The following morning Amalia arrived in the office quite early. She had to start preparing for Liz’s trial, which was supposed to start in exactly one week. She hadn’t slept well, but she really didn’t want to waste time pondering over the reasons for her insomnia, so she decided to blame the full moon for it.
Her attempts at trying to appear focused and committed were neutralized by the demanding sound of her mobile, which decided to interrupt her concentration at around nine. She was about to throw it at the wall when she saw Ryan’s name on the screen. He was even calling her now! She ignored the call, and let the diabolical thing ring in vain.
About half an hour later, the stubborn Assistant D.A. decided that it would be a good idea to phone her again. Well, it wasn’t a good idea at all. She was even more annoyed and this time couldn’t resist touching the ignore button. She knew that by doing so she was actually communicating the fact that she had seen his call and wasn’t really ignoring it. But she just had to do something to let off some steam. So she didn’t just press ignore, she pressed ignore with absolute joy. To hell with him and his phone calls.
By ten, the office phone was ringing too.
“The Assistant D.A. is calling for you, you can take it on line one,” her secretary informed her, blithely unaware of the situation.
At that point, Amalia saw red. Bright red.
“Please tell him that I’m in a meeting which is going to last for the rest of the day – thanks.”
At the sound of Amalia’s glacial tone, Michelle was wise enough not to insist.
“Of course, whatever you say,” she replied, then hung up immediately.
What a pain in the ass he was! At that point, all of Amalia’s attempts at staying calm had gone completely to hell. Her blood pressure had rocketed and she was starting to feel like taking her anger out on someone. He was forcing her to waste her precious time – even more precious than usual, since she was already behind schedule – to regain the clarity of mind she needed to get back to work.
But apparently, the day had other surprises in store for her. In fact, a couple of hours later, a rather embarrassed Michelle knocked at her door.
“Excuse me, Amalia, there’s a delivery for you,” she told her, indicating a delivery boy waiting just outside.
“What is it?”
“Flowers,” the secretary answered.
“Flowers?” asked Amalia again, sounding as shocked as if Michelle had just said ‘bombs’. And to be honest, as far as she was concerned it wouldn’t have been out of the question.
“Er, yes – quite a lot of flowers, actually,” Michelle added.
How many could ‘quite a lot’ be? Amalia lifted herself up from the chair to take a look.
“Oh my God!” she sighed when she saw the mountain of white roses that the delivery boy had piled up outside the door. “That’s not ‘a lot’ of flowers… that’s a whole goddam botanical garden!” she exclaimed in exasperation.
By then, the whole of the office was observing the scene with undisguised curiosity. Amalia was not the kind of woman who usually received presents like that – and even if she had been, it would never have happened in such an over-the-top way. Nobody would have dared. Nobody except…
“Where’s the note?” she asked the boy menacingly.
He gave it to her, looking somewhat scared. The people he usually delivered floral compositions to didn’t react like that – or at least most of them didn’t. Amalia snatched the note out of his hands and tore open the envelope. She wasn’t really expecting anything particularly illuminating, as she knew very well that men who feel guilty are occasionally prone to react with grand gestures, but she would have preferred something a bit more straightforward than what she found.
“I need to talk to you.” Was that all? What on earth was so important that he needed to send her a bunch of flowers as big as a hotdog stand?!
If things had been normal, she would have been extremely curious to know what the Assistant D.A. needed to tell her so urgently. But today it was more than likely that just hearing his voice would give her stomach cramps, so she decided she could wait. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like an effective tactic.
*
When Alex arrived at the office at about eleven after having spent a few hours delivering paperwork to various people around the courthouse, he found Ryan a lot more tense than usual. Even taking into account that it was a Monday morning, his mood seemed unusually bleak. His tie was twisted and loose and even the colors he was wearing didn’t exactly go together: the collar of his white shirt was wrinkled and his canary-yellow sweater clashed weirdly with the light grey suit he was wearing. And that wasn’t normal for Ryan O’Moore, who they had all learned was a real perfectionist.
“Is everything alright?” he asked, approaching his desk.
Ryan raised his eyes, revealing a threatening and exasperated expression. “Absolutely,” he muttered.
“Better and better,” thought Alex, moving away.
The Assistant D.A. then grabbed his mobile phone and called a number in an attempt to contact someone who didn’t answer. Half a minute later Ryan threw the phone down on the desk in annoyance.
*
During the course of the day, Alex saw Ryan try to call whoever it was dozens of times, but he never managed to get through; this of course sent his boss’s mood from bad to worse. By halfway through the afternoon, everybody in the office, including Alex, was trying to steer clear of Ryan, although they were still eyeing him with concern and curiosity.
