“Well, whatever the Hebrew word for ‘newbie’ is. I’ll ask Mrs. Scheinberg next time I see her. Oh, there’s some blessings you’re supposed to say.”
“What are they?” Ian asked, feeling wildly uncomfortable with the thought of reciting blessings. He rarely even attended Mass these days.
“I don’t know. They’re all in Hebrew. I can Google—”
“We’ll skip it. I’m a newbie, remember.” He took the lighter from her hand and lit the one candle that went into the center. Then he used it to light the candle on the far right. “Sorry I’m such a noob, God. You know what I’m supposed to say better than I do.”
“Sounds like a good prayer to me,” she said. She sat on the bed next to him and side by side they stared at the burning lights. “It’s pretty.”
“Beautiful.”
“I’m glad you like it. I wanted you to like it.”
“It means a lot to me that you did this,” he said. “I know we’ve hurt each other in the past. I’ve hurt you.”
“I wish you hadn’t dumped me—or at least not dumped me like you did—but Mrs. Scheinberg said you did it out of your integrity and I shouldn’t blame you.”
“Flash...here’s the thing,” he began. “The night we spent together was incredible.”
“Hell, yeah, it was.”
“So incredible that I was going to go talk to Dad and explain the situation—that I was romantically interested in someone who worked for the company, and I wanted to see how to handle it. You know, transfer to another job or something. But before I could go talk to him, something happened.”
Ian didn’t know how to say the next part. He didn’t want to. He hated to embarrass her but he had to tell her. She had to know.
“You remember a guy named John Haggerty?” Ian asked.
“Yeah, drywall guy. He asked me out like five times before I told him I was going to report him if he talked to me again.”
“When I came into work the morning after that night, Haggerty was sitting in front of my desk, waiting for me. He said he had something to tell me. He said it was about us.”
Flash’s eyes widened. He went on before she could ask.
“That night at the bar in Portland, we left together. You remember that?”
She nodded.
“And you remember I kissed you while we were leaving the bar?”
She nodded again.
“And you remember the bar was kind of dark by that time?”
She nodded once more.
“Haggerty was in the bar,” Ian said. “Not only did he see us alone together drinking and flirting. He saw us kissing. He saw us leave together. And he took pictures of it all.”
“Ah...” She closed her eyes and exhaled.
“Haggerty said he wanted a ten thousand dollar ‘bonus’ or he would tape those pictures inside every single locker at the company. He’d also send them to the news so they’d know that Oregon State Senator Dean Asher’s son likes to fuck his female employees, and all of this happens on my father’s watch and wouldn’t that make a great headline. Haggerty’s a piece of shit but he’s a smart piece of shit. He knew how much trouble he could cause with a potential sexual harassment scandal. He was so smug sitting there I wanted to smash his face in. I almost did it, too.”
“What did you do?”
“I told him I had to see how I could do this without Dad catching on. He said I had twenty-four hours before he told everyone about us and started pasting up pictures. Soon as he left the office, I called the company lawyer.”
“So you dumped me because you didn’t want your dad getting in trouble?”
“I broke it off with you because our lawyer said I needed to. He said you were a ticking time bomb, the only woman who worked on the construction crew, and I’d slept with you. If it made the news or you decided to sue or something...”
Flash made a sound like a bomb going off.
“Yeah,” Ian said. “Our lawyer was ready to kill me. Dad’s a state senator, he said like I didn’t know that already. Lawsuits. Cover-ups. Do not piss off the unions during an election year. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and on and on about how precarious the situation was. That’s the word he used—precarious.”
“Good word.”
“He said I had a choice—either I had to break it off with you completely and forever or I had to tell Dad and let Dad fire you.”
“Fire me?”
“You’d played a couple small pranks on coworkers and the lawyer said those constitute more than enough legal grounds to fire you.”
“We all play pranks on each other. Nobody ever gets hurt.”
“I know, I know.” Ian raised his hands in surrender. “That’s what I told Mac Brand, the company shark. He said I had to decide—either I dump you or fire you. It was so unfair to you in every single way but I didn’t see any other choice. I told our lawyer I’d break it off with you. He called the police and the next morning when Haggerty came into my office, I recorded our conversation, and got him arrested for blackmail. We agreed to drop the charges if he signed a legally binding nondisclosure agreement. And that was the end of it. And us.”
Ian felt sick, physically ill, recounting the story to her. He’d wanted to spare her the details, protect her from the knowledge of what could have been a nightmare for her.
“That’s very sweet, Ian. But...”
“But?”
