Caught Up in Us (8 page)

The girl behind the counter
cleared her throat. I opened my eyes and managed to choose a
sparkly number, with pink stones for the cat’s ears. It was kitschy
and that’s what made it so adorable.

“Wait for me outside,” Bryan
said.

I did as instructed and a minute
later, he left the store, dropped a tiny white bag into his wallet,
and then fastened the chain around my neck. “It’s just a little
necklace, but I wanted you to have something from me. Something you
liked,” he said, and he sounded so sweet and nervous
too.

“I love it, Bryan. I totally love
it.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

Then, his hands were in my hair,
and he kissed my neck, my earlobe, my eyelids. I sighed and swayed
closer. I was floating, I was flying, I was in Manhattan with the
man I’d fallen in mad, crazy love with.

“Why aren’t we just in your
apartment right now?” I whispered.

“Because if we are, I will not be
able to resist you.”

“You’re not doing a good job
resisting me right now.”

“I know. Can you even imagine what
it’ll be like if it’s just you and me?”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I can
imagine. I think about it all the time. I’m so crazy about you. I
want to be with you in every way.”

“Me too. Let’s go walk around NYU.
You’re going to be there in just a few weeks.” He held my hand and
squeezed my fingers when he said that, his touch a visceral
reminder that we’d be together then. We wandered around the campus
for the next hour, and with each building, dorm and classroom that
we managed to find open in August, I grew more excited about
college.

“I can’t believe I’m going to be
here soon. It’s going to be amazing.” We walked along the outside
of one of the dorms. “Did you love it here?”

“Yes. I loved it. College is
everything they say it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“That it’s the time when you find
yourself. When you figure out what you want. And when you have a
ton of fun.”

“I can’t wait to start. I know I’m
going to love it.”

“You are,” Bryan
said, but there was something sad in his tone.

I looked at him. “Hey. You
okay?”

“Totally.”

“Because you sounded…”

“I’m fine.”

But he grew quieter as we checked
out the campus bookstore, and a cafe where I said I would probably
do all my homework, and the library, which was speckled with
students for the summer session. His mind was elsewhere, and he
didn’t tell me where he’d gone.

At the station on Sunday night, I
thanked him again for the necklace.

“You should
always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic.
His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment
had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning
in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being
sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him
by.

When I called a few days later to
confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and
distant.

“I don’t think you should come
in,” he said.

Something didn’t compute. We’d
been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did
something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with
worry.

“No. It’s just…I don’t think we
should.”

“Should what?”

There were so many ways to answer
the question, but the scariest one was the one he said
next.

“I don’t think we should be
together.”

I looked at my phone briefly as if
it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer
understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I
could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in
love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want
to be with you.”

Then I waited, and I waited, and I
waited.

Words didn’t come.

The silence choked me. It was as
if hands were on my neck, gripping me.

How could I have misread him so
badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but
in love?

Then he spoke, and his words were
sharp glass. “I have to go.”

Breaking the clasp in a single,
fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the
trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.

That was the last time I spoke to
him.

Even now, five
years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the
pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable.
I have to go
.

That’s exactly what he did. He
left.

Chapter Nine

The factory was loud and busy.
Machines whirred, conveyor belts hummed, parts rattled and people
chatted. Bryan gave me the guided tour of the whole operation,
stopping along the way to talk with his employees, from the
managers who ran the facilities to some of the men and women at the
end of the line who worked like master jewelers with loupes,
carefully and painstakingly putting the finishing touches on pair
after pair of fine platinum and pewter and silver cufflinks for the
line called Sleek. Made Here also created cufflinks from recycled
materials including old watches and bike chains that had a
deliberately worn and purposefully tarnished look for the Scuff
line. The factory had once made lugnuts for hubcaps. With his
expertise in engineering and his vision for solving problems in
unconventional ways, Bryan had retrofitted the former auto parts
factory for Made Here’s goods, and the result was a mixture of
automation and craftsmanship.

“You know what I really want most
for the recycled line?”

“What would that be?”

“The lover’s bridge in
Paris.”

“Just take the whole bridge and
chop it up?”

He laughed. “No. The padlocks,” he
said, referring to the locks that hung on of one of the bridges
arcing over the Seine. Lovers wrote their names on locks, hooked
them to the links and tossed the keys in the river as a promise. It
was a popular spot for locals and tourists and the net effect was
every year the old locks had to be cut and tossed away to make room
for new proclamations of the heart. “I’ve been trying to work with
the city of Paris for years. To find a way to buy the used locks
from them — the ones they have to cut off every year. But, French
bureaucracy is, well, French bureaucracy.”

My eyes lit up, and for one of the
first times with him in this go-round, I spoke from the heart.
“That would be amazing, though. What a perfect gift. A pair of
cufflinks made from padlocks on the lover’s bridge.”

“Right? Wouldn’t it be? And it’s
not as if the city cuts the locks because the couples broke up.
They only throw them out because they need room for more. So what
if I could take those off their hands and turn them into
something?”

“Do you think it’ll
happen?”

“I’ve made some headway. But it’s
a project I can’t delegate. I’m the only one at the company who’s
fluent enough to converse with French civil workers.”

“Well, if you need any help, you
know where to find me. But I should let you know, I charge extra
for my translation services.”

