Caught Up in Us (4 page)

The next morning, I probably spent
more time in front of the mirror adjusting my hair and touching up
my lip gloss than I usually did. Then I walked into town and
stopped at the local cafe for my regular.

After I left, I was surprised to
find Bryan waiting outside Mystic Landing. He had a cup of coffee
in his hand, and the ends of his dark hair were still wet. I was
near enough to breathe in that clean, freshly showered scent. “I’m
a morning person too. Hope you don’t mind if I share the morning
shift with you. Nate’ll sleep past noon anyway.”

“Not at all,” I said as I hunted
for the keys in my purse.

He tipped his forehead to my
drink. “Must have just missed you at the cafe. Coffee,
too?”

I shook my head. “Caramel
macchiato. Only frou-frou drinks for this girl.” Then, I leaned in
closer to him and dropped my voice to a faux whisper. “I even got
an extra shot of caramel.”

He pretended as if I’d just the
most scandalous thing in the world. “So decadent.”

“And you?” I
asked, because I had a theory that you could tell a lot about a guy
by his coffee drink. Any guy who ordered soy, chai, or more foam
was going to be high-maintenance. If a fellow asked for the water
to be extra hot, he was destined to be cold and emotionless because
the water at any coffee shop is already scalding; if you needed it
hotter, you had no feelings. When boys wanted herbal tea, I’d run
the other way because that meant they’d be far too interested in
yoga, new-age crystals and feng-shui’ing my life. I had no problem
with those things, but their collective by-product was often not
enough showering, and I was a big fan of the just-showered look and
smell.

Then there was the man who ordered
just coffee. Simple, straightforward, knows what he
wants.

Bryan tapped the top of the
plastic lid on his cup. “Coffee. Just coffee, nothing more. I like
my coffee the way —”

I held up a
hand. “I don’t want to hear one of those customary guy
jokes.
I like my coffee the way I like my
women — hot, strong, with cream.
”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “I
wasn’t going to say that.”

“Oh. Sorry. How do you like your
coffee then?” I turned away and slid the key into the
lock.

He lowered his voice, and spoke in
a dark and smoky kind of whisper. “The way they drink it in Paris.
Black.”

It was a good thing my back was to
him. Because something about the way he said Paris sent shivers up
my spine. It was as if his voice was caressing my back. “Have you
been?” I asked, because it had been my dream to go to Paris. To
wander in and out of boutiques and shops and see all the necklaces
and bracelets and jewelry. To be inspired by the
designs.

To fall in love, by the river,
under the lamplight.

“Only once. But
the company I’m starting to work for has offices there, so I’m
hoping go back,” he said. As I opened the door, I thought:
take me with you, take me with you, take me with
you
.

We worked the morning shift
together that first day, and we clicked with the customers. He’d
chat up a pair of vacationing sisters about a coffee table picture
book, then hand off to me, and then I’d do the same with a couple
considering a serving plate. We had a sort of instant rhythm and
sense of how to make a store like this work.

“We’re like a tag team,” he said
after I rang up another sale, and I smiled in agreement.

Nate arrived in the early
afternoon to take over. As I grabbed my purse from behind the
counter, Bryan placed a hand on my arm. “Matinee and
popcorn?”

My stomach
flipped. I nodded a yes, mumbled a goodbye to my brother, and left
the store with his best friend. We walked the few blocks to the
six-screen cinema, picked a Will Ferrell comedy, and opted to share
a medium popcorn. We went the next day to see a thriller, then the
next for a sci-fi picture, and after that we saw a silly film with
talking animals in it, laughing the whole time. When the movie
ended, I told him it reminded me of a film I’d seen a few years
back with my mom, then proceeded to rattle off how it compared to
every other talking animal flick, as if I were a too-serious film
critic opining needlessly. “But the pig in
Babe
did set the standard for
linguistically-capable animals on screen.”

“You’ve pretty much seen every
movie, haven’t you?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say every
movie.”

“But most?”

I shrugged. “I see a lot of
movies.”

“Why? I mean, besides the obvious.
That movies are fun.”

“Isn’t that a
good enough reason? Just for entertainment?”

“Totally. So that’s the
reason?”

“Sure,” I said, but I was smiling
the kind of smile that said there was more to it.

“All right, Kat Harper. What’s the
story?” He motioned with his hand for me to spill the beans. “Tell
me where your love of movies comes from.”

“I think it’s
because of what movies have always meant to my family. All these
big events in my life were marked by movies. When Nate was in
eighth grade and won the election for class president, we all went
to see the re-release of
Raiders of the
Lost Ark
, because it was this great action
adventure, and I gripped the armrest when Harrison Ford raced
against the boulder. The time I was picked to design the cover of
the junior high yearbook we went to see
Ocean’s Eleven
. That’s just how we
celebrated things. I even remember when my grandmother died. We
went to the memorial service. I was twelve and I read a poem at the
service, and then we decided that we should see
Elf.
Which probably sounds like a
weird thing to do after a funeral.”

Bryan listened intently. “No, it
doesn’t. Not at all.”

“It was really the perfect movie
to see, because I think we all just needed to not be sad every
second, you know?”

“It actually makes perfect sense,”
he said. I looked at him and the honesty in his face and his eyes.
He understood. He got it. He got me. I kept going.

“But I guess it
all started with my mom. She’s a huge romantic comedy fan, so she
started showing me all the great ones.
Sleepless in Seattle
.
Love, Actually
.
Notting Hill
.
You’ve Got Mail
.”

“And do you still love romantic
comedies?”

