Chapter Four

Idiot, Aubrey thought to herself, and then said it out loud for Peter’s benefit. “I’m an idiot.”

            “Because you quit your job?” he asked, placing the finishing touches on whatever elaborate dinner he was making her. That was the plus of being best friends with a chef.

            Aubrey poured herself more wine. She had never quite recovered from the hangover, but the wine was making her feel a hundred times better. Thank God for wine. She nodded.

            “I do not think you’re an idiot for quitting your job. I thought you were an idiot for thinking you could keep working with a boss who you’d just rather messily divorced.”

            “But, Peter, I don’t have a job to go to here,” she pointed out.

            “So, okay, you could have given a little more thought to the actual decision to quit. You can wait tables at the restaurant for a bit, if you want. Until you find yourself a better job.”

            “Who’s hiring in this economy?” she asked, miserably, feeling sorry for herself.

            “Maybe you could paint,” Peter suggested. “You’ve always wanted to paint.”

            “I can paint to my heart’s content,” Aubrey replied. “It isn’t going to put money on the table.”

            “Food on the table,” Peter corrected. “How much wine have you had?”

            “I’m still a little drunk from last night. Which we’re not going to talk about. We’re going to talk about what an idiot I was for marrying my boss in the first place.”

            “You weren’t an idiot. You were young and compassionate and Paul was quite the sob story. Everyone makes mistakes, kid.”

            “No one as spectacularly as I do.” She watched him stir the sauce he was working on. Probably he was reducing it or some such thing. Peter talked chef-speak when he cooked. She couldn’t understand a word that came out of his mouth. And she decided she had to tell somebody. She would have preferred to tell a female friend, just because, but her closest female friends had not been able to comfort her through dinner that night. Anna was at the Sorbonne. Kaye was still busy figuring out how to breast-feed her newborn. Aubrey couldn’t have called either one of them to tell them she had stupidly quit her job on a spur of the moment decision. Peter, however, she could call. Peter, even though he might be a man, was hands-down her best friend. So he was going to get the whole crazy story. “I know why my marriage to Paul failed.”

            “Because you didn’t suit at all?”

            “Because the sex was incredibly bad. I think now that Paul didn’t even enjoy sex. It was like, ick, let’s get in and get over this with.”  

            “I’m sure that’s not what Paul thought,” said Peter.

            “Don’t try to make me feel better.”

            “I’m not. You’re an attractive woman. Men will make fools of themselves to have sex with a lot worse.”

            “I slept with a guy last night,” she said, “and that, that was good sex.” She punctuated the remark with a wave of her wineglass.

            Peter stopped stirring his sauce. He looked up at her. He said, “What?”

            “Yes.” She nodded emphatically.

            “You had a one-night stand?”

            “Mm-hmm. Didn’t even know his last name. All in all, I’m pretty proud of myself. What do you think?”

            “I think…That’s not your sort of thing.”

            “I was drunk and emotionally vulnerable.”

            “And he took advantage of that?”

            “Well, maybe he took a little bit of advantage of the drunkeness, but he was equally emotionally vulnerable, and really, he tried to be a gentleman but I kind of started stripping.”

            “You started stripping?” Peter’s voice sounded strangled.

            Aubrey nodded and frowned. “I’m not sure I did a good job. When women strip for you, do they usually wear a dress? It seems much easier in a dress.”

            “Why are we discussing this?”

            “I’m looking for a male perspective.”

            “You took your clothes off?”

            “Yeah.”

            “That’s all a man is really looking for.”

            “Pretty easy to please?”

            “Oh, yes.”

            “Probably not this one. He was a little out of my league. Really good-looking. Movie-star good looks. He had a stomach as hard as a rock.”

            “Well, good for him,” said Peter.

            Aubrey grinned. “Now you’re jealous.”

            “I’m not jealous. I don’t want to sleep with you.”

            “No, you’re just jealous of a man like that being out there at all. So. That was my first one-night stand.”

            “How do you feel?”

            “I’m…irritated. I went for looking for some simple sex, and instead I got Gray.”

            Peter snorted derisively.

            “What?” asked Aubrey, affronted.

