Vanilla

He stepped away as I swiveled in my chair, and though Alex could be counted on to make light of nearly anything, this time he looked solemn. “Yeah. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” I shrugged, looking again at the pictures. “I like having my picture taken. I like working with Olivia. I like the idea that something we’ve done together goes to raising money for something useful. It seems to make it worthwhile.”

“And if you hadn’t met Olivia in Scott’s workshop, you’d never have met me, and I’d never have been able to convince you my life would not be complete without you by my side.” Alex put his fists under his chin and fluttered his eyelashes at me. “So, lucky me.”

I was the lucky one. Alex had started his own investment-planning business a few years back, consulting mostly. He had the contacts and the skills to make people a lot of money if they let him. He’d brought me on as a partner, my job to take care of all the bits of the business he found boring, which was just about everything other than figuring out the best places to make money grow. I handled client accounts, paperwork, office filing, billing...and though there were days when working with him felt more like trying to wrestle a bag of kittens into a top hat worn by an eleven-armed octopus that hated cats, I wouldn’t have given it up for any other job. Before agreeing to take on the responsibility of keeping this joker in line, I’d been drowning in the corporate world of human resources for Smith, Brown and Kavanagh, where going to work every day had been like feeling another small piece of my soul shrivel and die.

“Serendipity. If I’d never met Scott, I’d never have met Olivia, and then I’d never have met you while you were throwing a pity party about how starting your own business was so much more work than you wanted to do...”

“It wasn’t a pity party,” Alex interrupted. “I was just, you know.”

“Whining,” I told him with a grin and ducked his attempt to poke my upper arm. The truth was, he might like to slack off in the office during the boring bits of paperwork and filing stuff, but he was a genius with the clients. And he knew how to make money grow, no question about that.

He leaned over my shoulder again to look at the picture of me in front of the apple-bobbing barrel. “That picture is hot as fuck, Elise.”

From another guy, in another office, this might’ve been grounds for sexual harassment. Instead I eyed it, then him, with another lift of my eyebrow. “You like the whole woman tied up on her knees with something in her mouth, huh?”

“Who doesn’t?” Alex laughed.

It wasn’t like Alex and I talked in detail about our sex lives. We’d become friends, but there are some things you don’t talk about with the people you work with. Especially when he’s a married man, and you’re basically the only two people in the office. I had no idea if Alex had seen any of my other photos, the ones I did with Scott. Alex and I were linked on Connex, of course, because these days everybody collected connexions like kids used to collect baseball cards. I’d posted a few shots on there a long time ago, but I now avoided putting anything too private on that social networking site because I’d connexed with family members. My mother had a hard enough time accepting the fact I posed in my bra and panties. If she saw me in a black vinyl catsuit with a whip in my hand and a man at my feet, she’d have plotzed. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed about any of it; it wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t as if I went around introducing myself like “Hi, I’m Elise, and sometimes I like to dominate men.”

I laughed, too. “Lots of people like it the other way around, believe me.”

“Both work,” he said with a flash of a grin I suspected had wooed him into the pants of many a woman in his day. Alex Kennedy was just one of those guys who turned heads and made lashes flutter. It wasn’t just his face, which was gorgeous. It was the way he looked at you, like what you said mattered, like in that moment, nobody else existed but you.

“You could be a model yourself, you know,” I told him somewhat abruptly. “I’m surprised Olivia doesn’t use you more often.”

Something flashed in his eyes, and a secret sort of smile slipped across his mouth before he focused again on me. “I’ve let Olivia take pictures of me.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, but didn’t ask. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know about that. “Tell you what, rock star, how about you sign off on all this stuff, you take me to lunch and then you can get home early to your gorgeous wife and make some more pictures together.”

Alex grinned. “You got it. I’ll even take you out for sushi, how’s that?”

“Awesome.” I pushed the folder toward him. “Sign.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was teasing him about how painless it had been to actually finish some work, and we were walking to the closest sushi restaurant. Tucked in a small storefront on Front Street and directly across from the parking garage, it was a favorite lunch spot for a lot of the people who worked downtown. Fortunately for us, Alex’s procrastination meant the lunch rush was over, and the dinner crowd hadn’t yet arrived. We had our choice of tables in the restaurant’s cozy back section, and we took a seat in the corner. The server brought us hot tea and bowls of miso soup. I dipped my porcelain spoon into the golden broth, stirring up the bits of scallion, then blew on it to cool it. I was suddenly starving.

