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“Why did you work for me for seven years?”
She was quiet for a while, and he appreciated that. He felt like she was taking his question seriously and she would give him an accurate answer. Because after all, she’d already said that she admired his integrity and his character. But that wasn’t what kept her at her job.
“Was it the money?” he finally asked. Maybe he had totally misunderstood, and she was making a comment about the salary he paid her. It was higher than any other administrative assistant he knew. He believed in compensating a person for doing a good job, and he couldn’t imagine that there was anyone else in the world, and he’d been around a good bit, who could do what Clara did, who could know him so well, understand him, and work to please him.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Why?” he pushed. Because he really wanted to know. He felt like he was on the cusp of finding out something that was going to change his life. And that seemed like an overstatement, but it wasn’t. He was pretty sure that Clara’s answer to that question was going to point him down a different path.
“You’re going to laugh at me,” she finally said.
“I promise I won’t.”
“I’m going to be embarrassed.”
“If I can fix that, I will.”
“I had a crush on you.”
“For seven years?” He didn’t mean to question her, he just couldn’t believe it. He had no idea. “You have to know you shocked me.”
“Seriously? You didn’t know?” She turned her head and looked at him, as though truly unsure as to whether or not he might have known.
“No.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
He wanted to shout “yes” into the car interior, but he didn’t want to say something without thinking it through. But... Of course it would have changed everything. He would have... He didn’t even know.
“Yes. I’m sure it would have changed things. I’m not sure how. But it changes them now.”
“How so?” she asked, and she sounded a little fatalistic, like she was resigned to whatever he was going to say but knew she wasn’t going to like it.
“You don’t like the fact that you had a crush on me?” And then he realized he said it in the past tense. “Do you still? Have a crush, I mean?”
“I don’t know if you can call it a crush. A crush kind of sounds temporary. Seven years isn’t really temporary, is it?”
“Seven years is a good long time. Maybe longer than what you should have allowed it to go on. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
“Have you ever seen the girls you go out with?” she asked, and there was a hint of humor in her eyes.
“I guess.” He stared at them for an entire night. He’d seen them. But it was usually someone he had hired which saved him the trouble of maintaining a relationship and kept him from having to go places alone. That seemed to invoke more speculation than the parade of different women that he’d been with over the years. “Only for one night.”
“I’m not exactly like them.”
“No. I guess you’re not.”
She gave an easy smile. “You know. I’m a small-town girl, living in Strawberry Sands. You... You hire people to go out with you, and they want to. Some of them, you didn’t even have to pay. Just for the prestige of being on your arm.”
“That’s true.” He sounded a little sad about that, probably because he was. He hadn’t realized how that might look to her. Hadn’t really given it a thought. It was just a means to an end. He needed to go, needed to go with someone, and he had Clara hire someone for him.
“It had never occurred to me that you would go with me.”
“I don’t know that I would have.”
“Your question involves being seen in public with me?”
“My question involves being out in public... Not necessarily with you, but...at an event for you. I... I didn’t want to be just your business call girl.”
