Текст книги "Off the Record"
Автор книги: K. A. Linde
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
Chapter 24
INTRODUCTIONS
Driving five hours to D.C. didn’t sound like a long time in the abstract. But once Liz actually got out onto I-85 it felt interminable. She couldn’t believe she was actually going. After everything that had happened and everything that had changed this summer, she was still driving out to see Hayden for the weekend.
She hadn’t seen Brady since the night of his fund-raising gala. She hadn’t expected to either. They were even more on the down-low, thanks to Heather and Elliott’s interference. It made her sigh all over again just thinking about that night. She hadn’t thought they could get much more secretive than they had been before, but she was wrong. He had called only once, and that was to tell her that he was going to be too busy to talk the rest of the week. She figured that meant she wasn’t supposed to call him either.
Sandy Carmichael would have to be tucked away for the weekend, and Liz would have to try to enjoy herself. She would have to be content knowing the man who loved her couldn’t contact her, and that she wouldn’t be able to see him until he could see her. They were back at square one.
It was as if they were starting all over again. But now their emotions were much stronger, and so it hurt fifty thousand times more. She couldn’t even think about it without her heart constricting, her stomach doing a belly flop, and her throat closing up. She had cried too much recently, thinking about Brady, how he had stuck up for her, that he loved her, that he hadn’t told her, that they couldn’t be together. She was determined not to cry on this trip.
Liz pulled off of the interstate headed straight for downtown D.C. She and Hayden had decided that she would pick him up after work on Thursday, and he had gotten permission to take the rest of the weekend off. He said even though they all technically had the weekends off, everyone still came in and worked extra hours because there was too much to do. He had even asked not to be on call. He certainly sounded like an overworked intern, but at least he was getting paid.
She followed the directions on her GPS through town and turned off into a parking lot in front of Hayden’s building. She cut the engine and sent him a text letting him know that she was here. She was a couple minutes early: Everyone she knew from the area had said northern Virginia had the worst drivers imaginable, so she had built in some traffic time, but there hadn’t been as much traffic as she had thought.
Just come inside. I’ll come get you. I have some last-minute things to close up, Hayden messaged back.
Liz shrugged and got out of the car. She had dressed comfortably for the trip and wished now that she had put on something cuter. She didn’t want to walk inside that building where everyone was in suits and heels without her own heels. She thought about pulling a pair out of her bag, but decided it would look ridiculous paired with her teal cuffed shorts and loose white spaghetti strap top. Her hair was down in waves, because there was no way she was straightening it in this humidity, and she had on light makeup.
She walked across the blacktop parking lot and into the glass building that Hayden worked in. The lobby was immaculate, with marble floors and a large, hard wooden desk. A security guard stood on either side of the desk, and a receptionist sat answering phones in a very professional business suit and tie.
“Hold, please,” the man said into the phone, then looked up at Liz. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Hayden Lane,” she told him, wringing her hands in front of her body. She didn’t know why she was so anxious. She had known Hayden for two years. They had worked together at the paper, and they had been friends the whole time. So she’d had a small crush on him; that didn’t mean she had to freak herself out before she even saw him. It was just Hayden.
“I’ll let him know. What’s your name?” he asked.
She actually had to think about it before answering. “Liz Dougherty,” she said softly. All summer she had gone by Sandy Carmichael, so it felt a bit odd to give her real name.
“One moment,” he said before pressing a button and holding the receiver to his ear. “A Miss Liz Dougherty here for Hayden. Great. Thank you.” He smiled up at Liz. “He’s on his way. Feel free to take a seat.”
“Thank you,” she said. He was already switching back over to the other line to finish his conversation.
Liz took a few steps away from the counter and sat down in the small waiting area. She couldn’t get over how weird it felt to be just Liz Dougherty again. It was almost too easy to assume a new identity. She felt lost in the deception and appeal of shrugging off the cares of her world, and now she was rebounding back to plain, average life. It was a bit disorienting.
“Liz,” Hayden called, walking out through a side door and toward her with a big smile on his face. Liz stood quickly and pulled her shorts down to a decent length.
