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Chapter One
If you plugged an amusement park into Flick Dalgetty, you could light up a roller coaster and make cotton candy for days.
Too much exposure to her and Tom figured his chances of dying from electric shock, heart failure or diabetes ratcheted up to a thousand percent.
Everyone who was anyone in the media and public affairs industry in Chicago, which was everyone at this hacks-and-flacks mixer, knew Flick. She was tough, sharp, wrote well, pitched a story even better, knew her lobbying from her hobnobbing, got results. She had integrity. She won industry awards.
She was a person going somewhere, but with a kind of no-holds-barred, anything-goes approach Tom found both dangerous and exhausting. If she burned out in a few years’ time and disappeared off the radar, it’d be no surprise.
He admired her, but she was his personal definition of way outside the box.
She’d either win big or end up in a doomsday cult. There was no middle ground.
There had to be nearly a hundred consultants and reporters in a room made for far fewer. It was loud in here, so he had to have misheard Wren. He shoulder-bumped her. “Did you say Flick Dalgetty needs a temporary roommate?”
“Yeah,” Wren said, “but I overheard that, so don’t ask me for the details.”
He could no sooner live with Flick Dalgetty than he could become a man who believed whims, distractions and impulsiveness were good notions to live by. Tom’s ambitions were better contained in goal setting, scheduling, discipline. He’d get what he wanted in life methodically, by staying the course, not zigzagging all over the shop. That’s the way it had worked so far, and he had no reason to believe that strategy wouldn’t deliver him everything he wanted.
Living with Flick Dalgetty would be like being kidnapped and trapped inside a Gravitron. The music would never stop, the lights would flash forever and the centrifugal force of her would flatten him.
He needed a temporary housemate, not a personal wind machine who also popped corn, tamed lions and taught monkeys to dance.
“Something about her housemate quitting on her, same problem as you,” Wren said.
Watching Flick hold court with a bunch of business reporters who had their mouths open like fairground clown heads made Tom’s gut tighten. “Josh didn’t quit on me. He moved to Beijing.”
“The very idea of Flick in your swanky condo has you panicked. You’re looking at her as if she’s an alien species when she might be the solution to your problem,” Wren said with an eye roll that could’ve given her concussion.
There wasn’t any way electronic-shockagram, disco-light-strobe, tip-you-upside-down-and-shake-you-while-laughing-like-a-horror-show Flick Dalgetty could solve any problem Tom was likely to have.
Ever.
Still, he deserved the full-head eye roll. When Josh moved to Beijing, Tom had lost a best friend and close colleague, the perfect roommate and half a mortgage payment, making him tense about being financially overextended, but Wren had lost her work husband and any sympathy she might’ve had for Tom’s predicament.
Across the room, Flick was doing some kind of dance routine, throwing her arms around and stomping her feet. “I think she’s made of ants. Maybe it’s bees. She never stops buzzing. She probably never shuts up either,” he said.
“I see you re-upped your cranky-pill dosage.”
“I don’t need a roommate badly enough to consider Flick Dalgetty. I’ll starve first. I’ll get a second job.”
Wren made a pig snort noise. “A second job with all the free time you have after working fifteen hours a day.”
“I came to drinks.”
“Under protest. Like half the room, you only came because you want to see if the famous Jack Haley shows up. I bet you go back to the office tonight.”
Wren was right, that’s why there was such a big turnout. Hacks and flacks’ monthly get-togethers were never this well attended and Tom rarely bothered showing up—he didn’t need to stand around making awkward small talk with industry colleagues for no good reason. What he needed was a word with Haley about a story.
Wren stifled a yawn behind her hand. They’d both been working long hours on the branding and launch of MK-9371, Accord Pharma’s new enzyme-blocking Alzheimer’s drug. When your client stood to make a hundred million on the one drug, you worked fifteen-hour days and said “thank you very much” at bonus time.
Shame it wasn’t bonus time.
“I’ll finish up the brand report tomorrow,” Tom said. Naming the new drug was an integral part of its go-to-market strategy. It couldn’t make it into the hands of patients as MK-9371, and naming a new drug wasn’t as much fun as it sounded. They’d tested dozens of names so far and not yet found a winner. “All this being out and about has made me tired. Haley is not going to show.”
“Poor baby.” Wren yawned, musically. She’d taken off one height-enhancing heel and stood with her weight on one stockinged foot. “No social stamina.”
Flick had moved on from the business writer clowns. He’d lost sight of her. That felt like a bad idea. Flick woul
d be the kind of person who loved surprising you. Tom had given surprises up when he was eight and didn’t miss them; in fact, he actively campaigned against them. They were bad for business and awful for life in general.
“It’s not my stamina you need to worry about, it’s my social capital. If I had to live with Flick Dalgetty and her constant buzzing, itching, braying, nonstop exhaust-o-thon, I’d be risking my sanity.”
Wren yawned again, and this time Tom saw her tonsils. “I hear Gino’s needs late-shift delivery drivers,” she said with very rounded vowels.
“I’m not kidding. There has to be someone else we know but don’t work directly with—” because that could get unnecessarily messy “—who needs a temporary roommate.”
Once his promotion came through, Tom planned on living alone, but until that extra salary hit his account, he had no choice but to take a savage haircut on his savings—doable, but not fiscally smart—or find a short-term roommate.
Anyone but Flick Dalgetty.
“And if you don’t get the job?”
Then the temporary roommate would need to become a permanent roommate while he plotted his next move. Josh had made his, taking the Beijing gig. It was Tom’s turn.
“I’m getting the job.” And everyone knew he was the anointed heir to the MD’s corner office.
Another yawn from Wren. Catching; it made him yawn too. “You know, you could afford to live a little,” she said.
That was exactly the plan. One he’d had since he was a mere military brat. The new job, the condo to himself. His version of living a lot. He didn’t need much, just his promotion and the privacy of his River North address, and he’d been working at both those things since he graduated and survived a summer internship with Rendel Public Affairs.
One mooted office managing director retirement and some slightly distasteful internal politicking up the food chain was all that stood in his way after ten years of not living much at all outside of the office and away from a keyboard and phone.
But he wouldn’t risk his savings to keep his newfound Josh-less privacy, and much as he was all booyah about getting the top job and being the company’s youngest regional managing director, he was also hip-checking contingency plans because Tom and Plan B were best buds. That’s what a temporary roommate was. Insurance.
“You might need to actually tell people you’re looking for a roommate if you really want to find one.”
That was a chore he’d rather avoid. It required talking to people about the details of their life. It would ultimately require a working knowledge of what style of pajamas they wore, and how bizarre they looked with bedhead, and whether they could manage to get a cereal bowl into the dishwasher instead of the sink. Jesus, it might require him to be polite to whoever they slept with.
Josh had been just as Type A, workaholic, neat-freak, house-proud and hardly-ever-home as Tom was. They’d seen each other more in the office than around the kitchen counter. Neither of them had been dating. They both favored discreet, casual hookups, because emotional commitments got in the way, and a regular partner wanted regular things: dinner eaten together, God forbid, actual voice contact during the day, weekends away, hanging out with each other’s posse, outdoor stuff done for fun, and the pinnacle of fears—spontaneity.
