talking and tension and cameras. I was suddenly out of gas, and picked up my phone to call my ATF contact and put off our dirty martini date until my next visit, citing exhaustion. After rifling through my overnight bag and grabbing my Columbia sweats, I defugged in the shower, scrubbing away the remnants of professional me.
Forty-five minutes and one room-service Cobb Salad later, I curled up on the bed and started aimlessly flicking through the available television channels, fully half of which were devoted to C-Span. I just wanted to escape: I was full, but still felt hungry; I was relaxed, but still on edge; and I was occupied, but still bored. As I perused the room service menu for something else to eat, it occurred to me that today was really the first workday I'd spent without Edward in quite some time. I wasn't hungry, and I wasn't tense, and I wasn't bored. What I was, in fact, was missing him. And his sarcasm, and his unpredictable enthusiasm, and his Smile of Death. I briefly indulged a fantasy in which we shared a room, fighting over the best outlet plugs for our laptops while he picked all of the ham out of my Cobb salad and chastised me for not having the foresight to order a real dinner in addition to what was essentially a chopped-up sandwich without any bread.
It sounded annoying. Annoying, and actually pretty fantastic.
Huffing in frustration, I flipped open my laptop and started organizing things for the sit-downs we'd scheduled on the following day. I managed to revise some of the questions I'd asked today with the new tacks I'd discovered would yield better answers from the interviews, and did a bit of research on ordering prescription medications from other countries which didn't bear the 'research and development tax' our US-based pharma companies placed on American consumers. Work calmed me down, and it wasn't until my phone buzzed several hours later that I noticed the evening had slipped into nighttime while I wasn't paying attention.
"Where are you?" Emmett sounded impatient.
"I'm in my room - haven't left it since we got back to the hotel. Where are you?"
"Get your ass downstairs. We're in the bar. "
"Em, it's after ten and I'm in sweats."
"So what? The after-work crowd is gone - it's just us, and nobody's dressed for Sunday dinner. The bar's in the basement, and you can take the elevator straight down. Ass. Here. Now."
The line went dead, and I threw the phone on the bed. I knew Emmett well enough to know that he'd either keep calling, or just come up to the room and bang on the door until he got what he wanted, and truth be told, the prospect of having a nightcap wasn't a completely unwelcome one. The prospect of having a nightcap and debriefing Edward about his day on the Hill was even more attractive.
I spent a good few minutes debating whether or not I should change into something a little more...appealing, and then defiantly tossed my hair up into a pony tail and crammed my feet into some sneakers. I grabbed my card key, wallet, and phone, and left the room in search of a downward-bound elevator car.
The bar at The Hay-Adams was a curious affair. "Off the Record" was hidden in the basement of the tony D.C. establishment, and had for years been a bastion for political power-players. I'd been down there on several occasions over the years, but always with sources and always on the clock at the height of after-work elbow-rubbing.
When I reached the bar entrance, I gave my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim lighting. "Off the Record" was like a dark, wood-paneled cave, with warm red accents and funny caricatures of famous politicos covering the walls. The vibe was as upscale as the rest of the hotel, but there was also something cozy about this space, and I'd always liked it. The place was practically deserted at this hour on a Tuesday, and I immediately spotted Emmett and Tanya at the far end of the bar. Their backs were turned to me, and they were hooting with laughter while the bartender just shook his head and grinned.
Edward was standing in front of them, breathing heavily and smiling. I noticed two things immediately: the first was that his smile made me smile, and the second was that he was also wearing a Columbia sweatshirt. He saw me approaching and ducked his head down slightly, his smile pulling in until it was a more faint but still welcoming expression. To call it shy would have been incorrect; it was more self-effacing and less removed.
"Hey," I said when I reached them. "What's going on here?"
"Cullen was just giving us a little demonstration of his exercise regimen," Emmett laughed. "Pull up a stool - this stuff is priceless." He waved one hand at Edward while he scrolled through the iTunes library on his phone with the other. "Go on. Let's try some Jamiroquai next."
Edward shook his head. "You've seen enough for one night," he said. I saw his eyes take in the lettering on my sweatshirt, and I pointed at his to make the connection.
"I had no idea you were a fellow alum. Are you still in touch with people there?"
"J School Class of 2001," he answered, nodding, and ignoring my question entirely by posing one of his own instead. "How was your day with the pot-bangers?"
"Good. Your day on the Hill?"
Edward nodded again. "Interesting. I had to empty my pockets and sign my life away in order to get into the place, though. They're a jumpy bunch over there."
"Knock off the bullshit rundowns of your days," Emmett barked. "Jamiroquai. Found it. Let's see what you do with 'Virtual Insanity'. It kind of fits the surroundings."