Hayden looked exactly how she remembered except he wasn’t in his normal shorts and polo combo. He had on a gray suit with a green shirt and striped tie. His medium brown hair was tousled, as if he had been running his hands through it while working. It was a bit shorter than she was used to. He usually kept it long enough for the curls to start peeking out around his ears, but apparently the Hill had cleaned him up. His hazel eyes were closer to a green color than normal as they reflected his attire.
“Hey, Hayden,” she said, walking to meet him halfway.
“Good to see you. How was the trip?” he asked, leaning forward and giving her a hug. She wrapped her arms around him briefly and then they broke apart.
“It was an easy drive,” she told him as he continued to smile down at her.
“I’m glad to hear that. Come on back with me. I have one more thing to finish up and then I can introduce you around. Sound good?”
Liz nodded. “Sounds great.”
Introductions. How many of those had she had this summer? She could think of one—Chris. She sighed and tried not to think about Brady. It was too complicated and would only frustrate her further.
Hayden held the door for her as she walked into a long hallway. He motioned her toward the elevator and scanned his security card. The door dinged open and they walked inside. He pressed the button for his floor and the elevator shot up.
Liz stood there in silence, wondering what it was going to be like in his office. She half expected it to be a madhouse, but then she also kind of thought it might be like Hayden—calm and controlled. He was efficient, and while the university press was different from a press office, he had always run it so smoothly. It had its moments of insanity, but Hayden tended to keep things under wraps.
What she found when they exited the elevator was much closer to mayhem. The room was covered in desks that were all pushed together and covered in monitors, computers, coffee cups, and hundreds of random pieces of paper. People were running around in a bigger hurry than was likely necessary; some were yelling into phones, and others were milling around chatting with colleagues. It should have been a terrifying sight, but it only excited her. This was what she wanted in her life.
“Come on,” he said, walking down the busy hallway. He turned about halfway and stopped at a small desk way neater than any of the surrounding desks. He was possibly the tidiest person she knew. She made a mental note to clean his office before he came back to school. The thought of being with Brady on top of Hayden’s desk at the paper made her blush. She needed to get her head on straight.
“Have a seat. I have to copy this stuff and turn it in to my boss before I go,” he said, taking a neat stack of papers off of his desk. “I’ll be right back.”
“All right,” she said, sitting down in his chair. She watched the general commotion in the office. It reminded her of the school paper, but with a different kind of hierarchy. She liked the hum of the room and the general sense of urgency. She could fit in here.
Liz turned back to Hayden’s desk and examined the area. His Post-its were color-coordinated based on the topic he was working on, and that made her giggle. She wished she was that organized with her stories, but they kind of came out of stream of consciousness.
He had pictures of him with his parents and what looked like his sister. Liz had never met her, but she knew that she was older and had gone to college out of state. There wasn’t much else on the desk aside from a few crumpled papers with numbers on them. He must have still been running, because they looked like old marathon race numbers. It wouldn’t surprise Liz in the least if he was working sixty-hour weeks and made time to run marathons.
She looked through the collage of newspaper articles he had pinned to a corkboard behind the pictures. She found a few were his from the school press, a few were from other reporters, and one was from…her. Liz stared, surprised. It was the article she had written most recently for the paper; the one Hayden had given her the suggestion for. He had one line highlighted in bright yellow that made her smile grow. It was her favorite line too.
In an endless sea of overindulgence, find time to indulge in something worthwhile and make an informed, educated decision for yourself. What matters to you in here, will matter to you out there.
Liz smiled to herself. She liked that he had enjoyed the article enough to post it up where anyone could see it.
“All finished!” Hayden said, rushing back to his desk. “I knew that wouldn’t take too long. Want to meet my friends before we head out, or are you beat?” He slung a messenger bag over his head and smiled brightly at her. She had forgotten how much Hayden always smiled. It had been her favorite part of coming into work. Even when she had been exhausted and irritable, he was there smiling away and brightening everyone’s day.
“I’d love to meet your friends. Lead the way,” she told him.