            “He said his name was Gray?”

            “You don’t think it was?”

            “Gray?” Peter raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Oh, yeah. And now you have a crush on a guy whose real name you don’t even know.”

            “That is his real name,” she protested. Surely he wouldn’t have gone by a non de plume…?

            “You’re not protesting the crush thing, I notice.”

            “He was good, Peter. He was very, very good. He was…very good. I don’t have a crush on him, but he was a hell of a lot better than my vibrator. I’m going to miss him, that’s all.”

            “Also, this is the first time since the divorce, isn’t it?”

            “First time for what?”

            “First time you’ve had sex.”

            “Yes,” she admitted, haughtily, daring him to make something of that. “That is, if you’re not counting the vibrator.”

            “I’m not,” he confirmed, drily.

            “What’s that smell?” she asked, looking at his sauce.

            He swore. “It’s burning.” He pulled it off the heat. “You distracted me with this unprecedented one-night stand talk. You going to be okay over this?”

            She rolled her eyes at him. “Of course I’m going to be okay over this. It’s not that big a deal. Especially when you consider that I just quit my job.”

            “Yeah, but you can always wait tables,” said Peter, and winked.

 

Gray had met Mark when Mark had arrested Doug for drinking and driving when Doug had been a troublesome eighteen-year-old and Gray had just moved to Vegas, just come into the stock Hugh had left him, and had had no idea what the hell he was doing. It was an unlikely friendship, and it had unexpectedly blossomed. Gray was glad for that. Without a friend in Vegas, he might have died those first few years. So what if he was the Chairman of the Board of a Fortune 500 company and Mark was just a local police detective? It worked for them. And Mark was one hell of a sparring partner.

            “I thought you were joking about your foot,” Mark said, in surprise, as Gray limped beside him.

            Gray glared at him. “You didn’t beat me that badly last time out.”

            “That’s not what the tape shows.”

            “The tape?” Gray repeated in disbelief. “You got the tape?”

            “How often do I beat you?”

            “Never,” Gray reminded him. “You never beat me.”

            “Sometimes I beat you. Especially now that you’ve lost a step, old man.” Mark glanced back down at the foot Gray was favoring and quirked a smile. “Several steps, it seems.”

            “Shut up,” Gray told him, sourly.

            “What the hell did you do to it?”

            They stepped outside, into the bright-as-day Vegas night that was swiftly falling. “It’s not interesting. Can you drive? I don’t want to take the limo, and I can’t drive myself.”

            “Your not-interesting stories are always the most interesting,” Mark commented, handing the claim ticket to the valet.

            “I kicked a wall.”

            “Ah. And you don’t know your own strength.”

            “Apparently not. It’s much better than it was.”

            Because Mark used the gym at the Bienvenue so often, and because it was well-known that he was friends with the boss, his car was always close at hand. It pulled up to them smoothly, and Gray maneuvered himself into the passenger side.

            “So who is she?” Mark asked, pulling the car out into Strip traffic.

            “Who’s who?” Gray asked, in surprise.

            “The girl. You’ve got that smug I-just-had-sex smile that bachelors got.”

            “Is that a trace of jealousy I detect?”

            “No, that smile is a matter of fact, my friend.”

            “There’s no girl.”

            “I interrogate people for a living, Gray, and I think you’re lying.”

            “There’s not really a girl. It was silly. It was stupid. I was a little drunk and she was, I think, a lot drunk.”

            “And you didn’t play noble as you usually do?”

            “I tried, but she started taking her clothes off. And she was a redhead.”

            Mark laughed. “You and redheads. One is going to be the death of you one of these days, you know.”

            “Never.”

            “Marriage is fun, Gray. You might like it. Not all marriages turn out like your mother’s marriages.”

            “Are we going to have dinner or a pop psychology lecture?”

            Mark smiled. “Just dinner. Actually, I invited you to dinner because I’m concerned about you. I am sorry, Gray.”

            What Gray mostly appreciated was that he said it without the least bit of tongue in cheek. Mark was a sports fan. He understood. “Thanks.”