That earned a brief smile. “Let me
show you more.” He pointed to the machines that moved the parts
along in a precision-timed fashion. “That’s how we can turn out
product quickly and on time by keeping the process moving,” he
said, then we stopped at a section of the factory floor where
workers took their time handling the materials to turn them into
the beginnings of new shapes and sizes.

One of the guys who was assembling
parts from used bike chains gave Bryan a quick nod.

“Hey Joe,” Bryan said.

“Hey Boss Man,” Joe
said.

“How’s the wife? Does Megan have
her teaching degree yet?”

Joe nodded. “Just a few more
months and she’ll be able to start working in the school
district.”

“That’s fantastic. Keep me
posted.”

As we walked away from Joe, I made
a mental note that Bryan knew his employees’ wives’ names, and what
they did for a living. If he were a jerk, it would be so much
easier to dislike him, as I wanted to. But instead, it was getting
harder to pretend he was nothing to me.

We popped into a quieter area with
glass walls where a dozen people in white lab coats were doing the
finishing work on the cufflinks, tie clips and money holders.
“Looking good, guys. I’m psyched about the progress you’ve made
this month. Make sure Delaney knows how you take your coffee or
latte or whatnot. We’ll do a pick-me-up all around today from
Stella’s,” he said, and I assumed Stella’s must be the local coffee
shop.

There were some hoots and cheers
as we left and headed to Bryan’s office on the second floor. His
assistant, Delaney, cradled a phone receiver as she scribbled down
elaborate notes. She was cute and perky, and had a librarian
sexiness to her with black glasses and blond hair fastened in a
bun.

Bryan held the
door for me, and I followed him. His office was functional, but it
didn’t scream overly masculine. I couldn’t stand those too mannish
offices decked out in chrome and black that seemed to shout
I am powerful
. Bryan’s
workspace was simple, with a large wooden desk, a gray couch, a
navy blue chair, and a few framed awards on the wall. I checked
them out; they were given by the Eco-Alliance. From the train, to
the car, to his entire recycled line, he practiced what he
preached, and I was impressed.

Another brick in my wall came
down.

We chatted for the next hour about
the manufacturing process, his distribution strategy and the supply
chain challenges he’d been facing lately. Delaney knocked on the
door, and then asked if it was time for the Stella’s
run.

“The usual for me,” Bryan said.
“Kat? You want something?”

“Just an iced
tea would be great.”

Bryan tilted his head as if he
were trying to figure me out. I was throwing him curveballs. He’d
expected one thing from me, but I gave him another.

“And whatever you want of course,
Delaney. And if you could see what the finishing crew wants as
well,” he said, referring to the employees he’d promised the coffee
to.

As she left, Bryan asked me more
questions about My Favorite Mistakes and how I envisioned growing
the business. The truth was I didn’t entirely know, and I admitted
that. Soon, Delaney returned with the Stella’s run, carrying a
cardboard drink holder with an iced tea and a coffee.

As she handed Bryan the coffee, I
pictured her tripping and spilling it on his shirt and then
fumbling through cleaning it up like on a bad sitcom. But she was
graceful and poised. “I have the papers from the board on the Wilco
termination,” she told him. “I’m just reviewing their comments and
emailing them to you for your two p.m. call.”

“Great. Thank you. I look forward
to reading them.” Delaney left, and closed the door behind her.
“She’s very involved. Eager to learn. So she has a lot of
responsibility,” he said to me, as if he felt the need to explain
why Delaney was reviewing termination papers.

“So she’s clearly a lot more than
just a minion,” I teased.

He laughed. “Definitely. But let
me tell you this. Minions are overrated. Once you have them, they
come in your office and want things.”

“Minion management. Never thought
about that before.”

“Oh, it’s not like the old days
when you could beat them with a cane.”

“I bet HR comes down pretty hard
on you for that,” I said and that cracked him up. He sat down in
his chair, still laughing and not paying close attention. Then, he
spilled his coffee on himself.

Now it was my turn. “I’m so sorry
for laughing,” I said in between big chuckles. “That was just so
unexpected. It’s usually the other person who spills the coffee.
You don’t usually spill it on yourself.”

His eyes widened. “Evidently, I’m
the world’s biggest dork.”

“It didn’t burn you, did
it?”

He shook his head as he stood up,
placing the half-empty cup on the low table. The front of his white
shirt was covered in a coffee-colored blotch. “No, it wasn’t that
hot. I can’t stand the way some places make their drinks scalding,
so Delaney always makes sure it’s a civilized
temperature.”

He walked to a small closet in the
corner of the office and took out a new shirt. “I guess I better
change.”

“I’ll leave,” I offered, and
started to rise.

“I don’t mind. Unless it makes you
uncomfortable.”

Uncomfortable
was not the word I’d
use. More like
turned
on
. When I looked over at Bryan, he was
already unbuttoning his shirt, and I was quite simply rooted to my
seat. If Channing Tatum were in the office taking off his shirt,
I’d find it physically impossible to do anything else but stare at
the spectacle of him undressing too. Bryan reached his cufflinks,
and I watched as he deftly removed them, then laid them on top of a
nearby bookshelf. He took off the shirt, and rested it on the back
of a chair. He wore a white tee-shirt underneath.