Unzipped?. Karen Kendall

half dozen choices in designer eyewear. She cornered a reluctant Hal and slipped them on and off his face. Really, it was quite amazing how different he looked in each pair. More and more sophisticated. More and more confident—even authoritarian.

      She debated between the last two pairs: one with a heavier, dark rectangular frame and the other with a lighter, more streamlined rimless frame.

      “Hal, do you have any preference?”

      “Nope,” he said. “I just want to be able to see.”

      She decided in favor of the heavier frame. His strong angular jaw balanced out the glasses well, and they gave him an aura of power. Pair them with that hair, a little stubble, a black cashmere V-neck and…yum. You could find yourself wanting to skinny-dip in those Bahama-blue eyes of his.

      He cleared his throat and looked away.

      Shannon realized with a start that she’d been staring at him for about five minutes straight, and blinked. Come to think of it, he’d been staring at her, too.

      And he’d been looking inside, trying to figure her out, not slobbering over her body and thinking of dragging her off to a cave by the hair. After years of experience, she could tell the difference.

      She pushed the thought away and told Marta which frames they’d purchase. And then she braced herself, because with the nonglare coating, the shatterproof glass, the cool sunshade attachment and the costly designer frames, Hal was going to—

      “Whaaaat?! How much did you say?”

      —have an aneurism and a heart attack all at once.

      “YES, BUT WHAT YOU’RE NOT understanding, Hal,” she told him in the privacy of the Explorer, “is that Marta can’t help the prices! She doesn’t make them up, she just works there. And you make her feel really bad when you squawk over the total.”

      “Well, it makes me feel really bad, too! Who pays over six hundred dollars for a pair of glasses? I don’t see any diamond studs in them….”

      “Hal, listen to me. You’re paying for a whole image, here. You’re essentially going to be advertising for your company, and you want to project an image of intelligence, decisiveness, sophistication. You want people to have confidence in your work, so—”

      “So I’ll show them the damned product. Why does it matter what I look like? Is our society really that shallow? I should be able to do my own at-home, bowl-over-the-head haircut and wear glasses frames fashioned from a coat hanger! None of this has anything to do with how good I am or how effective my software will be in streamlining business processes. This is bullsh—”

      Shannon threw up her hands. “Should, should, should,” she said, exasperated. “In an idealistic world, Hal, all of that would be true. But that’s not the kind of planet we live on.” She blew out a breath, shook her head and twisted her hair into a knot. She dug into her bag for a pencil and secured the curly mass on her head.

      “Look. Why don’t you take me back to Finesse, okay? It’s obvious that you’re completely hostile to this whole process, and quite frankly you’re hurting my feelings at this point. I’m just trying to do my job, not bilk you of your life savings.”

      They rode in silence for a few minutes. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched a muscle jump in Hal’s jaw. She turned away and looked out the window instead, at the road rushing under them like gray flannel, the grass an emerald blur, telephone poles whizzing by like matchsticks. The neat Cape Cods became pale flashes, their unique weathered charms lost in a fog of succession.

      Did her birth mother live in one of those? Or in some stucco place in Florida? A limestone house in Texas? A ski chalet in Utah or Colorado?

      Hal’s voice reached her on her imaginary journeys. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

      A frisson of strange awareness shot through her. She turned to him, surprised. It was rare, in her experience, for a man to apologize. His gaze bored into hers, and again she had the feeling he saw far more than she was used to.

      He had a small mole in the middle of his right cheek—on a woman it would have been called a beauty mark—and she found herself wanting to touch it. She did no such thing.

      “I know,” she said. “Thanks.”

      He nodded and she let the noises of the car comfort and steady her. The sound of the wind rushing past, the rumble of the engine, the muffled tap of brakes as they slowed for a turning vehicle ahead.

      “Did you grow up around here, Shannon?”

      The question caught her by surprise. “Close.” She hesitated, anticipating his reaction. “Greenwich.” A lot of people assumed she was a snob when she told them she grew up there.

      “Interesting. You don’t seem like the Greenwich type.”

      “I’m not.” She left it at that.

      “How did you get into this line of work?”

      “Oh. Well, a friend suggested it, actually. My friend Jane, who’s a co-owner of Finesse. We were all in dead-end jobs—at least they were—I was just a miserably failing actress, out in L.A. with a hundred thousand of them.” She laughed self-consciously.

      “That takes guts,” Hal said.

      “No. It takes naiveté and delusion.” She chuckled again, but even to her own ears it sounded forced.

      “You can call it what you want to, but I call it courage. To put your dream on the line like that, to move away from everything familiar…”

      I could kiss him. The thought didn’t shock her as much as it should have. I could kiss him for saying that to me right now. It’s like he knows how badly I need to hear it.

      They had turned into the parking lot of Finesse, and Hal idled the truck near her sodden car, the only other one in the small lot.

      “Thank you,” she said to him. Then she leaned over and acted on her thought.

      7

      SHANNON’S URGE TO KISS Hal had appeared impulsively out of nowhere, and as far as kisses went it was supposed to be friendly, quick and not too personal.