“Now you’re pulling my leg.”
“I’m not! It’s true.”
“You are a veritable font of information, Rosie. Where do you learn all this stuff?”
She shrugged, hesitating to make up a story. The truth was that when she was ten years old, her father left, and Rosalyn had escaped the harsh summer heat of Fresno—and her mother’s devastation—by hiding out in the public library. She loved painting, so a kind librarian showed her the section on fine art, including one thick tome that listed dozens of pigments, along with their histories and qualities. Ever since, it had become a kind of game; in her mind she would run through the exotic-sounding pigments like a mantra.
Dash smiled. “How did Shakespeare put it? ‘Young in years, in judgment old’?”
“I think it goes ‘young in limbs,’ but I’ll take it,” she said, returning his smile.
He started to drop by the office more frequently. Was it her imagination, or did he pay a little more attention to her than to theother interns? Some days Dash would bring a sandwich and offer to share, lingering as though he didn’t have a business to run, and they would chat about art and painting and wine. Rosalyn told him how her mother had advised her that she would never be able to make a living with her art, so she should either acquire a professional skill—like marketing—or marry rich.
He threw back his head and laughed at that one.
She started to think about Dash all the time. She obsessed over his distinctive scent, his slapdash handwriting. She yearned for the slightest hint of him. Alone in bed at night, she wondered what it would be like to kiss him, to touch him. It was a ludicrous infatuation, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself.
She began a project to redesign all of his labels, one after another. Rosalyn told herself—and Dash—that she could use them as class projects, but the truth was that spending time with his products made her feel closer to him.
One Saturday morning, she was doing her weekly wash at the Laundromat in town when she spied Dash going into a restaurant across the street, accompanied by a beautiful woman. Frozen, Rosalyn watched as he held the door for his companion, who smiled as she looked up at him. They disappeared inside, the door closing behind them. Shutting Rosalyn out.
She felt as if she had been punched in the gut, so visceral was her reaction.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rosalyn,”she scolded herself.“He’s your boss—that’s all. You’re suffering from a schoolgirl crush. He’s not yours, and never will be.”
But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Her classmates at the university—bright, healthy young men full of optimism and promise for the future—now seemed callow in comparison. A few discreet questions to the office manager revealed that Dash was fromPhoenix, had been married but was divorced four years ago, had no children, and was thirty-four years old—twelve years older than Rosalyn.
She tried directing her energies into her studies, where they belonged. Besides, Rosalyn reminded herself repeatedly, at the end of the semester her internship would be over and she would likely never see him again. Unless he came by the restaurant. But still...
It didn’t help.
One Thursday Dash and his friend Hugh were again at the restaurant, at her table. She tried to act casual as she greeted them and took their cocktail orders.
“If I leave you three hundred this time, will you follow me out into the parking lot again?” Dash asked.
She laughed. “No, and you certainly don’t need to buy me, Dash.”
“Did you hear that?” He put his hands over his chest and exclaimed to Hugh: “She called meDash! That’s progress.”
“Will you please just ask the woman out already?” said Hugh, smiling at her. “Though I can’t imagine why she’d agree. She’s worth twice as much as you, easily.”
Rosalyn’s pounding heart seemed to still as she and Dash stared at each other. As if she were in a movie, everyone else in the restaurant—the diners, the waitstaff, the barflies—seemed to fade away.
After a long moment, Dash said: “Rosie girl, you have gotten under my skin. If you say yes, I honestly think I could offer you a lifetime of laughter.”
?Sometimes, when the pain was especially intense, Rosalyn tried to remind herself of the annoying things Dash had said and done.
Like the way he had commandeered their only bathroom eachmorning so that Rosalyn had to jump out of bed before him if she wanted privacy to quickly pee and brush her teeth. Or the way he insisted on watching the Tour de France,allthree weeks of it, every damned stage, all the while lecturing her on thepelotonand what the different colored jerseys represented. He teased her for liking the polka-dotted jersey best, and for wondering aloud why scantily clad models stood onstage with the athletes as they received their awards.
He had a habit of loudly clearing his throat when he was thinking. At first she had found it endearing, but soon it became irritating. He liked wall-to-wall carpeting—and it had to bewhitecarpeting, which she thought singularly impractical for someone who bought, sold, and drank so much red wine.
He insisted on renting an expensive condo in a posh new development and leased a luxury car. He spent hundreds of dollars on new clothes instead of purchasing perfectly stylish but used garments from the consignment shop in Petaluma, as she always did.
Dash had spent freely, assuming he had plenty of time to earn more money, until his time ran out and Rosalyn was left a widow, deep in debt.
But then she would remember Dash’s husky voice crooning to her, making her feel safe and loved, and she would collapse in a heap on the aqua blue bath mat in their cottage bathroom, stifling her sobs with the T-shirt that no longer smelled like him, wishing more than anything that she could hear him clear his throat just one more time.
Chapter Fifteen
