Caught Up in Us (16 page)

Soon.

When I showed up
at Made Here’s offices for my work, I spent most of the time with
Nicole Blazer in design. She showed me the new line of tie clips
with the gold tints I’d suggested, then remarked that she was going
to get one for her partner. “She likes to wear the pants in the
relationship. And the ties,” Nicole said, as we looked at the first
set of clips spread out on the coffee table in her office. I felt a
pang of jealousy for Nicole and her partner, simply because they
weren’t a secret, because they were something. They were an
un-secret.

“Which one do you
like?”

“I love them all. But especially
this one.” I chose a clip that shone with the gold of a
sunset.

“My favorite too! And Bryan loves
that one as well,” Nicole said, then called out to Bryan who was
walking by her office. “Kat has the best taste.”

“She does,” he
said, but there was nothing more to his words. No wink and a nod.
No knowing look.

“He’s just
stressed about the…” Nicole let her voice trail off. No one seemed
to want to say much about Wilco, but he was the undercurrent at
Made Here these days. Wilco no longer worked here, but he managed
to be omnipresent thanks to being unpredictable, and after a week
of lying low it was pissing me off. I wanted to be on or I wanted
to be off. I didn’t want this weird now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t
middle ground. If we needed to lie low til the lawsuit was over,
then we should just cool it completely.

I looked briefly at Bryan as he
walked away. I turned back to Nicole, and saw she’d followed my
gaze.

“Do you?” she
asked, shifting her eyes down the hall. She didn’t have to finish
the question for me to know what she meant.
Do you like him
?

“No. Of course not. I mean, not
like that.”

She stood up and shut her door.
“You’re blushing.”

I put a hand on my cheek. Stupid
red cheeks. I didn’t say anything.

“Hey. It’s okay.”

I shook my head, as if I could rid
myself of all that wanting, hoping, falling. I picked up another
tie clip and examined it as if it were a long-lost archaeological
relic. “This one is nice too,” I added, doing my best to focus on
everything except waiting for Bryan.

But that night, I was so tired of
it all. Of waiting for a call. Of playing pretend. Of being so
undefined. When Jill returned home from her performance of Les Mis,
I was ready to slam my phone into the wall.

“Hi.” It came out like a strangled
mutter, as I burrowed into a corner of the couch with my laptop,
and its open tabs of spreadsheets.

“Why the long face, my little
porcupine?”

“Just busy.”

“Lie.”

“No. It’s true. I have to get
ready for my trip, and I have exams, and I have —”

Jill cut me off. “That’s all true,
I’m sure. But I have a crazy hunch you’re a crabcake because you’re
not getting your nightly action.”

I threw a pillow at her. She
dodged it artfully.

“Do you have any idea how much
that would have hurt?”

“Hardly at all?”

“Exactly. It would have hardly
hurt at all,” she said as she plunked herself on the couch and
wrapped an arm around me. “I was going to give you a hug, but
that’s cheesy, and besides you need this instead.” She promptly
wrapped me in a wrestling chokehold, and pretended to pin me down.
“You know I have two older brothers so I know every wrestling move
under the sun. Now, spill. Why hasn’t Hottie McCufflinks called you
in a week?”

“His ex-business partner is
following us,” I managed to say while trapped under Jill’s powerful
arm. I wished my roommate didn’t work out so much. She was toned
and tough.

She let go right away and sat up
straight. “Seriously?”

I nodded.

“That sucks. Why? You guys don’t
even do anything in public.”

“I know.” I sighed, then gave her
the update on the scrutiny Made Here was under thanks to Kramer
Wilco’s inability to keep his hands off a minor.

“Let’s kneecap him,” Jill
said.

“I wish. I mean, not really. Then
again, maybe it’s the universe telling me to stay away from Bryan,
right? It’s been nothing but obstacles with him from day one. Maybe
this is the latest sign. Besides, if the universe intends for us to
be together, then it’ll happen when we’re not in this weird
mentor-protege thing. Maybe I should shut it down for him right
now.”

Jill rolled her eyes and huffed.
“I don’t believe in signs. I believe in words, and action, and
doing. And what you’re doing is sitting and waiting and that is one
hundred percent unacceptable. Even if he has to lie low because of
lawsuits or whatnot, and even if you have to play it safe, you are
not allowed to mope.” She grabbed my phone, slid open the battery
pack, and took out the battery.

My eyes widened.
“Jill!”

She dropped the phone carcass on
the couch, ran down the hall to her bedroom, then skipped into the
living room five seconds later. I stood up, hands on my hips. “What
did you do?”

“It’s hidden, and I’ll let you
have it back when you prove yourself worthy. For now, you’re going
out with me.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me
to my room, then looked me up and down. “Put on some boots, grab a
scarf, and let’s go.”

I pretended to be annoyed, but
inside I was smiling. I was even happier when we wound up at the
best twenty-four diner in Manhattan and ordered chocolate
milkshakes and French fries and I didn’t have to check my phone
once.

Jill grabbed the bill. As she was
about to pay, I spotted an increasingly familiar face. But not a
welcome one. Instinctively, I ducked, as beads of panic prickled
across my skin.

“That’s him,” I whispered shakily.
My stomach twisted, and I felt exposed. I was finding I didn’t
enjoy being followed one bit. “Wilco.”

“The guy with the curly hair and
long coat?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s creepy. I’m going to go
talk to him.”

I looked up again, but stayed low
in the booth, as if that would protect me from the line of fire.
The trouble was, I had no idea what Wilco was capable of. Was he
just trying to keep tabs on me? Or did he have other, less savory,
notions in mind? “No. Jill, don’t.”