“I make jewelry. I drink caramel
machiattos. I wear Hello Kitty to bed. Of course I love romantic
comedies,” I said with a smile as we neared my house. But I didn’t
just love them. I wanted to live within them. I wanted a love like
in the movies.

Bryan cleared his throat. “I think
there’s a romantic-comedy we haven’t seen at the theater. Do you
want to go again tomorrow?”

“Yes,” I said,
and I’m sure it came out all breathy sounding.

We saw the movie the next day, and
it was the kind where you long for the hero and heroine to kiss,
and when they do, near the final frame, you feel this tingling in
your body, and you want to be kissed too. I stole a glance at Bryan
only to find he was stealing a glance at me.

“Hi,” he whispered in that voice
he’d used when he talked about Paris.

“Hi.”

He reached a hand towards me,
slowly, his eyes on me the whole time, as if he were asking if it
was okay. I nodded a yes. He ran his fingers through my dark brown
hair, then his mouth met mine, and we kissed until the credits
rolled, slow and sweet kisses. His lips were the softest I’d ever
felt, and his kisses were of the epic kind, the kind that made you
believe that movie kisses weren’t just for actors or for stories,
that they could be for you, and they could go on and on, like a
slow and sexy love song that melted you from the inside
out.

When he pulled away, he leaned his
forehead against mine. “Kat, I’ve wanted to do that since I first
met you in the driveway the other day.”

“You have?”

“Yes. You were so pretty, and then
you were everything else.”

My heart skipped ten thousand
beats. He was a movie kiss, he was the name above the title. He was
the one you wanted the heroine to wind up with so badly that your
heart ached for her when they weren’t together, then soared when
they finally were.

“I think you’re pretty cool too,”
I said.

“But we probably shouldn’t tell
Nate. You know, since I’m his buddy and you’re his little sister.
Not to mention the age thing.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

So it was our summer
secret.

Chapter Five

I’d deliberately resisted Internet
stalking Bryan for the last few years. Sure, I knew his company was
a generous supporter of the NYU business school and had endowed a
new wing of the library last year. I also knew he’d started Made
Here four years ago and had grown it quite nicely. But that was
because I read business news, and you couldn’t miss his success
story. Timing was everything and he’d capitalized at just the right
moment with his product line. But more so, he knew the mood of the
country shifted and that people wanted American-made goods, so he
retrofitted former lugnut factories for cufflink manufacturing and
then led the rapid growth along with his business partner. I hadn’t
dug any deeper in the last few years. Nor had I tracked him on
Facebook or hunted out anything else in recent months. The less I
knew about him, the better off I was.

Besides, I’d had
a boyfriend through most of college, Michael Preston. We were
together for three years. Three
tumultuous
years. Michael was an
actor at NYU and I first met him after a performance of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. He played Brando’s character and he was breathtaking on
stage, all raw emotion and power and want. But that intensity he
brought to the stage he brought to the relationship too in the form
of rabid jealousy and insecurity. One evening our junior year, he
showed up at my dorm, banged on the door, and collapsed on the
floor in a heap. “I didn’t get the part,” he moaned. He’d been at a
callback for the role of the youngest son in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

“I’m so sorry, Michael,” I said
and pet his hair.

He propped himself up on an elbow.
“You don’t love me enough.”

“I do love you,” I told
him.

“Then marry me. Marry me now.
Let’s have a secret marriage. Prove you love me by marrying
me.”

I was twenty. Even if I wanted to
get married, I wasn’t going to do it secretly. But he looked at me
so seriously, and with also something like anger in his eyes. I
laughed nervously.

“You don’t love me enough,” he
repeated.

Love me
enough
. What did that even mean? Maybe he
was right. Maybe I didn’t love him enough. All I knew was when he
showed up drunk at three in the morning the next night, it didn’t
feel like love. It felt like stalking. He kept appearing in the
middle of the night. Sometimes, I let him in just to shut him up so
I could fall back asleep. He’d lie in bed with me and wake me up at
three, four, five in the morning by poking his finger in my ear.
“Stay up all night with me. To prove you love
me.”

I couldn’t prove
I loved him enough, nor did I want to, and given the unexpected and
unwanted late-night visits, I was even more grateful when I was
accepted into a study abroad program for my senior year. I had to
get away from him, but I also wanted to be in France.

I took off for the city of lights
and lived there for my senior year of school, immersing myself in
the language, the food, and most of all the artisanal jewelry. My
days were filled with cobblestoned streets and stone corridors of
universities older than the United States, and my nights were rich
with lamplights and a winding river and the occasional kiss with a
young Frenchman. Once I returned to New York and started business
school, there was even less room to think of Bryan.

Now, it was finally time to follow
his Internet trail. But only because I needed to be armed with
information so I could make my case in front of my professor. So I
did the thing I hadn’t done for years. I sought out information
about Bryan online. The very first result shocked me.

Made Here Business Partner Ousted
by Board Following Affair

The link was to an article in a
New York newspaper from a few months ago. I checked out the photo
of Bryan’s ex-business partner, a standard sort of average-looking
guy. As I read the article, several lines stood out. “At the
board’s insistence, Kramer Wilco has stepped down as co-chief
executive of Made Here, the high-flying manufacturing startup
that’s been earning tidy profits in the last several quarters.
Wilco admitted to being involved with an intern at the Made Here
factory outside of Philadelphia. When it was discovered the intern
was seventeen and a senior in high school, the board made it clear
he needed to go. Wilco started Made Here with his business partner
Bryan Leighton four years ago. Leighton did not return calls for
comment, but a spokesperson said he will run the company solo
now.”