When he eventually left at about six – which was unusually early for him – everybody felt hugely relieved. And hoped that whatever the hell was wrong with the Assistant D.A. would be magically resolved by the following day, for the sake of everyone.
At six fifteen sharp, Ryan was outside Amalia’s office. Michelle was tidying up a pile of documents on her desk and was about to knock off for the day. She pretended not to be surprised to see the Assistant D.A. suddenly appear, although he was evidently out of breath and in a very bad mood. Possibly even worse than the one Amalia was in.
“I need to see Ms Berger very urgently,” he announced.
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ve missed her. She left the office half an hour ago and told me she had an appointment,” Amalia’s secretary replied stoically.
Ryan’s face went instantly blue.
“What kind of appointment?” he asked, although he realized it would have been better not to.
Michelle thought that the question was a weird one, but decided that she’d probably better not object too much.
“I really wouldn’t know. It wasn’t in her diary and Miss Berger didn’t really give me any details about it,” she said, turning the knife in the wound just a little. “Would you like me to make you an appointment?” she suggested formally, picking up a pen.
Ryan ran his fingers through his hair agitatedly.
“No,” he answered immediately. “I need to talk to her today. I’ve been trying to reach her since this morning, but she just wouldn’t answer the phone.”
Michelle smiled condescendingly. “I really don’t know how to help you, I’m sorry.”
“Where does she usually go on Monday evenings?” he asked, determined and stubborn.
“I don’t really think I’m allowed to disclose information like that?” Michelle replied with a smile.
Ryan sighed, exhausted. “Listen, I’ve had a horrible day so far. I’m not a serial killer, I’m pretty sure you can tell that just by looking at me, right? I just need to talk to Amalia. Come on, all I’m asking for is a little help – the kind any good Samaritan would give…”
Michelle immediately noticed the familiarity with which Ryan had used Amalia’s name, and had to force herself not to break out in an amused smile. Amalia certainly wasn’t the easiest woman in the world to deal with, she would concede that.
“Let me just remind you that Miss Berger is Jewish and that I’m pretty much an atheist, so you might want to re-think your strategy.”
Ryan raised his eyes up to the ceiling. Working with Amalia had obviously forced her secretary develop the same ability with words, he thought.
“God, please give me the strength…” he moaned to himself under his breath.
But fortunately Michelle was much more magnanimous than her boss.
“Look, every Monday evening at nine, Miss Berger goes to her yoga class.” She took a piece of paper and wrote an address on it. “There’s obviously no need for me to tell you that I will vigorously deny any accusation of having provided you with this information.”
Ryan took the piece of paper gratefully. “As far as I’m concerned, the secret will be buried with me.”
Michelle smiled as she watched him walking away. She didn’t think of herself as a curious woman, but she would have given away her right arm to see what happened when those two characters met later that evening.
*
Kayla glanced nervously at Amalia once again. Her friend was surrounded by such an aura of tension it was making the whole class feel uncomfortable.
“If I’d known it was going to end like this, I wouldn’t have worked so hard to plan your meeting with him last Saturday night. I thought having multiple orgasms might relax you a bit, but it’s looking depressingly like even that wasn’t enough to make you let yourself go a bit,” she teased her.
Amalia gave her a nasty look while she tried to follow the instructions to raise herself to the tips of her toes.
“I mean, if you can’t even relax by having sex, I’m afraid there really isn’t anything I can do to help you,” Kayla insisted, hoping to get some reaction out of her friend.
“For your information, I do feel more relaxed after sex, actually. It was what came after it that put me in this awful mood,” she informed her friend.
“Couldn’t you really avoid the aftermath? I mean, you could just have had sex, pure and simple, avoiding all the useless discussions that people always have afterwards.”
“Oh, look who’s talking! Hearing something like that from you is really hilarious,” Amalia snapped.
Kayla didn’t seem to be at all offended by her friend’s accusation. “How so? Anyway, I’m just trying to help you…”
“How are you helping me? By trying to set me up with Ryan again?”
“When I left, you two were sitting in a bar. What happened after that is nothing to do with me, my dear. It’s your own fault, so please stop throwing all your anger at me.”
“I’m not angry at all,” snapped Amalia.
“Of course you’re not angry! I wonder how on earth I thought you could be…”
At that point, the yoga school’s receptionist – who wouldn’t usually leave her desk for any reason, provoking many a snigger about her ass actually being superglued to her chair – poked her curly-haired head around the door of the exercise room.