            “I thought they had it. I really did. I was thinking of how off-the-wall happy you must have been.”

            Gray winced with a pain that was almost physical. “Please let’s not talk about it.”

            “Monica’s barbecuing.”

            “Barbecuing. Perfect,” said Gray, as Mark rolled to a stop in front of his house. It was a pretty two-story identical to all the other houses around it. Typical Vegas house, and Gray loved it. Maybe Mark had a bit of a point when he talked about his mother’s marriages. Maybe Gray’s scattershot upbringing was the reason he had never looked at a woman and thought, Yes. That one. She’s perfect for me. Maybe if he’d been raised in a nice, little house like this instead of a hotel, he’d be living a normal life like Mark instead of the completely ridiculous life he led.

            The air did indeed smell like barbecue, and they walked around the side of the house to the back. The baby, Madison, all of two years old, was sitting in the sandbox concentratedly sifting sand under the lights in the backyard. Mark detoured over to her. Gray limped his way up the couple of steps leading to the patio. Mark’s wife watched him in amusement.

            “What happened to you?”

            “Oh, travel casualty,” he said, dismissively. “How are you, Mon?” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “How’s the baby-making?” He laid a casual hand on the swell of her belly fondly.

            “Oh, the fun part was over four months ago. Now I’m just fat and tired. And I still have five months left to go.”

            “Fat.” Gray sat heavily in a wrought-iron chair, propping his leg up. “Don’t be silly.”

            “I’m making you a cheeseburger,” she said, turning back to the grill.

            “Thanks.”

            “He’d help you,” said Mark, walking up the steps with the baby in his arms, “but he’s milking his foot for all it’s worth.”

            “Uncray!” exclaimed Madison, squirming out of her father’s arms and into Gray’s with what passed as a joyful “Uncle Gray” in her language.

            “How’s my favorite girl?” Gray asked her, and tickled her stomach the way he knew she wanted him to.

            She giggled in delight and ran back to her father, and Gray, watching as Mark casually picked her back up, held a platter for his wife to load with hamburgers, felt an uncharacteristic twinge of envy. He had been out with Mark the night he had met Monica, had spent the entire evening buying himself drinks and drinking them alone while Mark had fallen all over himself trying to be charming. And he had not been jealous. He had been best man at the wedding. And he had not been jealous. He had not been jealous when Madison had been born, when she took her first steps, when she first started saying “Daddy.” It was awfully strange for him to be jealous now, out of nowhere. And he felt a little guilty over it.

            “So what did you do to your foot?” Monica asked, with interest, as she sat opposite him.

            Gray dug into his cheeseburger voraciously. His stomach had, unexpectedly, not been quite settled enough to handle food earlier in the day. He felt like he’d been surviving on pure caffeine for the whole workday. “It really doesn’t-”

            “He kicked a wall,” said Mark, cutting a hamburger into tiny pieces for Madison.

            “Kicked a wall? Why did you do that?”

            “I’m pleading temporary insanity. Intense frustration.”

            “It’s a guy thing,” said Mark. “You wouldn’t understand.”

            Monica rolled her eyes. “He’s been insufferable since we found out the baby’s a boy.”

            “The baby’s a boy?” Gray asked.

            “You didn’t tell him?” said Monica.

            “I thought I told you,” said Mark.

            Gray shook his head. “I don’t remember that. A brother. What does Madison think about that?”

            “Oh, Madison and Monica are both sulking because this evens things out now.”

            “Don’t listen to a word he says, Gray. We could have a dozen sons, and the women would still dominate the men in this family.”

            “I let her think that,” said Mark.

            Monica grinned at him.

            Jealousy, Gray thought. He was definitely jealous. Dammit, like he didn’t have enough on his plate. Now, apparently, out of nowhere, he’d decided he might actually like a family. Dammit to hell. He had to figure out how to get rid of that particular impulse.

            Then Mark’s cell phone rang, and the grin on Monica’s face faded, and she drew her eyebrows together and sent her husband a thoroughly displeased look. Maybe, Gray thought, he didn’t want to be married after all.

