Push Me (To The Edge series, #1) (3 page)

“No. This is my first time.
I’ve had layovers there before, but I’ve never spent any real time there.”

“You know me, and I’ll be
there.”

I nodded.

“Maybe we could get together, have a drink or something.”

“The wi-fi, please?” I said, ignoring his comment.

He smiled. “Sure.”

I watched him swipe the screen, pulling up a menu, and in a matter of about five seconds he had the wi-fi working and he handed my iPad over.

“It’s new, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“Same thing happened to me when I first got mine.” He went on to explain about choosing a network in the Settings menu,
then accepting the agreement from whatever network you were trying to get on, saving me from an embarrassing trip to the Apple Store. “It’s pretty much the same on the iPhone. I’ll show you.”

“I think you fixed it in the airport café.”

He held his hand out, shaking his head. “Different wi-fi. Might as well check.”

I handed him my phone and he did something with it
, but I didn’t pay attention.

With the impromptu technology tutoring session over, we sat in silence for a moment, and then Perfume Girl spoke up.

“Aren’t you Sam Poole, the baseball player?”

Sam
turned toward her. “I am.”

I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but I managed to lean forward and see hers. She was
smiling and flipped her hair as she declared her love of baseball.

Please
.

She said her name, but I d
idn’t catch it. Didn’t care to.

Sam
’s left hand was on his knee and I noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. He’d always worn it when I saw him at Barneys. I wondered if that meant he was divorced or if going ring-less was something he did on the road so he could flirt with impunity with girls who bathe in perfume. But that wasn’t like the Sam I remembered.

Oh, well. Not my problem.

With my earbuds in, I launched iTunes and started a playlist.

Sam
and the girl talked for no more than two minutes or so, and then he turned back toward me. I pulled the earbud from my left ear.

“I’m going to head back to my seat,” he said.

“Thanks for the help.”

He turned back to
Perfume Girl. “Nice meeting you. By the way, you smell
fantastic
.”

She thanked him, and I pressed my lips together to smother a smile.

After Sam left, I started the playlist on my iPad and checked my email. I picked up my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed any calls, swiped the unlock screen and it opened to the last thing Sam had done before handing it back to me.

He
had put his name and number in my contacts list.

Chapter Three

When we landed in Atlanta, I managed to wait until the last minute to get off the plane. I was trying to avoid Sam. Someone brazen enough to add his info to my contacts list would surely be waiting around to talk to me in the airport, and I wanted to allow enough time for him to be out of the terminal by the time I got there.

And he wasn’t
. I’d successfully dodged more interaction with him.

What I couldn’t avoid, though, was
Ian. Before I had a chance to dial, he called me, saying he’d been tracking the flight on the airline’s website, and asking why I hadn’t called as soon as we landed.

“I just got off.”

He made a low groaning noise. “You know you’re not supposed to do that without me.”

It was a good thing he was saying this over the phone and not in person—this way I could get away with rolling my eyes.
There was a time when I thought the sexual references in his jokes were hot, arousing, sometimes just playfully cute. But not anymore, and especially not from roughly 800 miles away.

“You know what I meant,” I said.

“And you know what
I
meant, didn’t you.” A statement, not a question.

“I did.”

“Good, because if you didn’t, I’d have to remind you the moment you get back. I might just do that anyway.”

I decided to humor him.
“Promise?”

“
Bet on it.”

The late spring chill that was in the air in New York that morning was nowhere to be found in Atlanta, and as I stepped out of the airport to make my way to the store, I was glad I had packed for springtime weather in the south.

I really needed these three days away from home.

.  .  .  .  .

My official title is “Visual Merchandising Manager.” When you walk into a department store and see all those displays…that’s what I do. Well, I don’t do all of them, of course. In fact, they’re mostly set up by the people who work in the store. My job is to train the managers and associates so the displays will match the designers’ specifications with precision.

I love what I do. It’s a big step up from the personal stylist position I’d
had for a couple of years. The money is decent, but if it weren’t for the fact that I lived with Ian in his penthouse on the upper West Side of Manhattan, I’d be living in a very small apartment if I stayed in that part of town, possibly working a second job to make ends meet. Even then, I wouldn’t regret my career choice for one second.

