Authors: Penelope Ward
For the rest of that afternoon, I fantasized about the beautiful generous stranger and what it would have been like to thank him properly…with my lips.
Oh fuck…oh fuck.
Sweating profusely, I ran down Main Street as far away from the diner as I could get.
Where the fuck did I park my car?
I need to think. It’s over there.
I got in and slammed the door. Silence.
She was so fucking beautiful.
My God.
I had an idea of what she would look like, but never could have imagined her to look as amazing as that. I was imagining a girl…but so much time had passed, I should have known that clearly, she would be a beautiful woman.
Those gigantic green eyes…
God, I hope my staring wasn’t that obvious. I just couldn’t look away.
Will do…WILL DO?
That was the best I thing I could think of to say to her?
And why the hell did I leave a fifty-dollar bill? Way to slip under the radar. I was so flustered and it was all I had in my wallet; I just couldn’t stay for change and risk saying something stupid or unintelligible while I waited for that. I could tell by how fast my heart was beating in there, that if I had stayed, I would have fucked it all up.
My heart rate has yet to slow down.
I had to get out of there. It’s bad enough I have a forty-minute drive back to the agency in the city. Who travels forty minutes for a bagel? Crazy stalker men, that’s who.
I must have been doing eighty-five miles per hour down I-93 when I thought about her name:
Allison.
It’s pretty just like her. But of course, I knew she would be more than pretty. And she smelled like green apples.
She seemed nervous. Her hand trembled and her cheeks turned rosy when she approached me and that made me want to rub her sweet face with my hand.
I wonder what her story is, why a girl that looks like that is waiting tables in a diner in the suburbs. Surely, she at least could do better at one of the trendy bars in Boston. She could have anything she wants with a face and eyes like that.
Not to mention her slamming body…the way that tight uniform hugged her ass.
Fuck!
She’s the last woman I should be thinking like this about. Yet, all I can focus on now is whether she tastes as good as she smells.
Snap out of it, Callahan. She’s the one woman you can’t have.
Which is why I want her.
I need to control my thoughts, but I didn’t expect to be so fucking captivated liked this.
I have to see her again when I can calm the fuck down. I just don’t know how I am going to manage it. The next two weeks are jam packed with client meetings.
***
I get back to the office in record time, passing my assistant Julie who immediately points to my office.
“Karyn is waiting for you,” she said.
Karyn.
I had been in a relationship for six months with Karyn Keller, an attractive blonde television reporter I began representing after she walked into the agency and demanded to be added to my client roster. We were immediately attracted to each other and decided to ignore the agency’s non-fraternization policy.
D.N. Westock represents some of the biggest names in broadcast news and I was their highest grossing agent and rising star after nabbing one of the hosts of a national morning show as a client. Not bad for a kid from Dorchester.
To say I had humble beginnings is putting it lightly. I grew up on the third level of a triple-decker apartment house in one of the highest crime sections of Boston, the middle child of an Italian mother and Irish father. My parents, older brother Caleb and I and my sister, Callie, who’s ten years younger, shared the two small bedrooms in the apartment. My parents, Paul and Bettina, went with the whole ‘C’ name thing for the kids, which went even further because our last name is Callahan.
Money was tight, but our parents did the best they could to provide for us. My father worked as a steelworker and my mother was a maid. Even so, no one was surprised when I, the boy who survived an accidental drive-by shooting on my fifteenth birthday right outside our front door, left home as soon as I graduated from high school. Marked with a bullet hole on my left arm, I managed to get into Northwestern on a merit-based scholarship because studying and school came easy to me, plain and simple.
Northwestern was known for its Communications program and I knew that I wanted to major in something where I would be able to use my innate ability to write and speak publicly. Mostly, I was good at mouthing off and could have taught an AP class in Bullshitting 101.
It was there in Chicago, nearly twelve years ago, during my senior year that my life fell apart. Even with what happened, though, somehow I managed to finish up and graduate.
Three years after the nightmare senior year, while working in Chicago, I began an affair with an older woman named Lana Ford, who happened to be a broadcasting agent. I had taken a position as her intern and even though Lana was fifteen years older, she taught me everything she knew—in the boardroom and the bedroom. I would follow Lana around during the day while she met with clients and then we’d head back to her loft at night. I was closed out emotionally after what happened to me back at Northwestern anyway, so the fact that she was using me for sex and I was using her to get ahead suited me just fine. I didn’t want to feel my heart break ever again. I didn’t want to feel anything at all, for that matter.
One day, Lana found out I took one of the other young female interns back to her loft, so she cut me loose. She had to know it wasn’t going anywhere romantically, but she was…understandably, very bitter. I thought she might try to sabotage me, but I immediately got another better internship, safely working under a male this time.
I eventually used the (non-sexual) experience I gained from watching Lana, to snag an actual junior agent job in the Chicago office of D.N. Westock. I worked my way up the ladder and began representing some major names in the Chicago area before being transferred to the Boston office. I requested the transfer to Boston four years ago after my father died suddenly of a heart attack.