"What is he supposed to be doing with Jamiroquai?" Emmett's insistence piqued my curiosity, as did Edward's apparent reluctance to satisfy the demand.
"Aiye - khot' kol yemu na golove teshi. He is stupid, pig-headed boy," Tanya laughed. "Show Bella what you do, Edward. Is very funny."
"What's awesome about it is that it should make you look like a fairy, but it actually doesn't. I'm mystified," Emmett said. "Go on. Get your step on."
Edward sighed his acquiescence. "Last one, and only for a minute or two."
Emmett slid his finger over the play icon, and the small speakers on the phone pumped out the heavily syncopated beat of the song. Edward stepped back and stretched for a moment, then started tapping his feet against the mellow oak flooring while the bartender paused to clap along in time. It took a few beats for Edward to find a rhythm he liked, but once he did, he jumped into a series of complicated, extremely fast shuffles and clicks, and I realized that what I was watching was tap dancing.
A bubble of surprised laughter escaped out of my mouth without warning, but it was quickly stifled in the next second as I watched him shake his head and practically fly across the clear space in front of the bar. The sound of his shoes hitting the floor formed the same kind of riveting tattoo which makes it impossible to stand still when a drum corps marches past you in a parade. There was something both ancient and oddly modern about the thing, and I found myself completely fixated on the sight of his feet as they pounded out half-beats and slid across the tempo, creating a second and clearly separate song underneath the acid-jazz funk of the music.
He was incredibly graceful in a very natural way. And while it was strange and unexpected, it certainly wasn't effeminate, because he danced with athleticism instead of flourish.
Tanya and Emmett might have been laughing, but I wasn't, because I was trying very hard not to be even more attracted to him than I'd been before I entered the bar.
He threw his hands up at the bridge, and Emmett reluctantly paused play. "Enough," Edward smiled. "That concludes the floor show for this evening. Don't forget to tip your waiters. And bartender," he added, as the man behind the bar tipped his head toward him in appreciation.
"Okay, what was that all about?" I asked, as he eased himself down onto the stool next to mine, and the four of us swiveled to face the bar again.
"Well," he breathed, trying to bring his heart rate down, "my mother insisted that some kind of dance was important to get me through the gangly years, and I turned my nose up at anything but tap, so there you go. I'm not a grand jeté kind of guy, as it happens - no offense to Barishnikov," he added when Tanya made a face at him.
"I get that, I guess," I nodded my head. "But why are you still doing it?"
Edward grinned. "Ah. I see. A few reasons, really. It's great exercise. I can do it almost anywhere, with no special equipment. I carry all the music I need in my head, and when that bores me, I use whatever music is around me. I've danced to everything from Farsi folk songs to Congolese tribal drums. It doesn't much matter where I do it, either - I can dance in a yurt, or in a prison cell, or under a desert moon. And finally, unlike a lot of exercise, it doesn't raise the hackles of anyone around me. Some hair-trigger tempers don't appreciate the lifting of weights and the sight of a man doing chin-ups, but they totally ignore someone who's just dancing, and that comes in handy more than you'd think it might." He leaned into me slightly and raised his eyebrows. "In a nutshell, I'm less threatening this way, sweetheart."
I couldn't possibly have disagreed more, but I kept my mouth shut, and after staring at me for a moment, Edward turned to speak to Emmett.
Tanya nudged me with her elbow. "I'm little drunk. Catch up," she sighed, banging her hand against the bar to attract the bartender's attention. " You had good day?"
I nodded and ordered the house special: a Presidential martini. "Long, but good. You?"
"Your government exhausts me. Bureaucrats exhaust me. Edward exhausts me. I'm exhausted." She put her head down on my shoulder, and I was honestly surprised at how comforting that felt. "This hotel is good, but is too quiet. I will sleep if it's so quiet."
I chuckled at her. "So? Sleep. You said you were exhausted. Sleep is good for exhaustion."
She looked up at me from her perch on my shoulder, and I saw that vague melancholy once more. "I don't like to sleep so much," was all she said. Then she raised her head again and suggested a game of four-handed poker. Emmett heard "poker" and greeted that second wind like a long-lost friend, sensing some weak gazelles in the herd. Neither Edward nor I could come up with any kind of reason not to kill an hour playing a few hands. In short order, the bartender produced a pack of playing cards on which were represented political heavyweights as bizarre human/animal hybrid cartoons, and we were off to the races. The wasabi-pea bar snacks became our chips.
Tanya spent the first few hands indiscriminately peppering her commentary with enthusiastic Russian curses, not even attempting to adopt a poker-face. Emmett laughed like a maniac as he relieved her of her wasabi peas; for him, the stakes were always entirely beside the point. Edward was a cautious player, which surprised me. He never bought the flop with less than a decent pair, but would occasionally risk an Ace/ten or an Ace/Jack. I stuck with the suited connectors when I could get my hands on them and I was on the button or close enough to it, and managed to take enough of the peas in the pot over the course of time to sit very comfortably in the hunt.
