One Night with her Best Friend Read online

  One Night with her Best Friend

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  One

  Kate Carlson crossed another item off her list, leaving only two more tasks to complete.

  She turned back to her keyboard and typed quickly, mentally gauging how long it would take to get through her list and then finish getting ready for her date that evening.

  She’d showered earlier but had then made the mistake of checking her email one last time—only to find her boss had sent nine emails in a row about an unexpected meeting he needed organized for Monday.

  It would have been nice to have a heads-up about the meeting before Friday evening, but she’d immediately made a list of things to do in preparation. She was the administrative assistant of one of the Senior Vice-Presidents of a multi-national cooperation. She’d had much worse time-crunches than this.

  Her wet hair hung around her shoulders, dampening the little satin robe she’d thrown on after her shower and dripping onto the back of her desk chair. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate on drying her hair and doing her makeup, though, until she’d taken care of the meeting arrangements.

  She wasn’t alarmed when the front door of her apartment opened without warning and a man strolled in. She didn’t even turn from her computer.

  She heard Aaron in her kitchen, opening the refrigerator and then popping the cap of a bottle of his favorite beer, which she always stocked for him.

  As he came into the living area, she hit send on an email and immediately pulled up a new message window.

  “I thought he was picking you up at seven-thirty,” Aaron said, coming to peer over her shoulder. He’d changed after work and now wore a pair of beat-up khakis and his favorite green shirt.

  “He is. What’s your point?”

  “Your hair is still wet.”

  She muttered a curse as she typed, rereading this message twice before she sent it to make sure it was free of typos. It was going to the office grammar-queen.

  “Crisis on the forty-second floor?” Aaron always referred to her office by the floor number—the executive floor of the corporate headquarters of her company.

  “Just an unexpected meeting to arrange.”

  “Can’t you do it tomorrow morning?”

  “I could. But I don’t like things hanging over me, waiting to be done.”

  “Yes, after fourteen years, I’m aware of that.”

  “After fourteen years, I would think you’d get tired of mocking me because I happen to be well organized.”

  Aaron’s smile was distinctive. It started with his head tilted downward so she couldn’t fully see his expression. Then he would lift his head and meet her eyes. The slow revelation of that smile was like the sun breaking from clouds—warm, startling, sometimes blinding.

  He gave her his downward grin now, his hazel eyes affectionate when he lifted them to meet hers. His thick brown hair was a rumpled mess, as it always was at the end of the day. “I’m not sure ‘well-organized’ fully captures the extent of your type-A-ness.”

  She had the sudden urge to stick her tongue out at the man who’d been her best friend since they were both fifteen, but she managed to resist the childish impulse. “I just like things to stay neat and in order. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. You can make lists and cross them off to your heart’s content.” He nodded toward the notepad on the desk beside her. The lined paper was an irregular size—long and narrow, the perfect shape for making lists. Aaron had given her one of those notepads as a joke in their senior year of high school, and she’d loved it so much he’d kept buying them for her.

  After a pause, he added in a different tone, “It’s just that, despite what you think, your lists don’t really keep the world in order.”

  “Well, they help. And what do you mean, despite what I think?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  She knew that casually dismissive tone well. “I will worry about it. Don’t bring it up at all if you’re not going to explain it. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you live like the whole world will collapse if it’s not listed, scheduled, and planned in advance according to an organized agenda, and that’s not actually true.”

  She kept typing, but now she wasn’t really seeing the words on the screen. “I don’t think I’m really like that.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Aaron wasn’t a superficial man, but he was naturally casual and laidback. He only brought up serious topics like this when he thought they were really important.

  Kate’s belly twisted uncomfortably as she made herself think through his words. Her hands were now frozen on the keyboard.

  “You know why I try to stay organized,” she said at last. “When my dad was around, things were a mess. They were…they were awful.”

  “I know.”

  Kate’s dad had been a gambler by nature. He probably still was, although she hadn’t heard from him in years. Instead of slots or poker, his game of choice was high-risk business investments. She’s spent the first fifteen years of her life moving every year as her father chased one failing venture after another. They’d lived from hand-to-mouth in ever-changing apartments, and Kate had never known what to expect from one day to the next.

  Sometimes he had come home with expensive toys and pretty dresses wrapped in fancy gift wrapping.

  Sometimes he had come home and looted her bedroom for anything he might be able to pawn.

  Twice, he had come home and announced they were moving. They’d packed and left town before dawn.

  It wasn’t until her mother had finally left her father and gotten a job here in Chicago that Kate had known what a stable, secure existence even felt like.

  “I learned it from my mom. I know she was a little anal about schedules and planning and everything, but she had her reasons for it.”