            “I’m sure it’s nothing,” Mark said to Monica, then muttered to Gray, “Excuse me,” as he stood with the phone, walking to the other end of the patio.

            “He’s sure it’s nothing,” Monica scoffed. “It’s always something.”

            “Ah,” said Gray, who was unsure he wanted to get involved in this marital disagreement.

            “I have to go,” said Mark, flipping the phone closed as he walked back to the table.

            “Uh-huh,” said Monica, looking unsurprised.

            “I’ll drop you off,” he said to Gray.

            “Don’t be silly,” Monica told him. “You invited Gray to dinner, at least let him stay for dinner.”

            “Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,” inserted Gray. He was fond of Monica but he could count on one hand the number of times he’d spent hanging out with just her.

            “You wouldn’t be any trouble. You’d be company for me and Madison since Mark is abandoning us.”

            “I’m sorry,” said Mark, and kissed the tip of Monica’s nose.

            “Please be careful,” she begged him.

            “Always.” He dropped a kiss on the top of Madison’s head and glanced at Gray. “I’ll call you later in the week to see if you’ve recovered.”

            Mark went jogging around the side of the house, and Monica said immediately, “Do you think we could convince him that we’re having an affair?”

            Gray actually burst out laughing, the idea was so ridiculous. “No,” he said. “And anyhow, why would you want to?”

            “Well, maybe he wouldn’t be so eager to leave us alone then.”

            “He wasn’t eager to leave us alone. He offered to drive me home,” said Gray.

            “I’m actually a little relieved he got called away. I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I was going to stop by the hotel at some point this week.”

            “Stop by the hotel?” Gray repeated, in confusion. That would have been completely unprecedented.

            “Years ago, Mark mentioned in passing that you had offered him a job.”

            “Oh. Yes. I did.”

            “What kind of job was it?”

            “Well, it was in security. I thought it would be convenient to have a person I actually trusted in charge of Bienvenue’s security. I still think that would be preferable.” Gray’s tone was dry. It was no secret at the hotel that he didn’t get along with his head of security. Danny usually ran interference for him.

            “Does the job offer still stand?”

            Gray thought she looked almost anxious at the answer. He thought he could not be any more confused. “Well, yes, it still stands. I ask Mark a few times a month, for God’s sake. Surely he understands it still stands?”

            “I don’t know what Mark thinks. I want you to convince him to take it.”

            “Convince him to take it?”

            “Yes. He doesn’t want to take it.”

            “No, he doesn’t. Monica, he likes what he does.”

            “But I don’t like what he does. Gray, I’m so tired of worrying about him. As soon as he leaves this house, I tense up, and I don’t relax again until he comes back, and then I worry over how soon he’s going to be called away again so I can start worrying about him.”

            “Monica, you’re gong to drive yourself crazy. Mark’s fine. You can’t live your life worrying-”

            “You think I don’t tell myself that? Over and over? That I need to just relax and enjoy my life? That’s all well and good, to a point. And the point that I reach is that Mark would be a lot safer if he worked for you than he currently is on the police force.”

            Gray was beginning to feel a little alarmed at how distressed Monica appeared to be. He tried to be as reasonable as possible. “Alright. Granted that’s true. Mark likes what he does-”

            “I know. And I didn’t think it would be this hard, being a police officer’s wife. And then I had a baby. And now I’m having a son. How can I raise a son without a father?”

            “You don’t have to-”

            “But what if I did? I know I’m overreacting. I know Mark is currently fine. But I’m so terrified of losing him, Gray. So absolutely terrified. I barely sleep because I just watch him and think of how terrified I am.”

            “But have you talked to him?”

            “Yes. But you need to talk to him. If he had two people badgering him about this-”

            “I’m not sure this is my place, Monica.”

            “I know. That’s why I waited the longest I could before asking you. But now, Gray, you’re my last resort. Please help me. Please?”

            Monica Dailey was a pretty girl. Not quite Gray’s type but pretty all the same. Petite in a way that reminded him of Aubrey. Long, chestnut brown hair. And a pair of brown doe eyes that shimmered luminously at him in the lights of the patio, pleading with him. Dammit to hell. “I’ll give it a try,” he agreed, reluctantly.