At one point, I noticed Edward staring at me. "What?" I demanded, suddenly and uncomfortably self-conscious, as I invariably was whenever I found him looking in my direction for an extended period of time.
He shook his head. "Nothing, really. You just look so serious. And you grab the side of your neck when you're not sure whether you should bluff. It's a very nice tell, but it's a tell all the same. Thought you'd want to know."
"Yeah, well, you almost rub your left eyebrow off when you bluff," I retorted.
Edward grinned ruefully. "My tell doesn't sound as nice as yours. Suggest another one and I'll work on it."
The bartender announced last call, giving us no more than two hands before we had to roll it up for the night. Tanya had finally busted out two hands ago, so she anointed herself color commentator. Emmett was dealing. Edward limped in with a token bet, and I got aggressive after the flop, but he called me, which made me doubt his dead-dog attitude, so I went all in, and he promptly followed. The pot was a sizable one; at the river, we realized that we were both holding the same straights, and ended up splitting the pot.
"Ha!" Tanya shouted. "You see? Kak dve kapli vody - you are the peas in same pod. Nashla kosa na kamen', Edward. Blade meets stone."
He smiled as we counted out the peas. "I'm not as wild as I used to be, but I still know how to win."
"You didn't win, Edward; it was a draw."
Edward looked at me as he pushed a pile of peas in my direction. "Clearly, it's a matter of perspective. I didn't lose, and in my mind, that means I won."
Emmett leaned back in his chair. "Not that it matters, because the two of you are arguing over second place. I won, but if I actually eat all of these wasabi peas, it won't be much of a victory for the ozone layer."
Were we arguing? Almost every conversation we had felt like a negotiation, and time after time, we seemed to reach a stalemate.
It was late, and tomorrow was going to be another long day of talking, of questions and answers and information-gathering. As much as I knew I should just let the matter drop, I couldn't. We stood up and returned the cards to the bartender, tipping him well and thanking him for letting us take up his space. As we made our way to the door, I murmured, "It was a draw," and Edward turned around to halt my progress with a hand on my forearm.
"I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't, because I'm in a rare mood to share. I absolutely love that you don't back down, and part of me is always hoping you'll win. Hoping you will, and frankly scared shitless that you might."
I looked up at him, and his expression was such a mix of emotions that it was impossible to sort them out, but I saw pain, and conflict, and hesitance, and tenderness as well, and the impact of all of them combined made me draw in a sharp breath. "Who are you, Edward?" I whispered. "Really, who are you, and what do you want from me?"
He slowly shook his head. "You don't know how long I've been asking myself those exact questions," he whispered back, more to himself than to me. Then his expression cleared, and the moment passed. "In any event," he continued in a stronger voice, "you should note that while I say I've won, I never said you lost. You're too literal for your own good."
"Just stop. Stop doing that. Stop with the non-answers, and the cryptic musings, and the hokey-pokey stuff. Enough, already. We're stuck with each other, and I'm trying to make this work, but if you keep irritating the shit out of me it's going to be more difficult than it needs to be." The angerlust was back in full force, and I had to stop my hands from reaching out to shake him, or grab him.
He raised his eyebrows at me. "I'm still irritating the shit out of you? Really? Well, that's promising. Most people give up way before this point."
"I need answers."
Edward shrugged his shoulders. "I wish I had some for you. You might just want to get used to disappointment, there, sweetheart. Believe me, I sympathize."
"Are you trying to make me hate you? I don't want to, but you really seem to be putting some effort into that," I seethed.
He pursed his lips together in thought. "I can't say that I want you to hate me, but it might not be such a bad idea for both of us in the long run if you do."
Fed up, I stomped past him on my way to the elevator.
"Good night, sweetheart," he called after me. "Sleep well."
"Go to hell," I shot back, completely ruffled and disgusted, and he laughed bitterly in response.
"Oh, I've already been. I have a bobble-head doll of Satan as a souvenir. I'll leave you to the elevator and just take the stairs to the lobby."
After a night of punching my pillow in frustration instead of actually sleeping, I plowed through the remaining sit-downs and dragged Emmett to the airport as early as possible. I sat next to Tanya on the flight home, during which we talked about absolutely nothing of importance and certainly nothing to do with Edward, who was seated across the aisle from us in casual conversation with Emmett. I forced myself to avoid looking in his direction at all costs. If Tanya noticed, she didn't comment on it, and instead kept me occupied with descriptions of an extremely-suspect security wanding she'd endured during their second trip to the Hill, and of all of the people they'd met there, asking me for background on some of them.