I wish I could say the day my father died felt like was the worst day of my life, but I had already experienced that day eight years earlier.
After I moved back to Boston, I was more determined than ever to forget everything that happened in Chicago. That is, until now. Four years after arriving back home, I now have to face my past again. I just couldn’t believe out of everywhere in the country,
she
was so geographically close to me. I have to see her again, if nothing else, just to stare at her beautiful face.
For now, I’d have to see Karyn.
“Hi hon. What took you so long?” Karyn asked sitting with her high heels crossed over my desk, clutching her usual venti non-fat two-pump vanilla latte. She handed me a now cold tall coffee.
I lied. “I had a meeting with a potential client outside of the city.”
“Anyone good?” She batted her eyelashes and twisted her straight blonde hair into a bun.
God, yes, someone good, I thought.
“Yes, this one might have a lot of potential.” I immediately pictured Allison and lost all attention to what Karyn said in response. Allison was simply gorgeous and my girlfriend’s looks paled in comparison.
I thought about Allison’s features: small nose, full lips and straight long beautiful dark hair that landed in the middle of her back. She could easily pass for a model, except for her shorter height. And I mentioned her eyes…
her eyes
. They were unusually huge…a light green with speckles of gold. There was something about those same eyes though that made me sad, sensing something in them that told me her life hasn’t been easy as of late. I couldn’t take my eyes of them, though. I did just long enough to glance down at that tight uniform that had her name stitched on the front of her perky breasts.
Karyn interrupted me from my stupor. “Where do you want to go eat tonight…Sonsie?” She winked sarcastically. She knew I hated going to those fancy places on Newbury Street. I was much more a takeout and Netflix kind of guy. Plus, I spent most afternoons wining and dining clients at frou-frou restaurants.
“Actually, I am thinking we should stay in tonight, I had a long day,” I said.
I was emotionally exhausted from the experience at the diner and wished I could just be alone tonight.
“Ok, whatever,” Karyn hissed, walking over to me to sit on my lap. Running her fingers through my hair, she asked, “Any word from WANY in New York? Didn’t you send my demo reel there last week?”
“Karyn, do you know how many agents are trying to get their clients that anchor gig? Believe me, if they are interested, we’ll hear from them. Personally, I think it’s a long shot for you. You have no desk experience, just street reporting. I think they are looking for more of a bubbly type; it’s a morning show gig and babe…bubbly you are not.”
Karyn frowned, “Well, I want you to push for me anyway.”
Karyn was the I-team reporter for one of the Boston stations. While she was pretty, her tone on-air was serious and it pained her to smile. Not my usual type, she can be brass and cold, but deep down, I like to believe she is a good person. She came from a wealthy family in Darien, Connecticut and got her start based on the fact that her mother was a big broadcasting exec in New York. Her father was a brain surgeon and Karyn wanted for nothing growing up, having gone to private schools and private resorts her whole life…nothing like
my
childhood.
Dating Karyn was convenient, though. She understood the industry and the demands of my job and she was available and attractive. She never seemed jealous when I worked closely with young attractive wannabe TV stars, coaching them. Best of all, she didn’t push me to open up emotionally, something I haven’t done in years with a woman. Karyn didn’t seem to expect much, except keeping up appearances and sex. I was happy to oblige on the latter, but after a while with Karyn, the sex had become ordinary, without the chemistry that existed in the first months of dating. It was still good, just vanilla (like her predictable latte).
***
That night, Karyn and I got Thai food from the place on the corner of my street and later, she left to sleep at her apartment on the other side of Boston. She had to wake up early to work the morning show and introduce her exclusive investigative report on the rise in Chinatown massage parlors being used as fronts for prostitution. Just as well. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts tonight.
It was bad enough that the entire time Karyn was going down on me, Allison was the only thing I could think about. How pathetic that I imagined it was her instead of Karyn and that it was the only way I could finish.
As I lay in bed, the moonlight was exquisite. Beacon Street was quieter than usual and that helped, because I had a lot on my mind tonight, namely deciding whether I would venture back to that diner ever again once I calmed down and whether I would open the can of worms that would emerge from that. I had to come up with a story if I were ever going to show my face again there. I reached for my iPod and immediately searched for my smooth jazz play list, putting on some Diana Krall. I looked up at the ceiling, thinking about the woman who mesmerized me at the diner today, wishing I could have met her under different circumstances and knowing that the truth would turn her world upside down.
The train ride back to my apartment in Malden seemed to go by in a flash tonight. Maybe it was all the fantasizing about Blue Eyes and his fifty-dollar bill. And of course, the number fifty leads to thoughts of the book I just read…which leads to thoughts of bondage and billionaires. That guy certainly could pass for a real-life Christian Grey. Heck, he was better looking than the man I imagined when reading that delicious smut.