The Wicked Redhead - Beatriz Williams

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      This time, Ella didn’t bother deciding whether Patrick had or had not ever picked up her clothes from the floor after a night of passion. Didn’t think of Patrick at all, in fact, as she dressed herself in the clothes Hector had peeled off her body under a high, bright moon and then gathered together again, in the hour before dawn, while Ella lay absolutely expired under the down comforter. She pulled her hair back in the scrunchie Hector had also recovered from the floorboards. Nearby, Nellie chased her nonexistent tail in a kind of canine delirium. Ella slid on her shoes, tucked Hector’s note into her pocket, and called for Nellie to follow her into the living room.

      By virtue of being related to the landlord, and also by virtue of his own skill at carpentry, Hector had the entire attic floor to himself: bedroom, bathroom, open living room and kitchen. The Sunday sunshine hurtled through the skylight to land in a scintillating rectangle on the kitchen counter, where Nellie’s leash and a plastic produce bag lay together with a bottle of water and a key. By now the dog was dancing on her claws. Yipping and begging. Ella leaned down and clipped the leash on her collar. Grabbed the bag and the water and the key as Nellie dragged her like a sled dog toward the door. Together, they raced along the flights of stairs, and Ella was out the vestibule and leaping down the stoop before she realized she hadn’t even looked at her own apartment door on the way down. How crazy was that? When that apartment had changed everything. The Redhead’s apartment, now hers.

      Ella had to run to keep up with Nellie, who was making for a patch of gravel surrounding a tree near the corner, and her stiff muscles begged for mercy, like that time Ella’s sister Joanie had talked Ella into joining a Pilates class. And maybe she wasn’t quite that stiff this morning, not quite so aware of just how many muscles the human body could contain; maybe her soreness today was tempered by that sense of marvelous well-being set off by the joyful firecracker in her belly, the sensation she still couldn’t name.

      But something else gnawed at her flesh—even when Nellie, after some investigation, decided on a spot and hunched down in relief—and Ella, resting at last, thought that maybe that gnawing came from her back pocket, where she’d stuffed Hector’s note as she flew out of Hector’s apartment. Moreover, she decided—shifting her balance, blowing on her fingers in the brisk air—the gnawing wasn’t because she missed him, although she did. She missed him the way you might miss a bone, if you woke up to find it missing from your arm or leg or rib cage. She missed kissing him and laying her hands on him in utter freedom, in the way they had finally done last night, the dam breaking at last under the pressure of Ella’s distress, but that wasn’t all; just being with Hector, just laughing with him and playing piano with him and lying on the floor staring through the skylight with him. She could live without the sex long before she could live without any of that.

      She missed him, yes, she missed everything about him.

      But the thing was—and Nellie was setting off again, full of purpose, and Ella had to force her legs to move—the thing was, when she woke up this morning, alone in Hector’s bed, she was kind of glad he wasn’t there.

      And the note? Gnawing from the safety of her back pocket? She wasn’t in any hurry to read it.

      HECTOR HAD LEFT TWO other voice mails on Ella’s cell phone, one Sunday afternoon around the time he must have landed in Los Angeles, and one in the evening. Both of them untouched, the same as Hector’s note, and just like Hector’s note the cell phone now went inside the front pocket of Ella’s laptop bag. She couldn’t listen to Hector’s voice right now, any more than she could look at Hector’s handwriting. He was probably frantic with worry, and still she couldn’t bring herself to hear those words, read those words, return his call and hear him speak more words. Not because she was guilty. Not because she didn’t care. Not because she didn’t long to hear Hector read the entire fucking Manhattan telephone directory in her ear, in the same way she longed to breathe.

      Ella tried the latte. Too hot. She set it down and checked her watch—seven forty-eight—and decided she might as well get it over with. Lifted her laptop bag from the counter stool and walked out the door, forgetting all about the latte left on the counter until she was pushing her way through the glass revolving door of the Parkinson Peters building on Fifty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue and wondered why her right hand was so empty.

      TO ELLA’S SURPRISE, HER security pass still worked. She spilled through the turnstile, in fact, because she’d been expecting it to stay locked. So maybe forgetting that latte was an act of mercy; it would have sloshed right up through the mouth hole and over her suit if she’d been holding it. What a disaster that would have been, right?

      Fortunately, the lobby was still empty at this hour, and only the security guy noticed Ella’s misstep. Most of the Parkinson Peters staff wandered in around eight thirty, though you were expected to stay as late as it took, and certainly past six o’clock if you wanted a strong review at the end of the year. And that was just when you were on the beach, between assignments, performing rote work in the mother ship. (The cabana, if you didn’t want to mix your metaphors.) Ella crossed the marble floor like she owned it—that was the only way to walk, Mumma had taught her—and pressed the elevator button. While she waited, somebody joined her, and for an instant made eye contact in the reflection of the elevator doors. A woman Ella didn’t recognize, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit similar to hers. Nice suit, Ella wanted to say, a final act of transgression while she still had the chance. But of course she didn’t say it. There was no point. Ella thought she had a finite amount of rebellion inside her, which she had used up considerably on Saturday night, and she didn’t want to waste any of the remainder. Unless rebellion was the kind of thing that fed on itself. Unless breaking the minor code of elevator silence—they had boarded the car by now, rushing upward to the thirty-first floor, where Ella was shortly to be made an ex-employee of Parkinson Peters—unless committing that misdemeanor gave her the courage to break other, larger rules, a courage that she was shortly going to need in spades. In which case—

      But it was too late. The elevator stopped at the twenty-fourth floor and the woman and her suit departed forever. Ella continued on to the thirty-first floor and unlocked the glass door to the Parkinson Peters offices with her pass. Strode to an empty cubicle, dropped her bag by the chair, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee to replace the one she had left behind at Starbucks. The room was in the center of the building and had no windows. The fluorescent light cast a sickly, anodyne glow, so that even the new granite countertops looked cheap. Ella was stirring in cream when an apologetic voice called her name from the door. She turned swiftly, spilling the coffee on her hand.

      “Ella? I’m so sorry.” It was Travis’s assistant, Rainbow, crisp and corporate in her Ann Taylor suit and cream blouse. Ella always imagined a pair of hippie parents serving her Tofurky at Thanksgiving and wondering where they had gone wrong. “Mr. Kemp asked me to send you to his office as soon as you came in.”

      Ella turned to reach for a paper towel. “I’ll be just a minute, thanks.”

      She took her time. Cleaned up the spill and washed her hands. Stuck a plastic lid on the coffee cup and took it to her desk, so she could drink it later. Her hand, carrying the coffee, setting it down on the Formica surface, remained steady. The nausea had passed. She unzipped her laptop bag and took out a leather portfolio, a yellow legal pad, and the Cross pen she used for business meetings, the one her father had given her when she first landed the job at Parkinson Peters, and as she walked down the passageway between the cubicles, it seemed to her that she could hear his proud voice as he gave it to her, Ella, his firstborn. Use it for good, he’d said, wagging the box. There’s power in this.

      She reached Travis’s office, which was not on the corner but two offices down—he’d only made partner a few years ago—and knocked on the door.

      “It’s open,” said Travis, in a voice that was neither stern nor angry, and in fact sounded as if he’d just been sharing a joke.

      So Ella pushed the door open and discovered she was right. He had been sharing a joke—or at least some pleasant morning banter—with a muscular man sitting confidently in the chair before the desk.

      Ella’s husband.

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