I listened to her with half an ear, and it wasn't until we were taxiing toward the gate at LaGuardia that she abruptly shifted topics.
"Listen to me, Bella; I gonna tell you something. Indyuk tozhe dumal, da v sup popal," she said, with a serious and concerned expression on her face, and she took one of my hands between both of hers to give it a squeeze.
I slewed my face around to meet hers and laughed in disbelief. "When are you going to remember that I don't speak Russian? What are you trying to say to me, in English?"
Tanya returned the laugh. "It means 'turkey was also thinking, but ended up in the soup'."
"Oh, my God. I'm on Mars. Seriously, is anyone around here capable of making a clear and fathomable statement? Do the two of you sit up at night, thinking of new and creative ways to confuse the hell out of me?"
"It means what you think is not always right. See? You get upset, but for wrong reasons."
I slipped my sunglasses on to shut out any potential examination of the expression in my eyes. "Sure I do. But until somebody gives me the right reasons, I don't have much of a choice, do I?"
"Is fair point," she agreed, and we gathered up our things once the "Fasten Seatbelt" sign was off.
Edward and I spent the remainder of the week talking politely across a frozen tundra between us. Peter dropped in several times to see how the health care series was shaping up, and seemed pleased enough with our progress. He informed us that the renovated studio would be ready early the following week, and he wanted to get us in there for some testing and a lesson or two on the smart boards. We'd do several dry runs as well, so that we weren't walking into our maiden broadcast without a feel for how everything was going to go down.
I went to visit with Jasper on Saturday; I hadn't invited Edward to join me, and he didn't push the point beyond asking me to tell Jasper he said 'hello'. That frankly surprised me, given how adamant he'd been about tagging along the previous week, but the mystery surrounding his complaisance was solved when Jasper informed me over coffee at the diner that Edward had already made a trip out to Greymore on Thursday to check in with him, conning the hapless Shelley into giving them a minute or two of privacy. Jasper chuckled at my outrage, which only served to annoy me more.
There was no new information on Alice's dream to share, and the week had been too hectic to do much digging around for answers. We agreed to meet again the following Saturday at the same time, with the hope that my liberation from the conference room and Emmett's presence would give me more freedom to root around for possibilities.
As we were wrapping up, Jasper tapped the table gently to get my attention. "Uh, there's one more thing I have to tell you," he said. "Alice had a dream - about you - yesterday. It wasn't a bad one, though," he hurriedly added. "She said it was important, and made me promise to tell you."
"So? What was it this time? I'm going to adopt an iguana? Inherit an ice cream truck? Buy some awesome shoes?" I'd had enough experience of Alice's Bella-centric dreams to know that whatever it was, it was going to be a debatable pleasure, but the fact that she'd had a good dream for a change was already a gift in my eyes, and I smiled.
He exhaled slowly. "Don't be angry with me. I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you like she told me, okay?"
I nodded my encouragement, but the smile slipped from my face because it didn't sound as though he was about to share something silly with me.
"Okay. Well, she said to tell you that you needed to do the brave thing when the time came, and you'd understand what she meant by that, and that everything would be all right as long as you went down into the hole."
"What?"
He bit his lip and repeated himself.
"That's it? What the hell does that mean? What hole? Why is everything a fucking fortune cookie this week? Why couldn't she just dream about shoes, for crying out loud?"
Jasper blanched slightly while I raged, and I made an effort to stop fuming in his direction, because he was just the messenger of muddle and not its author. "She told me you'd be pissed. Sorry. That's really all she said, though - swear to God. I'd be pissed too, for whatever that's worth to you. She did smile when she was telling me."
"When you get back there, you can deliver this message to her: tell her I have the keys to her place, and I'll be spending tomorrow afternoon drawing mustaches on every single one of the pictures on her walls. In black Sharpie. And then I'm going to take a pair of scissors to her precious antique postcard collection."
"You don't wanna do that," he laughed. "She'll skin you alive."
"She's doing time in La Casa de Cuckoo. She's not going to Switzerland, and she's not coming after me."
"You know, I know it made you mad and all, but I need to tell you that it was worth that just to see her smile for a change." He looked back down at the table for a moment, and when his eyes met mine again, they were sad. "She's not smiling too much lately."
On impulse, I covered his hand with my own. "If it makes her smile, then she can be my guest anytime she wants to send you out here with her half-assed dreams which make no sense at all. But she's the only one who gets to do that from now on."
"I'll tell her you said so. And I'm gonna guess that she'll want to ask you to leave those postcards alone."
I couldn't help but smile at him, and we parted ways shortly thereafter. On the drive back to Manhattan, I tried to come up with something about my life which didn't feel as though it was in complete flux at the moment. Nothing at all occurred to me, except for the fact that I had a lot of questions, which seemed to be the only constant element in my entire existence.
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