“Amalia Berger,” she said in a low voice, trying not to interrupt the lesson, “there’s a very assertive man here, and he is demanding to see you. He threatened to come in here himself if I didn’t call you out. Can you please come and see what he wants?” she begged.
“Well I wonder who that can be…” Kayla teased her. “Do you think it might be Mr Multiple Orgasm?”
A dozen heads, all clearly very interested in the subject in question, turned in their direction.
“Kayla, will you shut the hell up about it? I swear, if you told him I was here…”
But her friend cut her off. “Don’t waste your threats, Amalia – keep them all for Ryan. I didn’t tell him anything, scout’s honor,” she reassured her friend with a chuckle.
Amalia looked at her in resignation. “Not that you were ever a scout…”
“You’re right, but that’s my mother’s fault: I wanted to be a scout when I was a kid, and they would have taught me to always keep my promises, but my mother didn’t want me sleeping in tents, especially with boys…”
Amalia took her towel from the floor and started mentally preparing herself to leave the gym. “Sooner or later you will find someone who can silence that forked tongue of yours. And when it finally happens, you better believe that I am not going to miss the show for anything.”
Kayla doubted anything like that would ever happen, but she was wise enough not to provoke an already exasperated woman. Anyway, she couldn’t pretend that other people’s love affairs weren’t a pretty interesting show. Unless, of course, you were involved in them.
Ryan was sitting on a sofa in the reception area waiting for her, and he looked like a man who had been condemned to death: instead of angry, he just looked enormously depressed. And anyway he didn’t have anything to be angry about, thought Amalia as she walked over to him. She had changed after the interruption and was now wearing the same clothes she had worn in the office. He jumped to his feet as soon as she appeared, but didn’t speak, lost for words now that she was finally standing in front of him. Luckily Amalia was quite happy to speak for both of them.
“You goddamn idiot…” she spat at him as soon as she was close enough.
Ryan walked quickly over to her and put his hand over her mouth.
“I know, I’m well aware that I totally deserve to be insulted in a way that isn’t really appropriate in public. How about we go for a walk?” he asked, while looking around at the considerable number of people who had stopped to stare at them, seemingly quite taken with the show. Amalia glanced at him, but then nodded unwillingly in agreement.
A few minutes later they were walking towards her apartment together. “I’m trying very hard not to tell you to go to hell, Ryan, so just spit it out – what is this extremely important thing that you need to tell me so urgently that you’ve been chasing after me all day?”
“So you did notice then…” he said ironically, trying to break the tension.
“Oh no, apart from the hundred missed calls on my phone…” she snapped in irritation.
“And there were all the ones I made to the office,” he added, for no real reason.
“Ryan, you’re only making things worse. What the hell is it that you want?” she repeated, putting a lot of emphasis on the word ‘hell’.
He paused for a moment and Amalia was forced to do the same. He took one of her arms and turned her to look at him.
“I… I had some time to think. And I missed you. And I wanted to talk to you because I’d like to know if you missed me too.”
She looked at him, completely unmoved by his confession. “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked, unperturbed.
“That I’ve been going crazy since I left your house yesterday!”
“Well yeah, you aren’t really sounding particularly sane today,” she agreed. “What’s the problem? Are you thinking of claiming mental infirmity as a mitigating circumstance? That wouldn’t be very original…” she said, trying to hide the sudden acceleration of her heartbeat by talking very fast.
Ryan pretended he hadn’t heard that and pulled her even closer to him. Whether he was aware of it or not, Amalia had to unwillingly admit that his technique was uncannily efficient: he always managed to hypnotize her with those green eyes of his.
“Look, I know I behaved atrociously yesterday morning. But if it’s any excuse, I was shocked by my own reaction… at the idea of the two of us being together. I went a little crazy, to be honest…” he admitted, blushing.
“What? So you mean you’re not crazy at all today?” she asked.
“Today I’m even more out of my mind than yesterday, if that’s possible,” he admitted candidly.
“Have you changed strategy? After years of denial, you’re suddenly going to start being disarmingly honest? Well I hope you don’t expect me to trust you.
He shrugged. “I don’t think my technique worked all that well ten years ago. If it had I wouldn’t be here today, with you still always on my mind, right?”
Ryan had decided to bring out the heavy guns.
“Enough with this nonsense,” she warned him, in a low but clear voice.
“I’ve just gone through the worst thirty-six hours of my life, Amalia.”
She laughed. “Well good for you, I guess that means you’ve never had any real bad times in your life.”
“Aren’t I softening you even a little bit?” he asked her, moving really close to her face. And those eyes of his… Of course he was making her doubt her own mind! And that was why she wanted to get rid of him as soon as possible!