At the moment, though, I loved my job even more because it was the one thing in my life that gave me a sense of self.
Of independence. Of being something other than Ian’s fucktoy.

.  .  .  .  .

Arriving at the store, I was greeted by the manager, who appeared to be a little older than I. This always worries me. More than once I’ve encountered a manager who is senior to me in years, but not on the corporate ladder, and it’s caused some friction.

I don’t know if it’s resentment or pride or what, but it happens, and it makes everyone’s job more difficult than necessary. Usually it’s gone after the first day of my visit though, because I don’t wield power like some others from the corporate office. I like to get along, get my job done, and move on. I’m not interested in catty rivalries, power plays, or one-upmanship.

Tanya turned out to be very cool, a major relief. We spent the morning together going over schematics for the floor displays, and I showed her some images of new items we’d be getting in the coming months, along with the plans for their presentation.

I had a meeting with a few of the associates after lunch, covering much of the same
material, and then another later when the afternoon/evening girls arrived for their shifts. The entire staff reflected Tanya’s upbeat attitude, which was probably why the Atlanta store was one of our top performers in the region.

When two of the girls from the morning shift were getting ready to leave in the afternoon, I overheard them talking about going out with their boyfriends together that night—a double-date to the Atlanta Braves baseball game.

Sam popped into my head. I knew nothing about baseball, so I just assumed the Yankees were in town. I mentioned it in an off-hand manner, not meaning to start the debate that ensued between them as a result.

“The Braves are playing the Cubs, actually,” one of the girls
, Diane, said.

The other
, Heather, added, “Plus, the Yankees are in the American league. Braves are in the National. They wouldn’t be playing each other.”

“They could
,” Diane said.

“In the playoffs.”

“Or in the regular season. They play a few American league teams. Remember, we saw them play the White Sox?”

They
went back and forth for a couple of minutes. These girls really knew their baseball. I couldn’t relate, so I just stood there awkwardly. During a lull in the exchange, I said, “I hope you have fun. See you tomorrow.” I smiled and made my way to another part of the store.

Tanya told me that while I was in town I had to try southern barbeque and recommended her fav
orite place. It was customary to take the manager to lunch or dinner, so I invited her to grab a bite there after work, my treat. Or, actually, the treat provided by my travel expense account, just one of the perks of my job.

.  .  .  .  .

I was back in my hotel room by eight o’clock, full from the not-at-all-healthy and sinfully greasy dinner, exhausted, and really looking forward to relaxing as much as I could while dreading the inevitable bloating that would greet me the next morning.

After a nice hot shower, I sat on the bed drying my hair with a towel, flipping through channels in hopes of finding a good movie. Normally I
had no use for ESPN, and being a visitor in Atlanta, I had no idea what the channels were, but I stopped on a sports event when something, or rather someone, caught my eye.

Sam
.

He was in a suit, wearing a headset with a microphone, along with another guy. They were in a
broadcast booth, with the baseball field as the backdrop. I watched for a few minutes, listening to them rattle off various statistics of the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs.

I had no idea
Sam was a sportscaster now. Why was he no longer playing baseball? He couldn’t have been more than thirty-two or so, and to me that didn’t seem too old for the sport.

Perfume Girl had said she recognized him as a baseball player, and he’d agreed. But he clearly wasn’t playing baseball anymore. Had his wife ended up asking him to stop, as he’d once mentioned in Barneys all those years ago,
although he’d also said she’d never ask him to do that. Or…

I remembered noticing on the plane that he hadn’t been wearing a wedding band. Maybe he was divorced
. But even if he was, why wasn’t he playing anymore?

There was an easy way to find out.

I turned on my iPad and had to go through the steps Sam showed me earlier to get on wi-fi. Without him, I’d probably have done something wrong again. I was typing his name into the Google search field when my phone rang. I cringed, thinking it was probably Ian.

I was relieved to see
that it was Rachel, my best friend.

“Hey,” I said.

“Don’t tell me. It’s 8:20 and you’re already in for the night.”

“
Gee, how’d you guess?”

“Because you’re always
in your hotel room by 8:00.”

