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As soon as she opened the bedroom door she could smell the pie. Not as mouthwatering as fried chicken but wonderful all the same. A heated Sara Lee did not smell this delicious; she could almost taste the sugar, and the smoothness of the peaches.
Tom was settled on the big comfortable modular sectional with the TV on CNN and the remote in his hand. He’d moved her satchel and scarf from the sectional where she dumped them to one of four stools at the kitchen counter. He switched back to the music channel wh
en she came in. Some eighties thing she didn’t recognize. He had a slick sound system but an odd taste in music.
“The Pixies,” he said.
“‘Where is my mind?’” she said on top of the lyric. Where indeed? “You like old stuff.”
“I like playlists other people have made. Saves me the bother.”
How efficient. And soulless. “Look, I’m sorry about earlier. The pie thing.”
“It’s fine. Pie is good. I’m a big boy, I could’ve told you to take your pie request and shove it. And you didn’t bully me into offering you the room. It suits my purposes to have you here, and again, I’m not shy about telling people to fuck off. This is a temporary thing between us, but it doesn’t have to be unpleasant. We should take the time to get to know each other.”
It was a good thing one of them was a rational adult. That was the most he’d said since the hacks-and-flacks mixer when he’d nearly taken her out with his body slam. Except he was looking at her as if she’d done something he didn’t like again.
“Am I dressed wrong?” Shit. The guy had rules on top of rules. She didn’t know how she felt about him moving her stuff.
He placed the remote control in a carved wooden tray on the coffee table that was a solid slab of caramel-streaked marble, and stood. “Of course not. I didn’t realize you were so—” He stopped, jaw clamped tight.
“So what?”
“Young.”
“I’m twenty-eight.”
“You could pass for eighteen without the—” he waved a hand to indicate her body “—uniform—” and her face “—and gunk.”
She parroted his gesture. “Which is precisely why I need the uniform and the gunk. No one wants to take policy and public affairs advice from an eighteen-year-old.”
One of her biggest expenses when she’d landed a consultancy job was her wardrobe. She’d lived in jeans and tees and flirty cheap cotton dresses and had never worn heels. She’d had no idea how to dress to impress and neither did anyone she knew.
She had to hire a corporate wardrobe consultant with her first salary deposit, and spent a bucket load of cash and credit on the right suits and shoes, and elegant dresses for after-hours events. All of which had to be updated regularly, because not being on trend, with the right hair and makeup, was some kind of professional slip-up, a bigger crime than not going to the right school.
Not something men had to deal with, and goddamn, she resented that. Her credibility was at stake if the cut of her skirt was out of fashion, but a man could wear the same suit every day and no one would notice, let alone think it affected his judgment.
“You know there was an Australian male newscaster who wore the same blue suit five days a week on air for a year. No one picked it up. Same suit, five days a week, one whole year, millions of viewers. And not one person was bothered about it. But people called the network and complained if they didn’t like the color of his female colleague’s shirt on a single day.”
“I did not know that,” Tom said. And he said it in a “don’t spook the horses” way, as if he thought this was the beginning of her burnout, the very moment she started to unravel, and it was a good idea not to excite her any further.
“I need pie.” I need you to back off on the judging. You only think I’m a wildcat because you are a stone wall.
He went behind the kitchen counter. It might have been to check on the pie, but since he didn’t go to the oven, it had to be to take shelter from the blast radius. She went to the counter and stood there looking precisely like someone who’d never eaten homemade pie.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said, without reading the back of a pack or anything. Impressive. Annoying.
“I’m not going to burn out.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
Fifteen minutes was a long time for two tense people on the verge of an argument to wait for pie and not speak.
Finally, Tom went to the oven and Flick moved across to the kitchen. He took the pie out and set it on the counter. It was golden and puffy, the top of it crosshatched so you could see the yellow of the peaches. They looked almost liquid. Drool gathered in the corners of her mouth.
“This has to cool,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have said the thing about the rails.”
