Page 36

“This is how you walk to work every day?” he asked as he kept pace with her, making their way toward her office building, located on the other side of her Lincoln Park neighborhood. One of the only Chicago ad agencies she knew of that had settled outside the Loop, the city’s central business area.
“In the winter I walk up to Fullerton and take the bus,” she told him, and then tried to imagine a man like Blue, all threat and portent, on a Chicago Transit bus during rush hour. She bit back a smile. “Because it’s not Alaska or anything, but winter here is no joke. So when the weather’s nice, I walk.”
He gave her that intense look he used when he was considering things, but said nothing. He only escorted her to her office and left her at the security checkpoint in her lobby.
And because she was only playing the part of Everly Campbell, she had a good day. Because any day that involved her alive and not in a crumpled heap somewhere was good by definition. She hardly minded it when she had to suffer through a tense meeting with her boss tenminutes into her first day back at work, because it turned out that the week of sick leave she’d taken with no warning had not exactly pleased him. Or anyone else.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t fire you for leaving us in the lurch,” he demanded.
“Trust me, Charles, I was doing you a favor,” she replied, with the confidence of someone who really had spent the last week waiting for death, if not precisely in the form she’d claimed. “You would not wish this stomach flu on your worst enemy. I hope I’m not still contagious.”
Charles, a nitpicker of the highest order, who could milk a grudge for years and often did, backed down at that.
If she’d been herself, actually located inside her own skin, lying to her boss might have worried her. Upset her, even, because she’d never been a liar. She prided herself on doing her job well and following the rules, not bending them to suit herself.
But it was hard to care about things like office rules and the right way to talk to her prickly supervisor when she didn’t know if she’d make it home tonight. Or live through the night. How could she care about any of the tiny things that had consumed her before when she honestly had no idea if she’d live long enough to see the leaves change?
“It’s surprising how much easier everything is when you don’t care about it,” she told Blue that evening. “Pleasant, even.”
“What don’t you care about?”
“Everything. Except, you know, staying alive.”
He was waiting for her right where he’d left her, downin the office lobby. He leaned against the wall with a pair of Ray-Bans on and that fierce set to his mouth. Everly saw more than one woman nearly trip over her own feet at the sight of him. She was pleased that her extended exposure to him had prepared her, so she walked in a straight line.
Her pulse might have gone crazy and her stomach might have hollowed out and plummeted to her toes, but she didn’t trip.
“Staying alive is good,” he said, and she wished she could see his dark eyes.
But his sunglasses were mirrored, and all she could see was herself. Her cheeks, which were too red. And her eyes, which were much too bright.
She shoved her own sunglasses onto her face and followed him outside.
Out on the street, twilight was just bleeding in as the sun inched toward the horizon, and the temperature was dropping. There was a breeze coming in from Lake Michigan, stirring up the heavy summer air and suggesting that Chicagoland’s typical thunderstorms couldn’t be far behind. She could feel the charge of coming storms in the air, making her skin feel too tight for her body.
Then again, that could just be Blue, walking beside her like a caged thing, ready to burst free at any moment.
Everly didn’t think that could possibly look anything like hernormal routineto anyone who might be watching her—and who had seen her actual normal routine over the course of the previous weeks—but she wasn’t complaining.
Instead, she talked, as if Blue were picking her upfrom work because he wanted to and not because he was trying to keep her safe.
“I shrugged my way through what should have been an upsetting business meeting or four today. I told my boss I had the stomach flu last week and was so convincing I almost believed it myself. There’s a woman I work with who’s had it in for me for years, and she didn’t bother me the way she usually does. She said her usual passive-aggressive things, and I just smiled and asked if she’d gotten enough sleep.”
“Is that supposed to be an office takedown?” Blue sounded aggrieved. “You might notice I’ve gone out of my way to live a life that never, ever involves stray office chatter, Everly. If you start talking about intrigue over a watercooler, I might punch myself in the face.”
“I’m sorry not everything can be life-and-death and Alaskan retreats.”
She didn’t realize how tight a grip her temper had on her until she almost ignored the changing lights at a busy intersection. It was Blue’s hard hand on her upper arm—hauling her back a step—that saved her.
Everly wondered who saved him. If he let anyone try. He was so lethal, so hard and tough—but she could still feel the way his heart had kicked there beneath her palm last night. She knew it was there, whatever he did to convince the world, and maybe himself, otherwise.
But she was wise enough not to say something like that, out here on a Chicago street with commuters streaming all around them.
Instead, she smiled at him. And saw only herself reflected back at her in the mirror of his sunglasses. That and the faint line between his brows.
“I’m trying to say that everyone in the office treated me much better than they would have if I’d cried or gotten emotional or apologized all over the place.”
Whatever happened, she thought, she would always remember Blue in that moment. The late summer evening spread out around him, air thick with coming storms and the usual humidity, and his mouth a grim slash in that jaw he still hadn’t shaved.