HERSELF for not crying on the drive home to her apartment. She’d wanted to. She’d come very close. Then she’d seen that harrowing drop-off down the side of the highway and instead kept her eyes clear and on the road. By the time she pulled into her parking lot, she felt as good as anyone who’d been once again rejected by the guy she was in love with could feel.
“You don’t love him,” Flash told herself as she grabbed her duffel bag and a grocery bag from behind her truck seat. “You just want him.”
She closed her eyes and breathed long and hard through her nose, willing herself not to love Ian. A long time ago she’d read about those gurus who could control their own heart rates, slowing them to the point people could mistake them for dead. Why couldn’t she do that? She should be able to do that, will her heart to not beat so wildly in Ian’s presence. When he’d said his mother’s name and touched the iron ivy leaf on the fireplace grate, she thought she’d die of love for the man. If he was just a pretty face with good hair and a great body and a nice smile, and even if he was just a good person, she might have made it out without falling in love with him. But he was all that and vulnerable, too. That was her Achilles’ heel, her Kryptonite, the one chink in the armor she’d forged for herself. She felt protective of him as she never felt about any other man. She wanted to take care of him, which was stupid because if anyone on earth didn’t need taking care of it was the son of a rich father with a good job and all the luxuries in his life money could buy. But still...it was there, that love, that need to take care of him, and when he’d said he refused to let her use him, she’d almost broken down right then and told him everything she felt about him including all of that. Instead she’d turned tail and ran. He’d offered her friendship when she wanted his body and his heart and his soul. Friendship was the last thing she wanted from Ian Asher.
With a sigh, she got out of her truck, took her bags and walked to the corner apartment on the first floor. A few people had already started decorating for Christmas. She saw lights in windows, battery-operated candles, a few fake snow scenes. Fake snow? All they had to do was drive thirty miles east and they’d be up to their eyebrows in real snow.
She doubled-checked her grocery bag out of paranoia and knocked on the one door on the row with no Christmas decorations in the windows.
A few seconds later the door opened a crack, the security chain still locked.
“You’re late,” the voice inside the door said.
“Work-related. Sorry.”
“You have the stuff?”
“I have it,” Flash said.
“Two bags?”
“Two bags.”
“Anybody see you come here?” the voice asked, and Flash saw two dark brown eyes darting around in the direction of the parking lot.
“Nobody saw me but someone’s going to if you don’t let me in.”
The door slammed shut and a second later reopened. Flash slipped inside.
“You know this stuff isn’t illegal, right?” Flash said, passing the grocery bag to her downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Leah Scheinberg.
“Illegal or not, I can’t get caught with it,” Mrs. Scheinberg said, digging through the bag with a grin on her face. “I’d never hear the end of it. Here, take a hit. You look like you need this as much as I do.”
Mrs. Scheinberg was eighty-eight years old and had spent World War II working in a munitions factory as a welder—a real live Rosie the Riveter. Flash worshiped the ground she walked on, especially since Mrs. Scheinberg had saved one of her blowtorches from back in the day and had given it to her. Now it was Flash’s most prized possession. So when Mrs. Scheinberg offered her a frosted Christmas cookie, Flash took it, because when a woman is as much of a badass at eighty-eight as she was at eighteen, you ate the cookies she gave you and you did it with a smile.
“These are pretty good,” Flash said, eating an iced Christmas tree in one bite. “No wonder you make me smuggle them to you.”
“If my son weren’t such a stick-in-the-mud, I wouldn’t have to have you smuggle them in for me. Sit,” Mrs. Scheinberg said, pointing at her sofa.
Flash sat and munched on the fistful of cookies she’d taken out of the bag. She loved hanging out at Mrs. Scheinberg’s apartment. It was like stepping back in time to the 1930s. She’d inherited all her parents’ furniture and had it cleaned and repaired so that it looked like new, even if the patterns and styles were from another era. She had art deco lamps on her side tables with geometric patterned shades, a square teak coffee table with chrome legs and a leopard print wall-hanging over the back of the two-tone black-and-white sofa. Mrs. Scheinberg herself looked like she belonged in another era. She wore dresses every single day—not skirts, but dresses. When she went out she put on gloves. When she stayed in she always had on a full face of makeup and had her white hair styled every week. She took a seat in the chair across from the sofa and crossed her legs at the ankles, prim as a schoolgirl while she scarfed down frosted Christmas cookies like a starving person.
“Talk,” Mrs. Scheinberg said between bites. “Why were you late? You put in your notice today?”
“I did.”
“How did Mr. Asher take it?” Mrs. Scheinberg paused in her munching long enough to give Flash a pointed look.
“He took it. He wasn’t happy about it but he said he understood.”
Mrs. Scheinberg waved her hand dismissively.
“Not good enough for you,” Mrs. Scheinberg said. “You’re better off without him.”
“I did find something out about him today, though,” Flash said. “Something surprising.”
“Spill it,” Mrs. Scheinberg said, then popped another cookie in her mouth.
“He’s Jewish.”
Mrs. Scheinberg nodded her approval. “I always liked the boy.”
“You just told me he wasn’t good enough for me.”
“That’s before you told me he was a nice Jewish boy. Why am I just hearing this?”
“Because he didn’t know. We were talking about our parents and he mentioned that his mom died when he was a baby. He said his father never talks about her because there’s a lot of bad blood between the two sides of the family. His dad’s Catholic and his mother was from a pretty conservative Jewish family apparently.”
“Then he’s Jewish.”
“That’s what I told him. Then I asked him if he wanted a bagel.”
“Wicked girl. In my day we didn’t talk to men like that. Well...I did. But most women didn’t.”
“I can’t help myself,” Flash said. “He’s infuriating. I can’t stand being around him. I want to insult him and yell at him and put a ‘kick me’ sign on his back. He turns me into a child. I’m twenty-six. I should be able to talk to a man I’m attracted to without insulting him.”
“You’re in love.”
“Yup.”
“And you’re scared.”
“Yup.”
“Sit up straight and talk to me like a grown woman, Veronica Redding. We’re adults here. Let’s act like them.” She snapped her fingers and Flash sighed and sat up straighter.
“You don’t have much room to talk,” Flash said. “You’re Jewish but you’re addicted to frosted Christmas cookies and you make me buy them for you so your son won’t find out.”
“Where did I go wrong with that boy?”
“Your son runs an entire hospital. He calls you every day. He checks on you three times a week. And he’s nice to me. Nobody’s nice to me but he’s nice to me.”