They walked around the corner and stopped in front of two side-by-side desks. Two guys in suits were seated in front of their computers. They looked as if they were intent on their work, but as she looked more closely she saw they were actually chatting online and playing some video game. Liz shook her head. Men!
“Phillip! Topher!” Hayden said, clapping one of the guys on the back. “Y’all, this is Liz.”
They both looked up at once and said hi. One guy stood and introduced himself. “Topher,” he said, extending his hand. Liz shook it. He was of average build and height, with really short curly brown hair and chipmunk cheeks.
The other guy she assumed to be Phillip stood next and shook her hand. He was exceedingly tall and skinny, with military-cut hair and crooked front teeth. “Nice to meet you,” Phillip said.
“Nice to meet you too,” Liz said with a smile.
“Glad you’re finally here. Hayden has been talking about getting time off all summer. We were pretty tired of hearing about it,” Topher said, crossing his arms over his chest and smirking.
Liz locked eyes with Hayden for a second and then she broke the look. He had been talking about her…
“Thanks for ratting me out,” he said, chuckling softly. “We were heading out. Are you guys still good for drinks this weekend?”
“Definitely,” Topher agreed.
“Depends,” Phillip said, leaning in close to Hayden and raising his eyebrows. “Is Jamie coming out with you?”
Hayden groaned. “That’s my sister, man.”
“So, is that a yes?”
“You’re sick.”
“We’ll see you out this weekend,” Topher said, smacking the back of Phillip’s head. “It was nice to meet you, Liz.”
“You too,” she said with a confident smile.
“Let’s get out of here,” Hayden said, glaring at Phillip, but Liz could see the humor in his eyes.
They left the building and walked out into the parking lot toward Liz’s car. Hayden slid out of his jacket and tie before they even made it all the way to where she was parked.
“Do you want me to drive?” he asked. “I know a place we can park your car near my sister’s place. Then you don’t have to try to navigate D.C. traffic.”
“Um, yes!” she said immediately. “Please drive me back through that madness.” She tossed him the keys and walked to the passenger side.
He laughed as he popped the door and sat down. “Geez, how short are you?” he asked as he adjusted the seat back for his long legs.
“You’re just tall,” Liz said with a shrug.
Hayden pulled out of the parking lot and started driving them away from the capital area. There was a surprising amount of traffic. Not that she was unfamiliar with traffic, but D.C. rush hour pretty much took the cake. Nearly forty-five minutes later, Hayden had the car parked in a street spot.
“This is as close as we’re going to get. Is this okay with you?” he asked, putting the car into park.
“Absolutely not. I want to go back out in that terrible mess for another hour, please,” Liz said with a laugh as she pushed her door open. “Get me out of here!”
“At least you weren’t driving,” Hayden said.
“A silver lining!” Liz opened the trunk, and Hayden reached in before she got a chance and pulled her suitcase out. He set it on the ground and rolled it behind him the whole way to the apartment, ignoring her objections.
They stopped in front of a brick building that looked like all of the other brick buildings it was attached to, but Hayden seemed to know where he was going. He pulled a key out of his pocket and let them in.
“Top floor,” he told her, motioning up the stairs.
She walked up five exhaustingly long flights of stairs as Hayden walked behind her carrying her suitcase. She did not envy him. Huffing, Liz finally landed at the top floor. She dropped her hands to her knees and caught her breath. Hayden appeared next to her with his ever-present smile, not even breathing hard.
“How are you not dying? I feel ridiculous,” she said, looking up at him.
“I run marathons,” Hayden said with a shrug.
“I play tennis and I’m dying.”
“Do you run up stairs while playing tennis?” he asked.
“Do you run up stairs in your marathons?” Liz straightened and looked up into his hazel eyes.
“Fair point. However, I do run over twenty-six miles.”
“Shoot me,” she said.
He tilted his head and smiled at her as if he was trying to hold back from saying something. She wasn’t sure what it was, but his eyes were assessing her. Had she done something wrong?
“My place is down here,” he said, pointing down the hall.