We talked for a while about our favorite TV program. Alex had turned me on to the show about two monster-hunting brothers who drove around in a black Impala—sometimes in the office, we’d toss quotes from the show back and forth to each other, trying to stump the other. Because Alex was way more into the show and had been watching it for a lot longer, he was usually able to beat me at the game. Now, asking me which of the brothers I’d be if I could choose, he claimed he would always be Dean, the older brother, and I was stuck being the younger brother, Sam.

“Except shorter,” he said.

I made a face. “And without a penis, don’t forget that part. That’s kind of important. Anyway, I’m totally Dean. Dean’s way cooler.”

“We can’t both be Dean,” Alex pointed out.

“You have Sam hair.” I gestured at the raggedy mop of dark hair that spilled over his forehead.

“But you’re the smart one, and you do all the computer stuff,” Alex said. “You have to be Sam.”

We both laughed at that. He pushed the platter of spicy salmon toward me then took some for himself. Alex waved his chopsticks at me.

“So...how was your...meeting...last Friday?”

I paused. My once-a-month dates with Esteban weren’t a secret, exactly. Alex had no problem with me rearranging my schedule to accommodate appointments. Well, once a month, always on the second Friday, I had a “meeting.” I’d never told Alex what it was for, nor had he asked, until just now, though I could tell by his tone he suspected I hadn’t been seeing a chiropractor.

“It was very productive,” I told him.

He waited. I smiled. He shook his head.

“What’s your story, Elise?”

I gave him a falsely innocent look. “I don’t have a story.”

“Everyone has a story,” Alex said. “We all have secrets. What’s yours?”

“If I tell you, it would hardly be a secret, would it?”

Alex grinned. “C’mon. You know you wanna.”

All at once I did want to tell him, the sudden urge to share swelling up inside me with unexpected fervor. Why? I didn’t know, other than I hadn’t told anyone about the lover I’d been seeing once a month or so for the past year and a half, not even my best friend, Alicia. She’d moved to Texas two years ago, which had made it easier to keep Esteban a secret. If I hadn’t shared our relationship with the girl I’d known since elementary school, it certainly wasn’t something I should share with Alex.

My phone booped with my nephew William’s ringtone and saved me. I swiped the screen to take the call. “Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”

“Can you come get me from my lesson?”

I paused, dragging a piece of sushi through a puddle of wasabi-smeared soy sauce. “When are you finished?”

“I’m supposed to go until six-thirty but the rabbi had another meeting so he let me go now. I texted my mom a couple times, but she didn’t answer me.” William hesitated. “I texted my dad but he said he’s in a meeting and asked if you could get me.”

“Maybe she’s stuck in traffic,” I offered around a mouthful of rice and fish. “Can you give her a few more minutes?”

Another short pause came, then William said quietly, “Can you please come and get me, Auntie?”

He hadn’t called me that in a while. Heading toward thirteen, William had taken to calling me Elise without even an aunt in front of it, a habit that made me sad but one I didn’t denounce. Kids grew up. It’s what happened.

“Sure, kid. Let me finish up my lunch, and I’ll be right there. Another fifteen minutes or so, okay? If your mom gets there first, text me.” I disconnected and gave Alex an apologetic look. “My nephew needs to be picked up from his Bar Mitzvah tutoring. I guess his mom’s late. I’m only a few minutes from the synagogue. Mind if I run to get him?”

Alex shrugged. “Sure. Are we all done in the office?”

“I am.” I gave him a significant look that he returned with a grin. “I guess you are, too. Thanks for the sushi. See you tomorrow.”

It took me about ten minutes to get back to the parking lot in front of the office. Another ten to get to the synagogue, and only because I hit every red light on Second Street. I spotted William sitting on one of the benches at the shul’s front doors. He was tapping away on his phone, head bent, still wearing his kippah as was required by the synagogue for males while in the building, though he didn’t usually wear one outside it. He looked up when I pulled into the half-circle drive, his expression wary. I hated to see that on the kiddo’s face, not sure why he looked like that.

“Hey,” I said through the passenger-side window. “Is your mom on the way or do you still need a ride?”

“Yeah, I need one.” William slid into the passenger seat, backpack at his feet, and put on his seat belt without being reminded.

God, I loved that kid. I had a strange and winsome flashback to the smell of his head when he was a baby. My brother and Susan had gotten pregnant and married at age twenty, one year before we all graduated from college. I’d lived with them for the last four months of her pregnancy and the entire first year of William’s life, both so we could all save money and to help them out with the baby so they could finish their degrees. I’d changed diapers and done midnight feedings, the whole bit. William would kill me if I leaned over to sniff him now, though, not to mention that I was sure the experience would not be the same as it had been when he weighed ten pounds and fit in my arms like a doll. Instead, I waited until he’d settled before pulling out of the synagogue driveway and onto Front Street.