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Dallas
“Are you transferring here?”
When our company announced they were starting the new paper here in Boise, of course there were several positions that came with that. Apparently they’ve been getting applications from all over the company’s network. They’ve also reached out directly to people they would like to be in certain positions.
As I know all too well.
“All right,” she says running her fingers through her long hair. She lets it fall in a soft sheet on her shoulder. “I’ll tell you, but you have to keep it yourself. We also have to eat while we talk because I’m starving.”
We dig out our meals and settle down with our plastic forks and knives. All the while, she tells me she’s applied to one of the positions here, but won’t tell me which one.
“No way. I’m keeping that part to myself. I don’t need anyone giving me shit about it in case I don’t get it.”
“Don’t I have to keep all this to myself anyway?”
She waves her hand at me impatiently. “Just never mind. I’m getting out of Swan Pointe. That’s the important part. Things have been off for a while now, and when they announced the new paper I realized that what I needed was to get out of that town.”
She dips her taquito first into the little cup of guacamole and then into the little cup of salsa, and takes an enthusiastic bite.
I cut off a piece of my chimichanga. “Yeah. What’s up with you? I don’t care what you say, you haven’t been yourself in your column recently.”
She nods. “I know. Apparently I’m a great, big softy now.”
I raise my fork. “Oh yeah? How’d that happen?” I pop my bite in and instantly raise my brows. “Wow. This is good. How’s yours? Pass the test?”
She nods in approval, chewing herself.
“Although, if you’re wanting to test the quality of the Mexican food here, you have to do better than taquitos and cheese enchiladas. You can hardly screw that crap up.”
“Yes you can, and no they didn’t. This tastes pretty authentic. Who would’ve thought? In Boise freaking Idaho.”
“So this big change,” I prompt, taking another bite of my delicious chimi.
“Right. Well, I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”
I shake my head, smiling. “You’re not secretive or anything, are you?”
“Yes. I don’t talk to people about stuff like this, so don’t blow it by blabbing all my secrets.”
I smile. She’s confiding in me? I like that. A lot. I was right about the glimpse I got of Rita in the elevator on the way up to the party. There’s another side of her. A side I’m seeing more and more with each passing minute. And I’m enjoying the hell out of it.
More than enjoying it.
“So it’s kind of annoying,” she says. “I was at this café, minding my own business, enjoying their chocolate silk pie, when in comes Rayce Rivers ready to profess his love for Emma Swanson, and apologize for being such an asshole, and all that stuff. You read my piece on that right?”
I nod, unable to do anything else since my mouth is full.
“Yeah, so...” she hesitates.
I was getting ready to take another bite, but she has me intrigued. I lower my fork.
“So?”
“So I totally bought it. He was completely sincere. It was crazy too, because it was like neither one of them had any sense anybody else was in the restaurant. It was like watching this super touching, crazy romantic, private moment between these two and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. How am I supposed to be pissed off at him now?”
“Where you pissed at him before?”
“Well, yeah. People like that are such entitled brats. This one, all he cared about was his image. Such a phony. Then this woman comes along and it all completely changes. The whole thing got in my head.”
She waves her hand in the air like she’s trying to swat away a particularly annoying thought.
“It made me think maybe I’ve been wrong about other people, too. I don’t know, maybe I’m just sick of pulling everyone’s chain. If people want to be assholes, why the hell do I have to care? I have better things to do.”
God, I love her spunk. Truth be told, I always have. But that combined with the softer side she’s showing me tonight is definitely making me pay attention to her in a way I haven’t before.
“Better things to do like what? What position are you going for?”
“Oh no,” she says, covering her mouth because she’s still working on a bite of her quesadilla. “I’m telling you too much already. Besides, it’s not the job that matters. It’s the fact that it’s in Boise. This is my chance to get out and make a fresh start. What I really want to do won’t pay the bills, at least not for a while. I need something.”
“Why? What do you really want to do?”
She’s bopping her taquito up and down in the salsa, assessing me as if to see if she should tell me this, too.
“I promise I won’t tell anyone,” I say with a grin.
She points the taquito at me. “You’d better not.” She takes a bite, finishes chewing, then finally spills it. “It’s what half the people in our profession want to do but never do. Great American novelist and all that.”
She’s trying to toss it out there like it’s not that big a deal, but her vulnerability is showing through. Cutting another bite of her enchilada, she looks at me through her lashes, nervous.
Does she think I’m going to make fun of her for it?
“I think that’s great. I can see you doing something like that.”
She lowers her utensils. “Really?”
“Sure. You’re a damn good writer, that’s for sure. Knowing how to write a column may not be the same as knowing how to write a novel, but why not go for it?”
“Well, actually, and I swear to God if you tell anyone this I will hunt you down and pummel you.”
“Can we just make a blanket statement that everything we say in this room, stays in this room?”
She presses her lips together, evaluating me.
“You can trust me, Rita.”
Her face softens, like being able to trust someone is a rarity for her.
“Well, all right.” She smiles, looking down at her half-eaten container of food, a pretty blush tinting her cheeks. “Here’s the thing. I’ve been ghostwriting books for about four years now.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “What kind of books? Novels?”
She nods. “Genre stuff. Mainly young adult fantasy, some paranormal, a little bit of romance.”
I grin at her. “Romance?”
“Shut up,” she says, grinning herself and digging into her rice and beans. “I can write romance. I get the general idea.”
I laugh. “If tonight has taught me anything, it’s that you more than get the general idea.”
She gives me a sexy, self-satisfied grin.
We’ve ridden that particular horse twice, once when we first got here, and once while we were waiting for the food to arrive. And if she’s game, I could go for it again. She’s the sexiest woman I’ve ever been with, that’s for damned sure.