“But you should have talked to me. You should have told me what was really going on instead of saying, ‘Sorry, sweetheart. You’re not good enough for me.’”
“That’s not what I said. I said I’m your ‘superior’ because I am literally your ‘superior.’ That’s the word they use for a boss who oversees your work. Your ‘superior.’ I had the company lawyer telling me to find a reason to fire you, and I could have done it and you wouldn’t have had a legal leg to stand on. That’s too much power to have over the person you’re dating. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I wanted to protect you. That’s all. There’s my confession. Not a week goes by I don’t tell myself I made the wrong decision, although for the life of me, I don’t know what other choice I had.”
“You could have told me what was happening. You could have told me the entire truth. You could have mentioned to me that someone was blackmailing you and threatening to ruin your dad’s political career. I would have been upset, but I also would have been sympathetic. And I would have handled it my own way without getting lawyers involved.”
“What would you have done? Or do I not want to know?”
“I would have told everyone at work you and I slept together.”
“That’s how you would have handled it?”
“You can only blackmail someone over a secret. If it’s not a secret, then they can’t blackmail you, right?”
“True. Then again if you went around telling everyone at work about your sex life, you could have been fired for creating a hostile work environment.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Now you see what an untenable position I was in?” he asked. “There was no way to win for you or me or us, only better ways of losing. Like could I let them fire you when you’d done nothing wrong so we could cover our asses? Not a chance.”
“Wow.” It was all Flash said and then she said nothing more for a long time. He looked at the menorah she’d made him and saw it for what it was—a peace offering. He wished he had something more to give her in return than an ugly story.
“I know I was cold when I broke it off with you,” Ian said. “I know I was an ass. I know I was being insulting by telling you I was your superior.”
“You said, ‘Someone like me can’t be involved with someone like you,’” she said.
“I meant a boss with an employee. That’s all.”
“I thought you meant...”
“You thought I meant you weren’t good enough for me,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. It’s not what I meant because it’s not what I
think or what I feel. I wanted to talk to you about it, you know, after all the dust settled. But you’d already moved on and put it behind you. At least it seemed like you did.”
“Yeah, well, Mom and I moved a ton when I was a kid. She’d get behind on the rent and we’d have to pack up the car and drive out in the middle of the night, start over somewhere new a week later. At first you come to a new town and try to make friends. Then you move and lose your friends. By the fifth and sixth town you know you’re going to move again so you might as well not make friends. I got very good at walking away and leaving people behind. It was a survival skill. I had to learn fast how to cut my losses. Rule number one—don’t get attached in the first place and then when you leave you won’t miss anything. Or anybody. I broke rule number one with you. I got attached. But I didn’t break rule number two.”
“What’s rule number two?”
“When you see that you’re losing, quit playing. I was losing you so I folded my cards and left the table. I don’t stay where I’m not wanted.”
“You were wanted,” Ian whispered.
She stood up but immediately sat down again, not on the bed but on the floor with her back to the wall and the menorah in the window to her right. The candlelight danced across her face. She’d never looked more lovely to him or young or small or vulnerable. In personality and presence, she was huge. Physically she was a shrimp. An incredibly sexy shrimp.
“If I’d known you still wanted me...” she said, and paused.
“What would you have done?”
“I would have quit my job,” she said. “So we could have kept seeing each other without you getting into trouble or your dad. Or me.”
“You did quit your job.”
“Too late,” she said.
“Flash, you know I’m sorry, right? About everything?”
And he was sorry. After he broke it off with Flash he’d determined to put the whole thing behind him. He’d let his father set him up on blind dates with preapproved women, mostly the daughters of friends and business colleagues. Ian had done it; he’d gone out with his father’s choices. Every last woman he went out with on these father-ordained blind dates had been elegant, sophisticated, with long hair, understated makeup, no tattoos and no piercings other than the earlobes. They were all in respectable lines of work—one professor at a Catholic college, one doctor of internal medicine, one financial lawyer who sat on the board of one of Dad’s favorite charities. All wonderful women—smart, attractive and accomplished. When his father demanded to know why Ian hadn’t asked any of them out on a second date, all Ian had said was, Sorry, she’s just not my type, when what he meant was, I’m not over Flash and I don’t know if I ever will be.
