“How did you end up working at your magazine.Candid, isn’t it?”
“Yeah…er, yes, ma’am.” He feels a blush rising in his cheeks. “Um, yes, that’s it.Candid.” Why does he sound like a fucking moron?! He shrugs again, stupidly. “I needed a job, and turns out, a BA isn’t exactly the kind of degree that gets you into high-paying office jobs. So I answered a listing for the mag and worked there through grad school.” Another shrug, because he can’t imagine sounding less impressive than he does now.
“Do you like it?”
“It pays me enough to have my own place.” No matter how shitty that apartment is. “And it’s writing. So. Yes. I do.”
Shetsks. “I’m sure you do.”
He cuts into the pancakes and they hit his tongue like sugar-drenched clouds. Okay, that’s not the add-water-and-shake kind.
“I read your short story,” she says. “The one about the childhood friends. ‘Again.’”
Luke chokes on his pancakes. He forces the half-chewed bite down his throat and reaches for his coffee, slopping some over the rim, damn it. “How – how –howdid you…” He gulps in air, and then coffee, wheezing. “F-findit?”
She wipes up the spilled coffee with a placid expression that is somehow knowing. This woman is dangerous, he thinks. Lethal, maybe. “I looked you up of course, after Hal told us about you. I wanted to see your work, and I didn’t figure there were too many Lucas Kellers in Brooklyn who worked for pop culture mags and penned literary fiction in their spare time.”
“You downloaded that issue ofSpark?” he asks, knot forming in his gut. He pushes his plate away on impulse, as he recalls that story, every single dark secret pressed between its cramped lines of text. He wrote it only months after The Incident, and he was hurting, and sullen, and scrambling through the dark clutter of his angered thoughts for some scrap of meaning.
“I did.” She makes herself a plate. “I thought it was lovely.”
Lovely. No one has ever said that about him, or anything he’s ever written.
“Seriously?”
“I like the way you use language,” she says, and her expression grows thoughtful, brows tugging together. “I could tell you were a poet, the way it read.” She looks at him, withdrawn into her head somewhere. “The way the words sounded as I was reading.” A smile. “A lovely story told in a lovely way.”
Lovely, again. Is that what his midnight ruminations are? Lovely?
Lady, you don’t know shit, he thinks, and reaches for his coffee.
~*~
“Your father-in-law,” Luke says when they’re sitting side-by-side at the bar, breakfast well under way, plates keeping warm in the oven for Hal and Maddox (he can’t think of him as “Matt” yet, he just can’t).
“Mm.” Sandy takes a sip of coffee and says, “Now there’s a literary character for you.”
Luke crunches a piece of bacon. “Between the original news story, and the way everyone’s building him up, I’m starting to get animpression.”
“Ah. Animpression,” she repeats, using his exact inflection.
He flicks a sideways glance her way. She’s messing with him, and if the curl of her mouth is anything to go by, she’s enjoying it.
“I’m also starting to think this is some elaborate practical joke.”
Her smile widens, truer now. “No. Definitely not that.”
They finish their food – Luke’s appetite is gone so he just forces down a few more bites and drains his coffee. God, he needs a smoke in theworstway.
Sandy rinses their plates and stows them in the dishwasher. “Refill?”
“Please.”
She tops off his coffee and says, “I’m sure Will’s ready if you are.”
His messenger bag sits propped against the legs of the stool and he picks it up. “Lead the way.”
She does, back into the hall and to the left, through a formal sitting room full of dainty-legged furniture that, while in pristine condition, looks snatched from the year of the house’s building. A room untouched, there for show, perhaps for cocktail parties. No signs of life. Through white French doors they pass into another room, smaller, warmer, full of sunlight that gleams softly on buffed wood paneling. A library, with a fireplace, shelves crammed with books, a drink trolley, and two leather arm chairs with footstools angled on either side of the mantle. A man sits in one, his back to the window, and he must be Will Maddox.