  “I know she did.”

  Kate shot a suspicious look at Aaron, but his face was sober. “So why bring it up then?”

  “Just because I understand the reasons doesn’t mean living by a pre-planned agenda is the best way to be happy.”

  “It’s the only way that works for me. You don’t know what it was like for Mom and me before. You only knew me once we got settled.”

  “I know it was bad for you, and I know why you can’t stand to feel unsettled now. But—”

  She interrupted. “You might think you know, but you don’t really know. You did see what happened when we tried to give Dad another chance, though. I thought…we thought he had changed, but it was a stupid mistake. He gambled away all of Mom’s savings. We almost lost the house. You were there. You saw what happened.”

  “I know, and I’m not pretending it wasn’t really hard for you. But that doesn’t mean everything unplanned or unexpected is bad. Occasionally life happens in a good way that isn’t in our plans.”

  She shrugged off his words and the tight feeling in her gut. Eventually, she’d have to think about what he said—she couldn’t just ignore Aaron, not when he was taking this so seriously. She couldn’t think about it right now, though.

  It would upset her, and she had too much to do.

  She hit send on the email she’d been trying to write during the c
onversation and then crossed off the last two items on her list.

  Nothing pleased her more than the sight of a list completely accomplished. She tried to summon her normal satisfaction but couldn’t quite manage it. “Maybe being unplanned works for you, but it’s just not me. People can be different. I’ve done all right so far the way I am.”

  She had done all right. She had a good life and a great job. A lot of people wondered why she’d decided to become an administrative assistant after she graduated with a double major in Business Administration and Public Relations—instead of becoming a corporate mogul herself. She had exactly the kind of job she enjoyed, however, and she’d never felt there was anything inferior or unfulfilling about her position.

  She liked keeping her boss in order. She liked handling correspondence and making arrangements. She liked being the gatekeeper and maintaining the office. She was good at it—so good that she’d had a number of other job offers in the last few years. To keep her from moving on, her boss kept offering her more money.

  She had absolutely no complaints about her career. Or her boyfriend, whose date she was now running late for.

  When she glanced back up at Aaron, who was still lurking above her and eyeing her in concern, she noticed something. “You’ve got another hole.”

  He frowned, obviously not following her words. When she nodded toward the sleeve of his old shirt, he set down his beer on the corner of her desk so he could peer at it.

  There was a hole in the fabric at his right elbow.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “How did that happen?”

  She wasn’t surprised he hadn’t noticed. When he was wrapped up in grading or research, he didn’t notice trivial details like attire. Or eating. Or answering his phone.

  She stood up to inspect the damage. “It happened because this shirt is ancient and should have been thrown away years ago.”

  “Don’t start again. I’m not going to throw it away.”

  In their senior year of college, the professor Aaron was working for had given him the opportunity to teach one day in an introductory anthropology class. Aaron had tried to play it cool, but Kate had known how pleased he was with himself for being given the opportunity few undergraduates had. At that point, he had already known what career he wanted to pursue. Kate had given him the green dress shirt in congratulations, joking about it being his “professor shirt.”

  All these years later, he still hadn’t given the shirt up, even though it was on its last legs. A couple of years ago, at Kate’s insistence, he’d at least retired it from his work-clothes rotation.

  “Can you fix it?”

  Kate shook her head and studied the sleeve more carefully, so close to him she could smell the soap he used. “I don’t know. You really just need to dump the old thing.”

  “I’m not going to throw it away. If you can’t fix it, I’ll wear it with the hole.”

  She sighed, giving up since she knew he was more stubborn than she was—at least on this subject. “I can probably put a patch on it. Take it off.”

  Aaron blinked.

  “Take it off,” she repeated. “The shirt.”

  She laughed at his evident surprise. “I’m not asking you to strip for my delectation. Just take off the shirt and leave it here. I’ll work on it tomorrow.”

  “You should be so lucky as to have me strip for you.” Despite his dry tone, he’d started to unbutton the shirt. He wore a t-shirt underneath.

  She laughed even more at the imagined visual of Aaron as an exotic dancer as she accepted the shirt he handed her. It was still warm from his body, and she checked out the hole again, making sure it wasn’t too far gone to mend.

  “Is it all right?” he asked.

  When her eyes returned to his face, she saw the amusement had left his expression and he now looked genuinely concerned.

  Aaron was never sentimental and rarely made a big deal about anything—but his attachment to this old shirt was really very sweet.

  “Yeah. I can fix it.” Then she gave in to the surge of affection and stretched up to kiss him on the jaw. His skin was bristly under her lips from a day’s worth of beard. He felt and smelled so Aaron-like that she followed the kiss with a hug.