“We need to disarm
him.”

I tried to grab her arm, but Jill
rose quickly and walked over to Bryan’s former business partner.
Wilco stood at the cash register, waiting for the hostess to seat
him. I watched them carefully from the back of the booth. I
couldn’t make out what they were saying, but at one point Wilco
held up his hands as if he were surrendering, then pushed them back
into his pockets. It looked like he was touching something. Jill
batted her eyes and said something that made him blush. Then she
gave a flirty wave as he walked out.

Jill returned to the table. She
didn’t seem rattled, but she was a good actress. She knew how to
channel and conjure emotions. Meanwhile, I was a wreck and alarms
were going off every minute inside me.

“What did you do?”

“I pretended I thought he was
cute.”

“Eww. How did you do
that?”

“I basically
said, ‘
Hey, I feel as if I’ve seen you
around a lot
.’ And then asked him a bunch
of questions about himself, where he lived, as if I was into him. I
think it threw him off. Because if you’re following people around,
the last thing you want is someone to notice you,
right?”

“Sure,” I said,
but my skin was still crawling with worry, and then there was this
drumbeat inside me. A reminder. That all the signs were pointing to
Bryan and me being impossible. I had to stop being foolish, and
start being wise.

Chapter Seventeen

I left for class the next morning
still surrounded by the sense that there were unwanted eyes on me.
I jumped when I saw a black town car at the curb. Bryan’s driver
was waiting by the door.

“Hi. Bryan Leighton sent me for
you.”

I had half a
mind to say
thanks, but no
thanks
. But I was so glad to see him, and
relieved too to avoid the streets with their easy opportunities for
Wilco to track me. I slid into the backseat only to find I was
alone. “Excuse me. Where’s Bryan?”

“He asked me to drive you wherever
you need for the next few days.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

I rooted around in my bag for my
phone. This situation was veering too close to my college
ex-boyfriend Michael, and I wasn’t someone who craved danger like a
drug. But my phone was nowhere in sight. Then I remembered Jill had
dismantled it, and I’d somehow gotten so used to the few hours of
being phone-less that I hadn’t even looked for it this
morning.

The driver took me to class and I
expected him to drop me off curbside. Instead, he stepped out of
the car, scanned the street in each direction and then placed a
hand on my back and led me into the building, as if he were a
secret agent on my security detail.

“What the heck is going
on?”

“Just getting you safely to class,
Ms. Harper.”

“Is there a reason I wouldn’t get
safely to class?” I asked, even though I had a feeling the answer
was the man in the diner last night. Jill’s strategy to disarm
Wilco by flirting hadn’t quite rattled the guy as she’d
hoped.

“I’ll be here when class ends,”
the driver replied and that was clearly all the information I was
getting.

Sure enough, the driver was
waiting inside the lobby of the business school building in the
early afternoon. I started walking towards the main door, but he
gestured down the hallway, wrapped a hand around my elbow, and
guided me to a back door that led to the building’s rarely used
service exit. There, the car was waiting.

“Is someone going to tell me
what’s going on with the cloak and dagger?”

“Just following orders,” he said,
as he started the car.

“Fine. Then can you take me
uptown?” I gave him the address of a cafe where I was meeting
Claire, and he drove me there, standing guard outside as I Claire
and I sipped hot chocolate and I tried to pretend my day hadn’t
been turned upside down with covert affairs.

“I want a full report when you
return from Paris,” Claire said. “I’ll be out of the country for a
week. I convinced my husband to take me away on a technology-free
trip to Tahiti.”

“That’s funny because I spent the
whole day without my phone. My roommate hid it from me.”

“And see! You still made it to our
appointment on time. Maybe we don’t need to be tethered to our
phones as much as we think.”

But I was missing my phone because
I had no idea what was going on. When it was time to head home I
settled into the safety of the leather seat of the town car, closed
my eyes and tried desperately to let go of the caged-in day, to
forget about the run-in last night. Then, as we idled in the
stalled Park Avenue traffic, I heard the driver’s phone ring. My
ears pricked as he answered.

“Hello?”

In his pause, I could make out the
gravelly sound of the other voice. Nicole Blazer.

“Yes?”

A pause.

“She’s with me right
now.”

Another pause, and a strange fear
ricocheted through my body.

“I’ll bring her
now.”

He ended the call and looked at me
in the rearview mirror. “Nicole says Bryan has been asking for
you.”

*****

Nicole placed a gentle hand on my
arm. “His hand is pretty banged up, and it looks like he might have
broken one of the bones in it.

“What on earth
happened?”

Nicole held open the pristinely
painted white door that led into the foyer of Bryan’s four-story
brownstone on Sixtieth and Park. “We were meeting with Wilco’s
attorneys this afternoon to review the wrongful termination suit
and attempt to settle. We were all there, and it was going fine,
and Bryan stepped out for a minute, then walked back in, and Wilco
blew a gasket. Stood up, sucker punched him in the gut, jammed him
in the back, and smashed his hand into the table.”

My eyes widened with shock. “Oh my
god. That’s awful.”

She nodded. “His attorneys were
totally freaked out. It all happened so quickly, and they didn’t
even know what to do. The security guard at the office rushed in
and restrained Wilco, and when the police came a few minutes later,
they found a knife in his coat pocket.”

I rewound back the diner. To the
way he’d touched the inside of his pocket. He’d seemed so unhinged.
“I saw him last night. He followed me to a diner. I think he had
the knife then too.” I placed my hand on my mouth. A tear slid down
my cheek.