They reached the end of the hall and entered the apartment. It was homey, with a clear feminine touch. Paintings of various mediums—oil, acrylic, and watercolor—covered much of the wall space, nearly all of them unbelievably perfect depictions of landscapes with the occasional portrait and abstract thrown into the collection. The furniture was in all earth tones, and candles were on every table as well as the mantel of the fireplace. Liz instantly felt comfortable in the apartment.
“Is she here?” Liz heard a voice call from off in the other direction.
“Yeah, Jamie, come out of the studio,” Hayden called back, placing Liz’s suitcase off to the side and closing the door.
“Oh my God, hi!” Jamie said, rounding the corner draped in a paint-splattered apron. She looked nothing like Hayden, with a chin-length black bob with red highlights and long bangs that swept across her forehead and tucked behind her ear. She was shorter than Liz, with a naturally tiny frame. The one quality it seemed she and Hayden shared was her charismatic smile.
“Hey,” Liz said as Jamie walked right up to her.
“I would totally hug you, but I can’t guarantee you wouldn’t get paint all over you!”
Liz laughed. “That’s all right.”
“I’m so glad you’re here.”
That was a common sentiment, it seemed. Topher and Phillip had said something similar, and now his sister was reiterating the same thing. How much had Hayden talked about her?
It was nice, though. As daunting as it was to come up to D.C., she liked at least getting the opportunity to meet people. She had hidden all summer and had forgotten how much she liked to spend time with other people.
“Hayden wasn’t sure what you wanted for dinner, but he said he already knew that you liked Italian. I happen to make some kick-ass lasagna,” Jamie said, bubbly and friendly. Liz couldn’t have kept a smile from her face if she tried. “I hope you don’t mind staying in to eat. We can go out if you want. I’m cool with that. Whatever y’all want! I just get super exhausted after driving for a long time and prefer to nap instead of going out. You might not be like that…”
“Jamie,” Hayden said, shaking his head, “breathe.”
Jamie rolled her eyes at him. “Sorry. So, what do you want to do?” she asked, bouncing up and down on the balls of her toes.
“Ignore her. I swear she gets hopped up on caffeine when she’s in her studio,” he said, nudging Liz.
“Whatever, Hayden. I’m being accommodating, and you’re being an ass.”
“Lasagna sounds great,” Liz cut in, knowing a family brawl when she saw it. “Thank you.”
“Great! I’ll get started on that then,” Jamie said, bounding back into her studio.
“I’m going to go change,” Hayden told Liz. “You can bring your stuff into my room. We don’t have a guest room, so I’m taking the couch.”
“Oh no, I can take the couch. I don’t mind,” she told him quickly.
Hayden leveled a look at her that she had seen time and time again at the paper. She wasn’t getting out of this. He reached forward and picked up her suitcase and started walking it back to his bedroom.
“You are not sleeping on the couch,” he said. “You’re a guest.”
Liz shrugged and walked with him down the hallway. She glanced off to the right and saw Jamie’s studio. It was a small bedroom covered in easels, canvas, and paint. The floor had a sheet of plastic over the carpet, and the walls were a strange array of colors from where paint had splashed. Jamie removed her apron as they passed.
“One of Jamie’s roommates moved out for the summer, so I took over her bedroom. Otherwise I would have had to live in the suburbs with my parents. Really lucky, I’d say,” Hayden told her as he opened his bedroom for her.
This was more what she expected from Hayden. The room was perfectly put together and sensible compared to his eccentric artist sister. A queen-sized bed sat in one corner with a green comforter and white pillows. A desk sat against one wall, and that was pretty much it as far as the room went. He clearly spent more time at the office than in his room. It looked more like a place you came home to to change and sleep.
Liz set her bag down in the corner as Hayden rummaged through his closet for clothes.
“I’ll go change in the bathroom,” he said, walking out. Liz had moved to his bed and taken a seat while she waited. It felt a bit strange to be sitting on Hayden’s bed, in Hayden’s apartment, hanging out with Hayden. She was sure this summer would be the most memorable she would ever experience. Brady…and now she was sitting on the bed of the guy she had liked for two years. Even if they were just friends, it was a bit bizarre.
