Round Robin

Chapter 7(midnightandahalf)

STEPHANIE

I was never going to be able to look at pie the same way again.

The chocolate curls nestled on top of the fluffy French Silk reminded me of the decadence of sinking into Ranger's bajillion-thread count sheets. The caramelization of the top of the Pecan pie was the same color as Ranger's eyes when he'd looked up at me from between my thighs. And don't even get me started on the Banana Cream.

A throat cleared and cut through my fantasy of licking whipped cream off… Get your mind out of the gutter, Stephanie!

"Sorry," I croaked. Blinked. When my vision focused, Tim stood in front of me with a quizzical look. "Sorry. What was that?"

I was still a bit dazed, and Tim cocked his head at me in concern. His white apron was pristine, just like always. The cowlick on the side of his head gave him that perpetual 'just rolled out of bed' look. He was a man of few words, but we'd developed a rapport over my years of frequenting the Tasty Pastry. He was just as much of a fixture there as Linda on the register. As far as I could tell, Tim's only job was grabbing and bagging customers' orders. To his credit, he was pretty good at it.

"What'll it be today?" he asked. He tended to speak quietly, and his eye contact treaded the line between sincere and disconcerting. He occupied a soft spot in my heart typically reserved for Cocker Spaniels.

"I'll take one of everything," I told him.

Despite our little inside joke being as tired as I was, Tim gave me his small smile. "So, the usual?"

"Yes, please."

I paid for my single Boston Cream donut with the last two-dollar bills in my wallet, dropping the change - meager though it was - into the tip jar. A donut was usually my Sunday morning treat, reserved once per week for the protection of my wallet and my waistline. But special exceptions could be made for extenuating circumstances.

Typically, my life's extenuating circumstances included things like overbearing mothers, crazy grandmothers, and the occasional existential crisis. This was my first attempt at trying to use sugar to self-medicate post-orgasmic embarrassment.

I couldn't even wait to eat sitting down like a civilized person. The minute I hit the sidewalk, I was unwrapping the donut and taking a big bite. I let the chocolate and custard coat my tongue while I used my free hand to corral my hair, trying to stop the wind from blowing my curls into the sticky mess.

After his second serving of pie, Ranger and I had apparently fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was morning and he was gone. He'd left a note inviting me to dinner at his apartment. I swallowed hard at the thought of the cameras in the elevators at Rangeman. Who monitored them, I wondered? How long had the guys been talking behind my back, gossiping about how often I'd been up to the seventh floor? Jeez. What must they think of me?

Nothing that wasn't true. Now.

The look on Lester's face when he'd made his blunt, scarily accurate guess had said it all. He knew exactly what I'd been up to. I'd thought I'd been making friends with the guys, but was I just their entertainment? The thought made my donut turn to lead in my stomach, and I nearly stumbled my way through the door of the salon.

"Who pissed in your Cheerios, Sunshine?" Amanda called. My partner-in-crime for what we affectionately called Tedious Tuesdays was sprawled across her chair. She'd used her foot on the counter to stop her spinning to watch me, and her look of amusement changed to one of concern. "Whoa. You, okay?"

I heaved a sigh. "I had sex."

Amanda's eyes widened and she sat up at attention. "Did that whole secret admirer thing pan out?"

I thought about that for a minute while I flung myself into my chair across from Amanda's. "I mean… I guess, in a very roundabout way, it did."

"Yeah, I'm gonna need a little more than that." She was fully alert now, leaning forward, hot on the scent of gossip. While I considered it a necessary evil of the job and tried to tune it out, Amanda lived for the salacious news that was passed between biddies and socialites alike over cuts and colors.

I prayed to the Powers That Be that a customer walks through our doors right at that moment. But clearly, the Powers weren't in my favor lately. In response to my silence, Amanda arched one of her delicate eyebrows at me. It was a gesture that had recently become so familiar that my stomach whooshed, and then I groaned at my own reaction.

"Spill the beans, Plum!"

I sighed, knowing that Amanda was going to be like a dog with a bone. God love her, but the woman could use a new hobby. Nonetheless, I could use someone to vent to and bounce some ideas off. And Amanda was, although perhaps not a trusted confidante, given her penchant for gossip, at least an available one.