“I regret it,” Ian said when Flash didn’t say anything to his apology. “And I’m not proud of myself. As much as my father loves me and I love him, there was a damn good chance he’d fire me if he found out what was going on. I’d not only slept with an employee, but I’d gotten caught sleeping with an employee. I didn’t want you to lose your job. I didn’t want me to lose my father’s respect.” Ian rubbed his face and groaned before dropping his hands to his knees and meeting her eyes again. “I made the wrong choice by not telling you the truth. It was a weak thing to do and I don’t like thinking of myself as a weak man. I wanted to beat Haggerty for threatening to do that to me, to us. Literally physically beat the shit out of him so much it scared me. I scared me. My feelings scared me. So I...” He shrugged.
“You cut your losses.”
“That’s what I thought I was doing,” he said. “Cutting my losses. I lost too much when I lost you. And when you quit work and walked out of the building, it felt like I was about to lose something I couldn’t live without.”
“Dammit, Ian, I wish you’d told me all of this back then instead of keeping it from me,” she said.
“I do, too,” he said. “Can you forgive me?”
It felt like an eternity passed before she finally answered him.
“Yeah, I can forgive you.”
“I don’t deserve it. You’re a better person than I am.”
“I know,” she said, the tiniest hint of a smile on her mouth.
“I want to be with you,” he said. “In any way you’ll let me be with you. If you want to have sex—just sex—I can live with that. It’s not what I want but if it makes you happy, if it makes up for what I did, I’ll do it.”
“What do you want from me? And don’t say you want to be my friend. We both know that’s not it.”
“I want you. As much of you as you are willing to give me. I can’t deal with watching you walk out of my life again. You did it yesterday and I lasted three seconds before I was chasing you across the parking lot. You did it last night and I lasted two seconds before I was running to the garage to stop you. I screwed up last time. I’m not going to screw up this time. Please tell me you’ll give me another chance, Flash. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“I’m here,” she said. “I drove to the top of a volcano that’s covered in two feet of snow to give you a gift I made with my own hands today. Did I mention the volcano part?” She turned to point at the top of Mount Hood, its snowy peak glowing a red and sunset gold in the window.
“The volcano thing makes you nervous, doesn’t it?”
“You make me nervous,” she said, turning away from the window to meet his eyes.
“I make you nervous? Me? Ian Asher makes Flash Redding nervous? That’s like saying David made Goliath nervous.”
“David killed Goliath,” she said.
“But David didn’t make Goliath nervous.”
“If Goliath were smart, he would have been nervous,” she said. “I’m smart enough to be nervous.”
She raised her chin and looked him hard in the eyes, daring him to take this where he knew they both wanted it to go.
“Tell me why I make you nervous,” he said. The time for questions was over. Orders only.
“Because I have very strong feelings for you,” she said.
“I have strong feelings for you, too.”
“Anger? Fear? The usual dark-side stuff?” she asked.
“Attraction, fascination, adoration, affection, erection.”
“Is ‘erection’ an emotion?” she asked.
“It’s definitely a feeling.”
“What’s it feel like?” she asked, walking right into his answer, which he knew she did on purpose, because she wanted this as much as he did.
“Come here and find out for yourself.”
5
FLASH GAVE HIM a long look and didn’t speak. They were in a standoff and he’d just fired the first shot. Now it was her move.
She started to stand and Ian shook his head.
“You know better than that,” he said.
Flash lowered herself back to the floor. She didn’t move again, not for a few seconds. Stubborn girl, he knew she wanted it as much as he did. And she knew he knew, which was why she took her own sweet time obeying him.
Not that he minded. He could wait. Luckily he didn’t have to wait long. Flash slowly tipped forward and came up onto her hands and knees. She crawled four feet from the wall to the end of his bed. Every muscle in his body went taut at the sight of this invincible woman on her knees in front of him. His chest heaved as she knelt between his thighs and his blood rushed and burned. She hadn’t even touched him yet.
This time he made her wait, made her sit there while he took her chin in his hand and turned her face left and right and then finally up to meet his eyes.
“So beautiful,” he said. “I like the nose stud.” He tapped the end of her nose to make her smile.
“Thank you,” she said. No sarcasm. No talking back. She laid her head on his thigh and he couldn’t help but feel that was exactly where it belonged.
“I love the way your hair looks after you take your welding helmet off. Sometimes you spike your hair up on purpose. But that’s when it’s spiked up just because it’s swea
ty and out of control. It looks like you’ve just been fucked, long and hard. I like that image in my head.”
“Me being fucked long and hard?”
“Me. Fucking you. Long and hard,” he said.
“I like that image, too.”
With his hand still on her chin, he traced the outline of her lips with his thumb. She had full soft kissable lips, the kind of lips a man dreams of seeing wrapped around his cock morning, noon