 

No matter how many different ways she did the numbers, the result stayed stubbornly the same. She could not afford to quit her job. Much as she wanted to, she just couldn’t do it. New York was too damn expensive to live in. Between the divorce and the silly splurge of her disastrous trip to Boston-well, disastrous if it was rated in terms of baseball instead of in terms of sex–she was out of savings. The alimony was definitely not enough for her to live on for any amount of time. As it was, she could barely last the week without some sort of income. So. She could either go crawling back to Paul. Or wait tables at Peter’s restaurant. Neither alternative seemed especially appealing.

            She turned on the television, looking for guidance, and found the news talking about the Yankees’ preparations for the World Series. Could she hate these people any more? she thought, and changed the station, finding a talk show with a bunch of people who looked like they actually had worse problems than she did. Nice to see.

            She settled down to watch it, but her phone rang, and she picked it up, and her mother shrieked at her, “You quit your job?!”

            Oh, no, thought Aubrey, and closed her eyes briefly. “Yes, I-”

            “Is this some sort of misguided reaction to the Red Sox thing?” she demanded, severely. Her mother had raised three boys. She expected them to be crazy over sports. She had never understood how her only daughter had turned out the same way.

            “No. I think it’s just a misguided reaction to the fact that I can’t keep working with Paul. How’d you find out?”

            “I called you at the museum, and Karla told me. Poor Aubrey. You’ve had a tough year, darling.”

            Her mother’s voice was soothing, which was nice. Aubrey needed a little soothing. Hadn’t her interlude with Gray been evidence enough of that? she thought, ironically. When things fell apart, she needed to have somebody to understand, whether that was embodied in crawling onto Gray’s broad chest and into her mother’s softer-and far less exciting-embrace.

            “Come home for a while, darling. Forget about New York. We’ll spoil you, until you can figure out what to do.”

            This would, of course, be her mother’s solution. Her mother had never wanted her to leave Maine in the first place. And she couldn’t come slinking home in defeat. “I…Not just yet,” said Aubrey. “I’m going to figure something out.”

            “Aubrey, don’t be-”

            “I’ll figure something out,” she insisted. “I’ll call you again if I get really desperate.”

            “Well, it’s good to know your family is still your absolute last resort,” her mother said, drily.

            “Why were you calling me at the museum?” Aubrey asked.

            “Just to chat. Your brothers have been moping around, I wanted to see how you were doing.”

            “Well, it turns out I’m considerably worse.”

            “I see that,” said her mother. “Aubrey, you’re sure you’re okay? Maybe I should come out and visit you.”

            Oh, yeah. Just what she needed. More to deal with. “Not right now. Maybe when I get my feet under me a little better.”

            “Please don’t be proud and stubborn, Aubrey. You should ask for help when you need it.”

            “I will. I’ve got everything under control for the time being.” She waited for God to strike her dead for such an obvious lie. “I will talk to you later.”

            “Yes, remember to call,” her mother warned, because Aubrey frequently forgot. “I love you.”

            “I love you, too,” she said, and hung up the phone, then decided she needed to get out of this apartment and, grabbing the gift she’d bought for Kaye’s newborn, went to visit her.

            The baby was tiny but absolutely perfect, and Aubrey told her so.

            Kaye, looking exhausted but glowingly happy, smiled. “Yes, we think so.”

            Aubrey was feeling jealous. She was jealous of this little baby she held in her arms. She was jealous of Kaye’s fabulous lifestyle, of the husband who adored her, of the job she enjoyed with its steady stream of income, of her ignorance of events in the baseball world. These days, Aubrey decided, she was jealous of just about everything.

            “Why aren’t you at work?” Kaye asked. “Not that it isn’t lovely to have a visitor in the middle of the day-”

            “I quit my job,” Aubrey answered, abruptly.

            “I see,” remarked Kaye, slowly. That was how Kaye processed things. She mouthed a platitude, drawing out the pleasantry time, until she could make a decision about what she’d just been told. “And why did you that?” she asked, finally, after a moment.