"So, there's this tall, dark, and mysterious man, and I guess I sort of saved his life," I began melodramatically. I filled Amanda in on the happenings of the past few weeks, all the way up to last night.

By the time I finished, Amanda was reclining in her chair again, fanning her face and looking like she needed a cigarette. "Whoa."

"Yeah." Even the re-telling had gotten me a little flushed. Maybe I needed a cigarette.

Amanda's face transitioned from blissful to contemplative, to confused. "Wait, back up. When are we going to get to the reason that you walked in here looking like you wanted to puke?"

"Because who does that? Who falls into bed with a guy they barely know?"

"You mean a guy they've been having dinner with nightly and practically living with for weeks?"

Well, when she put it like that… I shook my head. "You don't get it. If you met the guy, you'd understand - he's not a normal, dateable person. He's just intent on repaying his karmic debt or whatever since he thinks I saved his bacon. And here I am, mistaking things for something more than they are."

"The way I heard the story, you weren't the one who initiated at least two of the three rounds," she pointed out. "It takes two to do the horizontal tango, and there's no mistaking that he was interested."

Maybe that was part of my problem - he was interested, but would he continue to be? I shoved that thought into the recesses of my mind and switched gears to the next topic that had my stomach churning.

"I can only imagine what all the other guys are thinking of me," I lamented.

Amanda's brow knit in confusion. "What do you mean?"

During the retelling of the past few weeks, I'd pieced together the clues. Lester was always going out of his way to talk to me and ask about my day. Bobby seemed constantly concerned with what and where I was eating dinner and had offered on several occasions to share his home cooking. Hal, who occupied the apartment across the hall from mine, was probably intimately attuned to my comings and goings.

"It's a freaking security company, for Chrissake," I said. "There are cameras everywhere. They've all probably been watching my every move for weeks, just waiting for the moment I'd cave to temptation. I assume there was a betting pool. I heard some of the guys in the break room last week talking about odds."

Amanda was looking at me like I had corn coming out of my ears. "Conceited, much?"

Surprise snapped me out of my spiral. "Excuse me?"

"You're talking about a group of grown men, all with lives of their own. What makes you think that their entertainment, or any part of their attention for that matter, centers on you?"

I blinked. The heat of embarrassment and shame was an unwelcome addition to the anxiety still roiling in my belly. At that moment, my phone chimed, and I fished it out of my bag on reflex. It was a text from Ranger.

We need to talk. Call me.

There was a missed call from him about twenty minutes ago. That must have been when I was in the bakery. The 'need to talk' was doing nothing for my anxiety.

"That from a member of your fan club?" Amanda asked, studying the ends of her hair.

"Point taken," I grumbled.

"Is it, really?" she asked, leaning forward to peer closely at me. "I've never understood why you have such a weird fear of gossip."

"I'm not afraid of it," I argued, even though that wasn't true. I was scared of gossip in the same way some people - sane people - were scared of guns. Because gossip, in the hands of the right person, was nearly as effective a weapon.

"You're sure afraid of something, and I don't think it's the man who just gifted you with four orgasms." Leaving me with that sage observation, Amanda heaved herself off the chair to greet a walk-in customer.

Usually, we made a game out of fighting over clients on Tedious Tuesdays. But I hadn't even heard the bell above the door. I was in the midst of an uncomfortable self-discovery. How long had I been letting my fear of gossip dictate my decisions?

Probably that was a thread that I didn't want to pull. Without any effort at all, it already unraveled all the way back to the moment I called Ranger instead of the police to help me out of my current stalker situation. In a moment of potential danger, I'd called a mysterious stranger with a black business card rather than risking the gossip that a run-in with Trenton's Finest would generate. Who does that?

Stephanie Plum. That's who. Not Emily Restler's daughter. Certainly not Sharon Petrusky, the nice young girl from Italian Peoples. Definitely not Marge Dembrowksi's daughter, who was the epitome of perfection.

And now it was Stephanie Plum who found herself on the receiving end of the mystery man's infuriatingly vague 'we need to talk'. Surely, he'd come to his senses in the light of day. Probably the dinner invitation he'd left on my nightstand was part of his plan to let me down easy, but he'd since realized that having me inside his inner sanctum yet again would be counterproductive, so wanted to clear things up sooner rather than later.