“While you were gone, I had some time to think too,” Amalia answered, unable to move away, “and I have to admit that I concluded you were absolutely right about everything. I mean, let’s face it: two people like us could never really have a future together. Even if we forget about our personalities, which are totally incompatible, it wouldn’t work anyway.”
“Yes, but you always told me you didn’t want to be in a relationship anyway…”
“What do you mean?”
She really didn’t understand where he was heading with all this nonsense. Truth be told, she didn’t even know why he was standing there in front of her.
“I don’t want to be in a relationship either. But maybe we could… I don’t know…” he mumbled, trying without success to explain his feelings. “Look, I’ve spent a whole night trying to convince myself that I did the right thing in rushing away from your place like that. But I’m here now, and everything else can go to hell. I know that there can never be anything serious between us and that there are a million reasons why…” he stopped, as though embarrassed and unsure of how to proceed. It almost seemed as though they had swapped roles since the last time they had talked.
“Ryan, in exactly one week the trial is going to start,” she reminded him, unconvinced.
“Exactly. We have a week. It’s almost an eternity,” he said, trying to convince her with a smile.
Amalia clenched her jaws as if to challenge him. “Ryan, a week is not an eternity, as you know very well.”
“But it’s all we have, take it or leave it,” he said in exasperation.
“And in fact, I thought that you had decided to leave it…” she couldn’t resist reminding him, while giving him an accusing glare.
He was decent enough to show he was feeling guilty.
“And are you going to keep reminding me of that for a whole week?”
Amalia didn’t feel like she had to hide the truth. “Believe me, you’ll be looking forward to these damned seven days to be over.”
“We’ll see about that. But at least you’ll have plenty of time to try and convince me that you’re right.”
“I swear that when this week is over, I’m not going out with another lawyer for at least ten years…” she muttered resentfully.
“See? We’re already agreeing on something.”
And at that point he’d had enough of bickering with her, so he finally pulled her closer to him and kissed her. Just as he had been daydreaming of doing for the last thirty-six hours.
*
Thant night, Ryan slept at Amalia’s. Since he hadn’t planned for anything like that – although he had hoped for it – he realized in the middle of the night that he hadn’t brought any clothes with him for the following morning. And going to the office in the same clothes he had been wearing the day before was out of question: Alex would notice in about two seconds flat.
So he chose the lesser of two evils: he phoned his brother Niel up and begged him to bring him some clothes over to Amalia’s the following morning. Of course his brother would tease him about it for the rest of his life, that went without saying, but Ryan was still convinced he had done the right thing. Or at least he really hoped he had.
Waking up with Amalia in his arms was the perfect reward for the energy he had spent running after her all day: she opened her eyes and smiled at him – and that was something she didn’t do very often, especially not in such a spontaneous, natural way.
“Good morning,” he said, giving her a light kiss.
She stretched like a cat without pulling away from his embrace. “Well waking up like this is definitely a lot nicer than the last time,” she said honestly.
“That’s the good thing about not having any expectations,” said Ryan, unable to suppress his cynicism.
She burst out laughing and lifted herself up on one elbow to kiss him again. “If I was a different woman, I would accuse you of completely lacking romance. You woke up happy thanks to me, you idiot, not because you don’t have any expectations!” she laughed. And she was right – though Ryan decided that letting her know she was might be playing with fire.
“You know, what I like about you is that you read me perfectly and understand my point of view. Even better than that, you agree with me but you still want to challenge my certainties.”
They didn’t have much time that morning, before long they’d have to get up and Amalia would have to put on that severe mask she had become so fond of.
She thought about what he had just said. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this time I don’t agree with you at all. It’s not a lack of expectations in my case, it’s just an awareness of the end. Which is an equally cynical concept, I know.”
His reply was a very hot kiss and a hand that began to caress her body with increasing desire.
“Ryan, it’s late and I need to be at the office quite early today.”
“It’s not late at all, it’s still dawn. And anyway, if the Assistant D.A. doesn’t have to go to the office yet, that means you don’t have to either,” he reminded her.
“Your brother is going to be here any minute now. Are you sure you want him to see you in this state?” she asked him maliciously, pointing at a precise area under the blanket.
Ryan sighed. “God, but you’re cruel when you’ve just woken up. And that’s another new thing I just found out about you.”
“Why, what was the first?”
He stood up, totally confident in his nakedness, and headed towards the bathroom for a quick shower. He paused for a moment to smile back at her happily. “I’ll only tell you if you come into the shower with me…”
“What if your brother arrives?”
“He’ll wait. He’s smart enough to guess that we’re busy.”