“Not always.” I reclined on the bed, put the TV on mute, and waited to see if they showed
Sam again. There was something I thought I’d noticed, but I needed to see him again to be sure.

“Right, not always
,” Rachel said. “There was that time you worked in the store until 9:00. I almost forgot. Forgive me?”

“I love you, so you’re always forgiven.”

We had a few minutes of small talk, during which she told me she had met a guy in a Duane Reade supermarket earlier that afternoon, and that he could be “The One.”

I’d known
Rachel for almost ten years and in that time she had identified dozens of guys—maybe more than a hundred—as “The One.” She hadn’t dated, let alone slept with, very many of them. The vast majority were guys she met in random situations. Sometimes on the bus, sometimes in line at the grocery store, other times when she was working. Sometimes she’d strike up the conversation, other times she would give off flirt-ready signals like a beacon until the guy she was interested in received the signal and bounced it back to her.

She never had trouble attracting the attention of a guy. She was tall, with thick natural blonde hair that she wore in a
cute bob with long bangs. She had what I always thought of as the body of a professional dancer, even though she never worked out and ate whatever she wanted. I always thought she was a dead-ringer for the actress Elisha Cuthbert, without even realizing at first the phonetic similarity of the names. Anyway, her physical appearance wasn’t the problem.

Rachel
’s problem, in my view, was that she was too eager. And I was convinced that guys picked up on that very quickly.

She’d never see
most of the guys again, but that didn’t stop her from dreaming about them. And the few dates that did arise from those situations ended like all the others had for her lately—not great.

It was actually a running joke between us, but there was always something underlying the conversation that told me she was getting more and mo
re impatient about actually finding “The One.”

“Congratulations,” I said, referring to the guy she’d met in the supermarket.
“What does this one do?”

“Me, if he’s lucky.
”

“That’s a new one.”

“It just popped into my head,” Rachel said. “I actually have no idea what he does. He was cute and smelled nice. Flirted a little, but I didn’t get his name.”

“Sounds promising.”

“Tell me about it.” There was a hint of disappointment in her tone. “Remember me telling you about that guy I talked to on JDate?” she asked.

Rachel
had gotten into online dating a couple of years ago. She’d signed up for all of the popular ones, including JDate, a site for Jewish singles. It’s worth noting that Rachel is Catholic.

“The cop?”
I asked, my eyes locked on the image of Sam on the TV.

“Yeah. So he seems pretty cool and I decided to see him last night.”

“It’s only been a week.”

Rachel
had gone into the online dating scene with the policy of exchanging emails for at least a week, followed by another week of phone calls, just to scope out the guy and not meet someone too quickly. This was as much a safety thing as it was an attempt not to show her over-eagerness.

“I know,” she said
. “I broke my own rule.”

“How’d that work out
?”

“Really,
really
well.”

I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and my response came out in a flat tone.
“Seriously...”

“Yeah. Why? You sound like you don’t believe me.”

“I believe that it went well. But, Rachel, this guy’s a
detective
. He
detects
things for a living. He’s going to find out you’re not Jewish. You don’t think he’s going to
detect
that?”

“
Oh, come on,” she said. “What does it matter? He’ll get to know me, fall in love with me, and he won’t care what my religion is.”

“He might care that you lied to him.”

She was silent for a moment. I hoped she was rethinking it, developing at least a temporary conscience, and would tell this guy the truth.

“
If it keeps going well,” she said, “I could always secretly convert.”

I swiped the screen on my
iPad, then opened the browser. “Good strategy.”

“Are you multi-tasking
?”

“What?”

“I hear clicking,” she said. “You’re typing on your iPad.”

She was right. I was listening to her, but I was also typing
Sam’s name into Google.

“I’m listening. I was just looking up something. Get this…”

I told her about Sam, how I knew him, how we’d run into each other in the airport all these years later, the definite flirting he was doing…

“But he didn’t recognize you?”

“Nope. Am I that forgettable?”

Rachel
ran through the reasons it was understandable that Sam hadn’t remembered me—all the ones I had told myself—the weight loss, longer hair, no more glasses.

“Did he flirt with you back then
at Barneys?”