  For just a second, he stood perfectly still. Then he wrapped his arms around her and tightened them almost painfully.

  She sighed in pleasure, feeling warm and safe and known in his arms.

  “What was that for?” he asked when they pulled apart.

  She shrugged. “Just because.” For no good reason, she felt a little awkward about her spontaneous gesture, so she sat back down at her desk to complete her email. “Did you finish grading your papers?”

  Aaron had gone to high school and college here in Chicago with her, but then he’d gotten married and moved away for graduate school. They’d drifted apart for those five years until he’d gotten a divorce and taken a faculty job in the anthropology department of a local liberal arts college.

  He’d rented the apartment across the hall from hers, and their friendship picked up where they’d left off, as if they hadn’t spent those five years apart.

  “Yeah.” He grabbed his beer again and went over to lower himself onto her couch.

  “How were they?”

  “The usual.”

  She turned around, waiting to see if he was going to complain about the declining state of writing and critical thinking in American college students, but he didn’t. He wasn’t even looking at her now. He sat with his beer untouched and stared out toward the glass door onto her balcony.

  She frowned, wondering why he looked so stiff and uncomfortable all of a sudden. It couldn’t have been the hug. They’d hugged countless times before. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Did something just happen?”

  “Nothing happened. You need to get dressed or you won’t be ready when he arrives.”

  She ignored that. She’d known Aaron too long, and she could read the tension in his shoulders and the rippling muscle in his jaw. She just didn’t know what had caused it.

  She went to sit down beside him and put a hand on his knee. “Aaron, tell me what the hell is the matter all of a sudden?”

  “Would you please put some clothes on?”

  Kate’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  “Your robe is open.”

  She sucked in a surprised breath and looked down at herself. Sure enough, the fabric had parted past the point of decency, revealing a lot of skin and the inner-curves of her breasts. She pulled it closed. “Oh. Sorry about that. But I don’t know why you’re getting all uptight about it.”

  “I’m not uptight, but it really isn’t smart to go around flashing random men.”

  He sounded uncharacteristically grumpy, and she frowned at his tone. “You’re not a random man. You’re Aaron. And we went skinny-dipping together when we were seventeen, so I don’t think anything I have should be a shock to you.”

  He rolled his eyes, but he looked more relaxed now that she’d pulled her robe closed. “I thought you’d be going through an extensive primping ritual. Isn’t this supposed to be a big date tonight?”

  “Yeah. It’s our one-month anniversary.”

  Aaron’s expression conveyed his opinion of celebrating a one-month anniversary.

  “Don’t be snide.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Your expression was snide.”

  “You’re imagining things.” His mouth twitched. “Although Hugh is a ridiculous name.”

  She stiffened. “There’s nothing wrong with his name. There are a lot of incredibly handsome Hughs in the world, you know.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. Shall I list them for you?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I’m crazy about Hugh.”

  “You really aren’t.”

  Annoyance tightened in her chest. “What the hell is wrong with you today? I am crazy abou
t him.”

  “You’re crazy about the idea of him, but I’m not sure how crazy you are about him. He fits the image you’ve always had of the man you want, and that’s what has you so excited.”

  Hugh was a high-powered corporate attorney—handsome, sophisticated, and organized, with as clear a plan for his life as she had for hers. She’d spent the last month feeling like her romantic daydreams were about to come true, and it was just rude of Aaron to not support her in this.

  “What’s wrong with that? There are certain things I look for in a man, and he happens to possess all of them. That’s why I’m crazy about him. You don’t even really know him. How can you presume to know my feelings for him?”

  “I know you. It’s like I was saying before. You’ve always had this picture-perfect plan for your life, and you dismiss without even considering anything that doesn’t fit—because you think it’s a threat to your orderly world. You just assume Hugh is the next item on the master list for your life.”

  “Why are you harping on all this today? I know what I want. And Hugh is what I want.”

  He let out a breath and seemed to slump a little, although nothing significant changed about his body language. “I know he is.”

  “Then why are you acting like I’m doing something wrong for liking him?” Her voice cracked slightly on the last word.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his hazel eyes kind and familiar again. “If Hugh makes you happy, then that’s great.”

  “He does.”

  “Then that’s good then.”

  She peered at him, feeling like he’d withdrawn from her in an inexplicable way. The idea made her chest ache.

  She’d never been so lonely as the years he’d been married and living across the country from her.

  “I said I’m sorry,” Aaron said thickly. “Don’t look at me like I strangled your bunny.”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle at his wry, aggrieved tone, and the tension in her chest relaxed. She had the ludicrous urge to hug him again, to crawl into his lap and be held by him.

  She resisted the impulse, of course, since it was entirely inappropriate.