He reappeared in the doorway in khaki shorts and a fitted T-shirt. “Thanks for coming out this weekend. I wasn’t sure you were going to be able to make it.”
“I wasn’t sure either…what with school and everything,” she said, not really wanting to get into the real reason. No, she was pretty sure she never wanted to tell him the real reason.
Hayden walked over and took a seat next to her, stretching back on the bed. “How is school going? You’re finished with the semester, right? Did you get your grades back already?”
Liz turned to face him on the bed. She stared down at his lean runner’s build all stretched out on display and tried not to blush. “This semester was surprisingly a challenge. Professor Mires really helped me do more with my project than I’d ever intended. Thank you so much for your good idea. I got an A on that article.”
“Awesome. It was a really good one!” He cradled his hands behind his head.
“Thanks. Couldn’t have done it without you.”
“You would have come up with something,” he said with an easy shrug, as if he’d never doubted it. “So, did you get an A in the class then?”
“I don’t find out until Monday. I turned in one last paper this week. I haven’t even published it to the paper yet. If I do well on it, then I might put it out there,” she told him.
What she hadn’t told him was that the paper she had turned in for her final assignment had been the idea given to her by Brady Maxwell. While she hadn’t used it originally, she still thought it was a good suggestion, and had written and rewritten it too many times to count since she had published the article off of Hayden’s idea. After spending that much time on it, she had decided to turn it in for her final paper to Professor Mires. She was proud of the work and thought it was the right move.
“Nice. You’ll have to let me know how you do. Has the paper been good this summer? I know it was pretty dead, since no one is on campus, but did you think it was useful having your own column anyway?” he asked.
It felt like forever since she had talked about her work with anyone in person. It was a bit like opening the floodgates. She told him all about the paper: the people who were still there, the projects she had worked on, the story of what had happened with Justin. Hayden seemed legitimately interested in every detail. It didn’t seem to be just because he missed the paper, which was obvious, but that he was interested in her more generally. And he couldn’t know the most important thing that had happened to her that summer.
“Hey, you two,” Jamie said, peeking her head into the doorway. “Meredith just got home, James is on his way over, and the lasagna is almost done. I’m opening a bottle of wine, if you guys want to venture out to the living room.”
Liz looked down at her watch in surprise. Had they really been talking for more than an hour? Where had the time gone? It had been so long since Liz had seen Hayden. She was surprised how easy it was to talk to him.
Twenty minutes later, all five of them were seated around the dining room table. Jamie had lit half of the candles in the room and filled their glasses with red wine. The lasagna was to die for, and by the end of the meal, Liz felt a bit sloshy from the wine, but she also felt wonderfully comfortable with the entire group.
Jamie and James were pretty much the cutest couple in existence, and both more than welcoming to her. Meredith, Jamie’s other roommate, worked as a yoga and Pilates instructor nearby and had a total mellow feel to her. Hayden seemed totally in his element, and they spent half of the dinner laughing at one another’s comments. Liz didn’t know whether it was the alcohol fueling it or the general good company, but she hadn’t laughed this much in a long time.
They spent the next couple hours camped out in the living room discussing everything from American politics to French painters to the newest fad diet. The night flew by and soon James was convincing Jamie it was time to go to bed. The two of them and Meredith finally retreated to their respective rooms, leaving Liz and Hayden alone.
“We should probably get to bed if we’re going to get up and walk around the city in the morning,” Hayden said, standing. He reached his hand out to her and she took it, helping her to her feet. She was happy to find out that she wasn’t that wobbly.
“Something is different about you,” he said softly as they stood together.
Liz shrugged and smiled sweetly. “Same old me.”
Hayden shook his head. “No. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s different.”
“Good different or bad different?” Liz asked.
“Just different. You were always pretty great.”
“Well…thanks,” she said, stepping around him. “I don’t know what it is.”
“Me either,” Hayden said, his eyes following her.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, trying to avoid his intense gaze.
“Good night, Liz.”
Liz walked back to Hayden’s bedroom and closed the door. She leaned her head back against it and let out a long breath.
She knew what had happened to her. Brady fucking Maxwell had happened to her.
