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“God, no. I wanted to be a nurse. That lasted until Viv got a nasty cut when I was seventeen and I passed out from the sight of the blood.”
“Yeah, that could be a problem.” I laughed. “Tell me, Amy, if you could have changed anything about your childhood, what would it have been?”
She didn’t have to think. “I wish we could have taken a family vacation, all four of us, before Viv and I left for school. We never did, because the life of a dairy farmer is a continuous, seven-day-a-week job. My daddy never had a vacation the whole time I was growing up.” She lost her smile looking down at her plate.
“Wow, a dairy farm. Sounds like hard work.”
“Two milkings a day, and you can’t ever miss one or the cows get sick.”
I reached across to take her hand. I didn’t know how to ease her pain. “Maybe you’ll get a chance at that vacation someday.”
She shook her head. “Daddy doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of his cows for even a day.”
We chatted easily, exchanging relevant details and memories for nearly another hour, so when I paid the bill, I added a generous tip for having taken the table for so long.
Amy gathered up her purse. “We should spend some more time on this tomorrow. Can we meet in the morning?”
I shook my head. “I can't. I have another commitment tomorrow I can't break.”
It'd taken me a month to get the meeting set up with Chameleon outside of normal business hours, so I wasn’t about to cancel. I was getting a rare chance to meet and pick the brain of their founder and chief investigator, Ryan Westerly. The keys to their approach seemed to revolve around his work, and I was anxious to learn more.
“I wish I could,” I reiterated. “But this will have to be good enough.”
Amy had attacked the problem of learning as much as we could about each other with gratifying determination, and the evening had gone by quickly. In the end, the dinner with her had been a refreshing interlude.
Leaving the restaurant, we turned right, the route to the MBTA station for her train ride home.
“Liam,” she said, letting my name hang in the air.
“Yeah, Sunshine?”
“I want to be honest with you.”
Fuck.
This is where bad news usually started. When a woman says she wants to be honest, it’s always because she has some bad news to lay on you. I waited for the bomb to drop. This was the same woman who had told me flat out that sex with me was “not as bad as she expected”three days ago. I doubted whatever she had to say now could be as devastating as that.
“I had a really good time tonight.”
I waited for thebutfollowed by the news that she couldn’t go through with it, or something equally bad. We walked along silently for another few steps, and she didn’t add to her statement.
She snaked her arm around my waist, leaning into me as we walked.
The warmth of her hip against mine brought back images of Tuesday night and stiffened my cock. I had vowed to keep this fake. It wasn’t money for sex, I’d told her, it was payment for consulting, for acting, and I needed to keep it that way.
I put my arm around her shoulder, and she relaxed into me as I shortened my stride to keep our feet in sync.
“Me too,” I told her honestly. Telling her about losing Roberta, and my self-destructive aftermath, had been cleansing. I had kept it hidden for so long.
She hadn’t judged me as I’d expected, but had been genuinely supportive. For over a year I had held it in, ashamed of the weakness I’d displayed, the lack of self-control.
“Thank you for helping,” I added.
“You can thank me when it’s done and you’re writing Tiffany’s another ten-million-dollar check. It will be a great help to the two hundred and forty-one people who depend on us,” she said, giving my waist a squeeze.
“I thought you had a hundred and ten employees.”
“We do,” she said. “I had HR tally up the count including family members. Two hundred and forty-one, until Jessie Camino in Accounts Receivable gives birth. She’s expecting twins, which will make it two hundred and forty-three.”
