Chapter 12
I caught the last train back into the city with only three minutes to spare. There’d been an earlier train, but that would have meant missing out on Roxie’s Sunday chicken.
As I sat in the last car with a take-out container full of leftover chicken, buttermilk mashed potatoes, and garlic and shallot green beans, I thought back over the weekend, balancing the pluses and minuses.
Plus: The town was adorable.
Minus: The air was almost too clean.
Plus: The scenery was lovely.
Minus: It was too quiet, especially at night. No horns.
Minus: It was too loud, especially at night. Fucking crickets. Fucking wind. Fucking scary scraping trees everywhere . . .
Plus: The dicks were large . . .
Plus: And in charge.
Plus. Plus. Plus.
I shivered from the excitement my body still felt whenever I thought about that mouth, those lips, that tongue . . .
That ex.
Hmm. What was the story there? I’d spent half a year fantasizing about this guy, and half a day letting him get me off twelve ways from Sunday. And I didn’t even have his phone number.
I waited for some part of me to feel guilty about that, to tsk-tsk me and shake an admonishing finger and make me feel the teeniest bit shameful for spending naked time with a man I barely knew. But it never came.
I wanted to know more about him, not because I should, but because he fascinated me. I wanted to know the story that was there, because while he occasionally had these wonderful verbal treasure nuggets, for the most part he still responded to every question with yep, nope, or great big ass.
He also responded with beautiful, pinup, and you taste incredible, but that’s beside the point.
I still should’ve gotten his phone number. At least then we could send dirty texts . . .
And as the train ran down the tracks, heading back to my city life, I started pulling up train schedules . . .
It’s funny how visiting a place just once can imprint it on your psyche. The first time I traveled to Prague, I fell in love with the smoky red-brick-topped roofs, the black-and-white-tiled sidewalks, the sound of a foreign language hopelessly unrecognizable to my American ears, all hard Z’s and clucking K’s. The first time I visited Dubai, I was captured by the skyline and the hard-driving sand that coated even the enormous shopping malls, and the oppressive heat that weighted every move.
Now, all week long I found myself thinking about the color of the fall trees on Main Street in Bailey Falls, the scent of burning leaves in the air, and the slip and slide of hay underneath my bare feet. My bare everything, to be exact.
But with all this daydreaming, work was still center stage. The T&T project was coming along very nicely. We’d begun casting for the commercials we were shooting, as well as for the print advertisement.
For the Bailey Falls campaign, I was still kicking around the idea of using the local-farmer angle, how to position it to show these wonderful local farms in exactly the right light. Not to mention lighting those farmers to look irresistible to any woman on the East Coast with a pulse and an overnight bag . . .
I wondered how Oscar would feel about being photographed for the campaign. I wondered if Casserole Missy would object. I further wondered why I’d taken to referring to her as Casserole Missy, since I was just having some fun, getting a taste of some local flavor, as it were . . .
I’d resisted the impulse all week to call up Roxie and ask if she had Oscar’s phone number. I wondered if Oscar had called her and asked for mine. Or maybe he’d ask Leo to ask Roxie to ask me if it was okay for him to call me—like a game of high school telephone, the kind with the windy knotted cord that I’d twine around one hand while holding the phone to my ear, giggling late at night on the phone with my girlfriend, talking about how he’d held my hand during lunch and asked me to the dance after the big game Friday night.
And how he’d told me how satiny soft the inside of my thigh was on his tongue.
I pulled myself out of Bailey Falls and thoughts of phone numbers. Something told me I needed to play this one easy, casual, and not crowd him. And since my instincts were unfailing in this area, I literally sat on my hands more than once to stop from texting Roxie. But I wondered what he was up to this week, and if he was thinking of me.
I was giddy. And giddy plus Natalie can equal dangerous territory.
When I was walking home after work and saw Bailey Falls Creamery cheese in the window of La Belle Fromage, my heart raced. When I saw a red flannel shirt in the window at Barneys, in a display of fashionable lumberjacks, my skin tingled. And when I saw a salami in the window of Zabar’s, it was almost more than I could bear.
I was stopping by to pick up a few things to have sent over to my parents’ house, since I’d missed brunch the previous Sunday. Work-related issues were an acceptable excuse for missing brunch, but only when cleared in advance and only when it was career enhancing. I usually adhered to this rule, but in the haste to get out of town last week I’d forgotten to call my mother, thus beginning the biggest case of recorded guilt the city had seen since my neighbor Francis Applebaum had forgotten to call his mother on Rosh Hashanah. That he’d been having an emergency appendectomy was usually overlooked in the relaying of this story, but the entire block had taken sides.
It was Wednesday night, and though I’d originally planned to have the treats delivered, it was a nice night out and I wasn’t quite ready to go home yet. I felt a little out of sorts, twitchy, perhaps a little restless? And wondering how in the world I was going to tell my mother I’d be missing brunch again this Sunday . . .
I was planning on taking the train up to Bailey Falls again on Thursday afternoon. I had a breakfast planned for Friday morning at Callahan’s with the chamber of commerce and some of the local business owners. I wanted to chat with them about what they wanted, how they saw their town, and how they’d like others to see it. Chad was helping me organize the meeting, making sure the key players were there. Roxie had already been tasked with making the cakes that would follow the meeting. If it went well, cake to celebrate. If it went not so well, then everyone would hopefully just remember the cake . . .
“You’re heading up there again? This weekend?” Dan had asked when I gave him my expense report for the week before.
“Yeah, this weekend I get to hobnob with the elite of Bailey Falls, including the mayor’s wife. You know how it is, mingling with the upper crust.” Perched on the edge of his desk, I mentally ran through my wardrobe and wondered if there’d be time to get another pair of thigh-high Chanel boots before the weekend. Sadly, the extended vacation they’d taken in the mud and the water had ruined them. Twenty-two hundred dollars, down the drain.