But it isn’t just that. Rita’s woken up a part of me I didn’t even realize had been sleeping.
“Anyway,” she says. “I got the inside scoop on Mr. Michaelson, did my studying, and talked his ear off about the PGA during our interview. I hate that crap but he loved it. I made sure we hit on the refugee thing, too, because he’s so passionate about it. At least that, I didn’t have to fake. I wanted to show him I can do the hard-hitting stuff, you know? I’m not just a trashy gossip columnist.”
Now, this is revealing. Rita’s never once apologized for what she writes, or indicated she wanted to do anything other than, as she’s put it, “milk the cows that pay for the farm.”
“I submitted some pieces I wrote just for him and he said he was really impressed.”
“I’m sure he was.”
“It seemed to go well. I think I have a good shot at it.”
And that circles us back to where this whole conversation started. Her in Boise. Me in Swan Pointe. I’m not sure how I would’ve felt about this new development if I’d heard about it before tonight.
Yeah, I’ve always had more than one eye on Rita. She’s sexy and invigorating. She’s expert at verbal dueling. Technically, I guess we’ve been rivals, but I’ve never had any disdain for her either. I guess I would’ve been sad to see her go. I would’ve missed our little jabs as we passed each other in the Great Divide.
But now?
Now I feel like I’ve been given a glimpse at something far deeper than that. So much more. I’ve tasted just enough to know I want more. And she’s leaving.
I’m not liking this at all.
We’re holding each other’s eyes, not moving, our expressions sober.
“I can’t stay in that town,” she says quietly, almost apologetically.
“I understand,” I say, just as soberly. “You have every reason to leave and no reason to stay.”
She fusses with the corner of her Styrofoam container. “Well. I wouldn’t say no reason.”
“But you’d be stuck,” I say, thinking now of my own situation. “Just like I am.”
She cocks her head at me. “How are you stuck?”
“Hmmm.” Well, that’s a whole other topic. I take my last bite and close up my container. She closes hers as well. I stand and reach for her hand. “Come on.”
I lead us onto the balcony, leaving the sliding door open behind us. The night air is a little chilly, but it’s refreshing after being inside so long. We lean on the metal railing and look out over the busy streets of downtown Boise. She’s close to me, her arm pressing softly against mine.
“You heard about my former fiancé?” I ask, keeping my eye on the lights of the soaring Zions Bank building, where we’d been earlier that night.
“You mean the accident?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry about that.”
Rita had actually expressed her sympathy to me after it happened. That had been a rare moment of her letting her guard down, too, now that I think back on it. But I was too caught up in everything else to notice. Not that it would’ve mattered back then. I was in love with Christie, and that’s all there was to it.
“She blamed herself.”
“My god.”
“I know.”
“That wasn’t her fault.”
“Try telling her that.”
“Jesus.”
We look out over the city for a moment in silence.
“I can’t imagine feeling responsible for the deaths of five other people.”
“Not to mention the two who were so banged up their lives will never be the same again.”
It was the kind of multiple car pile-up that makes headlines.
Rita turns toward me and rests her hand on my bare arm. “Let me guess, she hasn’t been the same either.”
I shake my head.
“Is that why you two broke up?”
I nod. “She did the breaking. She’s completely out of control. She’s not the person she was before. I kept thinking she’d come around, but I don’t think so. It’s just... too late.”
There’s a heavy pause.
I look at Rita. She’s examining me openly, and asks her next question as if there’s some part of her that doesn’t want to hear the answer. “Are you over her?”
“I’m over her,” I say definitively, without hesitation. Because it’s true.
It seems she’s reassured by my conviction, because her expression relaxes.
“What I’ve been struggling with is being over what I thought my life was going to be. I don’t do well with change, and this one flipped my entire world on its head.”
She nods sympathetically. “I can only imagine.”
“But...”
I look into those beautiful sky blue eyes of hers. I want to tell her that she’s making me see I could have a different future. A better future. A beautiful future. Getting a glimpse at the real Rita Becker has made me see I can survive horrible things and go on to be deeply, wildly, impossibly happy anyway.
But the phrase too much, too soon comes to mind, so I keep to myself just how much she’s affecting me. Just how much I want more of her. Not just tonight, but after that, too.
So instead I say, “Imagining a different future than the one I had planned has been hard. I haven’t been hanging onto her, exactly. She’s been gone and we’ve been over for a long time. But I’ve been hanging onto the idea of everything she represented.”
“Yeah.” She’s stroking my arm, keeping me grounded. “It sucks when we realize we’re not in control of our lives as much as we thought we were.”
I smile a little at that. “Right.”
“But, I don’t know. I think the only thing we can do is embrace that, you know? Throw ourselves into the wind. Let life surprise us a little.”
That right there. That’s the thing about Rita that’s always intrigued me. She throws herself into the wind just in the way she walks down a hall.
There’s a side of me that responds to that. Needs it. But I was locked into Christie, and Christie represented the safe path. The predictable path.
If I’m honest with myself, there was a part of me that thought I wanted the kind of life we’d have together, but there was this whole other side that had been silenced and left unfulfilled.
It’s far past time for me to stop hanging onto what I lost in that tragedy, and instead reach for everything I gained.
This could be a chance for me to start over, too. To reinvent myself, just like Rita wants to.
“You make me brave,” I say, pulling her closer to me.
She smiles up at me. “You should. You’re the elevator superhero. The Rita Whisperer.”
I laugh. “The Rita Whisperer?”
She shrugs, that little blush creeping up on her cheeks again. “You make me feel things, too, okay?”
I take her face into both my hands and lean down. “Yes,” I say tenderly, our lips an inch apart, her body softening against mine, “It’s okay.”