I shoved my cell phone into the drawer next to my extra combs and scissors, deciding that settling things with Ranger would be a Future Stephanie problem. First, I had to get through the Impossible Inventory, one of the dreaded activities that made Tedious Tuesdays so much worse than just the low tips.

Just after lunch, my cousin Shirley the Whiner came in for her monthly roots touch-up. I was the only one that Shirley trusted with her hair. Lucky me.

True to her name, she spent the first ten minutes of conversation complaining - about the weather, her kids, her husband, the chicken salad sandwich she'd had for lunch a week ago. Nothing was too insignificant or too petty for Shirley to whine about.

"So, what's been new with you?" she finally asked when she needed to catch her breath.

"Same old, same old," I replied. Years of conditioning had taught me that this was the safest reply, and not just to Shirley. The salon was a hunting ground for women like my cousin. Any scrap of information could be twisted and turned into gossip.

Shirley clicked her tongue at me. "That's not what I hear. Eddie told me about that robbery at the corner store a few weeks ago. It sounds like you were right in the middle of it! I can't even imagine."

I'm sure she could imagine. I'm sure she'd already gotten so many accounts - first, second, and third hand - that the entire event was playing in full technicolor and surround sound in her mind's eye.

"I heard that you knew the perp," she continued, not deterred by my silence.

"Not really," I insisted. "Just a guy from our high school. You probably knew him, too."

She waved a manicured hand. "Not like you did. So, have you heard from him?"

"I don't think he's the pen pals' type of guy," I said, remembering him copying off Kimmy Morrow's spelling tests.

Shirley's eyes widened dramatically, and she craned her neck to look back at me, causing me to narrowly avoid swiping her blonde dye across her face. "Oh, I didn't mean letters. Haven't you heard? He's out."

"Out?" I repeated. "Out of what?"

"Of jail! I guess there was something about overcrowding, and he was bonded out again," she said.

My first thought was for Ranger, and my heart plummeted into my stomach. Arnold had been distinctly displeased with Ranger's attempt to bring him in on his bond. But then I reminded myself that Ranger lived in what was essentially a fortified tower and that he specialized in bad guys. He could handle himself.

"Huh. Good for him, I guess." I feigned nonchalance, determined to throw Shirley off the scent of what she thought was going to be hot news. "Hey, have you ever thought of adding some strawberry to your blonde?"

I successfully maneuvered the conversation and distracted her by debating the merits of platinum versus strawberry for the remainder of the appointment. We made it all the way through the dye, shampoo, cut, and blowout without me having to say more than four more sentences. I waved goodbye to Shirley after I'd checked her out and stuffed the receipt in the register drawer. I didn't need to check for a tip, since Shirley's philosophy had always been that it was awkward to tip family.

Finally, I clocked out at 5:30 pm on the dot, before my shift replacement had even hung up her purse. I sucked in a deep breath when I set foot on the sidewalk, letting the exhaust fumes burn my nostrils. Dinner with Ranger in his apartment wouldn't be until 8. I had no interest in running into any of the guys; not until I had more time to talk myself out of the icky feelings that still lingered when I considered that Lester had probably told them all about my night with Ranger.

Although it was nearly a thirty-minute walk in the opposite direction, my feet set off for the Burg. The fresh air would do me good, I reasoned. A blue Miata to my right sputtered to life in a cloud of black when the stoplight turned green. Okay, so not fresh air, but as close as you get in Jersey.

I didn't realize until I was more than halfway there that I'd left my phone in the drawer at my station. No way I was turning back now.

When I arrived at my parents' house, I was a little surprised that Grandma Mazur wasn't waiting for me with her nose pressed against the screen door. I let myself in and for a moment I allowed myself to be comforted by the familiar noises of home. The drone of the evening news, the beeping coming from the kitchen that told me I was right in time for the pot roast to come out of the oven. The only thing missing was the sound of my mother and Grandma Mazur arguing over the potatoes.

That mystery was solved when I stepped over the threshold. I stumbled and my heart froze in my chest. "What are you doing here?"