Disgust had never occurred to him.
“Dylan, what are you doing here?” She glanced around the hallway as if his mere presence were something she wanted to hide from others.
“I’m delivering roses from an admirer,” he said, piling on more charm, hoping this was going to take.
“Really? Aren’t they better suited for your girlfriend?”
Where was that one coming from? “My girlfriend? What girlfriend?” he asked.
Someone at the copier a couple of offices down paused and craned their neck, their ear perked, catching whatever wave of gossip they could grab from the conversation he and Laura were having right here in the hall and he took that as a cue.
Nodding toward the person he said “Do you really want to have this conversation out here?”
Her face changed. She glanced over. “No, I don’t.” Ice Queen voice. If she could be any colder she’d be a glacial shelf in the Arctic. Ouch.
“Please, let me come in and let’s talk, ‘cause I don’t have a girlfriend and I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
She frowned, seeming to consider her options. Finally, she reached for the flowers, grabbed the latte with a yank, turned around and left the door open. He took that as an opportunity, stepped through and closed the door. She set the flowers on a filing cabinet and took a swig of the coffee.
The room was the most boring office he’d seen— and he was a firefighter, so he’d seen his share. At least the fluorescent lights didn’t blink on and off like crazy and trigger eye tics. Everything was beige. The floor was beige. The walls were beige. Nope, change that. Putty, he had recently learned, was the official name of the most boring shade ever. He’d learned that because he’d had to do some requisition forms for some boring filing cabinets. Replacing some pre-World War II office equipment at the firehouse.
None of that mattered. What mattered was that the dozen and a half roses that he bought were by far the only color in the room other than Laura’s perfect lime-green sweater covered by a nice double-breasted suit. She leaned back against the front of her desk, her butt forming beautiful curves against the edge, her arms crossed over her now-swelling breasts. He could tell that she was aroused just by the sight of him, but could also tell that her anger ran deep.
Where on earth had this come from? he wondered. At least he had some explanation for why she’d fled his bed at three in the morning. She thought he had a girlfriend? What the hell had Mike been telling her? Wait, that didn’t make any sense, ‘cause Mike swore up and down he hadn’t said a word about them to her. So...what?
“Why do you think I have a girlfriend?” he asked.
She said, “Well, when your bedroom is plastered with pictures of someone who looks like she was part of the Olympic beach volleyball team, it’s kinda hard to come to any other conclusion.” She gestured down at her belly and hips. “I, obviously, wasn’t picked to play for that team.”
“My bedroom pictures?” Huh? “Oh, my God!” he said, washing his face with his hand, rubbing his eye until he calmed himself down. “Jesus, Laura. That’s not my girlfriend. That’s Jill!”
She snorted. “So who’s Jill? Your wife?”
“Jill is my...man, this is complicated.”
“Yeah...” she replied, drawing out the word. “It’s always complicated. It was complicated with the last guy I dated. Seriously—he turned out to be married, too.”
“Oh, so you think...oh, no, Laura, Laura, no!” Dylan shook his head. “Jill’s dead. Jill’s my...my...former lover.” The words came out like a mouthful of packing peanuts. How could he describe Jill? She was just Jill. Giving her a label reduced her to so much less than she had been.
“Dead?”
“Yeah. She died of cancer eighteen months ago.”
“And so you have pict—oh! Oh, oh, no, Dylan, I’ve made such a big mistake!” she cried. All of the anger drained out of her voice, her hushed tones triggering more hope than mourning in him.
“I didn’t bring it up because it was just our first date, Laura,” Dylan explained. “But no, those are pictures of Jill. We—” watch it, Dylan “I was with Jill for almost 10 years. And, she, well...she died. She has, she had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. And there was nothing the doctors could do after really trying everything. So, that’s...that’s my girlfriend, as you put it.”
He stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared at the industrial carpet for a few seconds, then looked up at her. “Is that why you’ve been putting me off? Is that why you’ve been ignoring all of my messages, my texts, my voice mail—because you got up in the middle of the night and saw some pictures of this...of some woman and jumped to one hell of a conclusion?”