            “Paul was micromanaging everything I was doing. I couldn’t sneeze without Paul asking me if I thought that was a good idea, because clearly it wasn’t. How can I go on working like that?”

            “I think you were a saint for trying it in the first place,” Kaye informed her, drily. “After how messy the divorce was.”

            “Did you think it was messy? I thought, compared to the rest of my life, the divorce was admirably tidy. It was the marriage that was messy. I probably should have had a job lined up before I quit.”

            “You don’t have one lined up?”

            Aubrey shook her head.

            “Well, that’s typical Aubrey.”

            “Peter said I could wait tables at the restaurant.”

            “That doesn’t sound like such a good idea to me.”

            “Why not?” Aubrey asked, affronted. So what if she thought the same thing?

            “You’re not the most graceful woman I’ve ever met.”

            “I’m plenty graceful.”

            “Aubrey, you’re downright clumsy.”

            Aubrey frowned darkly.

            “What does it matter? You don’t want to be waiting tables anyhow.”

            “No, I don’t. But I’m not feeling encouraged by the job market. I called around a bit, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything open. So I think I’m going to wait tables for the time being. It’s better than running home to Maine. And I’m going to paint on the side. I might be able to sell a few things. Especially if I paint with the money and not the art in mind.”

            “This sounds like a foolproof plan,” said Kaye.

            She was probably being sarcastic. Aubrey ignored her. She said instead, “There’s another little thing. I might be pregnant.”

            “What?”

            Getting an exclamation out of Kaye was quite an accomplishment. Aubrey grinned. “Okay, I don’t really think I’m pregnant. The timing is all off. But I have recently had unprotected sex. And the irony of it is that I told the guy not to worry. He must have assumed I was on the Pill. Which I’m not, because sex once a year doesn’t seem to me to be worth the money for the prescription.”

            “What guy?”

            “This guy I met in Boston.”

            “Cute?”

            Cute wasn’t the word. But he was definitely something. So much of something it almost hurt to think of it. “Very,” she affirmed.

            Kaye’s smile was wide and happy. “This is great, Aubrey. This is progress. And you’ve even slept with him? When can I meet him?”

            “Be kind of difficult to arrange, considering I have no idea who he is.”

            This gave Kaye more pause, but she had recovered enough to fall back into character. “I see,” she drawled out. There was the customary pause while she sorted the pieces in her head. “So you had sex with a stranger. Unprotected sex. And then you told him not to worry about pregnancy.”

            “Timing’s off,” Aubrey reminded her.

            “You don’t seem particularly worried about sexually transmitted diseases.”

            “He didn’t seem like the type. He was a high-quality one-night stand.”

            “Isn’t that an oxymoron? What would possess you to have a one-night stand?”

            Aubrey was annoyed. “Why can’t I have a one-night stand? Women do it, you know.”

            “Drunk women. Not twenty-eight-year-old divorcees.”

            “I was a little drunk, I’ll have you know. And I made a very conscious decision that I wanted a brief, uncomplicated fling. Have you ever had one? It makes you appreciate sex.”

            “Sex with people you know?” Kaye’s tone was so dry Aubrey was surprised she didn’t choke on it.

            “No, sex. The act of sex, without all the messy emotion cluttering it up. Sex, you know, is very enjoyable.”

            “I’ve noticed. I can’t believe you had to sleep with a stranger before you noticed. What sort of idiot was Paul, anyhow?”

            “Paul was every sort of idiot. But that’s not really the point.”

            “What is the point?” Kaye’s tone was still desert-dry.

            “The point is I feel free. Liberated. Maybe a one-night stand is just what I needed to put the divorce behind me. I came back from it and immediately quit my job, got rid of that last string tying me to Paul. I am now the new Aubrey Thomas. I’m delightful and independent.”

            “Delightful and independent?”

            “Yes.”

            “The independent I understand. Why the delightful?”

            “Because I’ve always wanted to be described as delightful.”

            “So you’re starting a whole new life.”

            “Yes,” Aubrey affirmed.

            “Waiting tables at Peter’s restaurant.”

            “Even the longest journeys, Kaye, start out with a single step,” Aubrey informed her, solemnly.