Room 1208 (8 page)

“Oh, wow, this is amazing!”

They’d rounded a corner and there it was—the
brilliant light and color of Times Square. She stood still, feeling
shell-shocked from the kaleidoscope of sights and sounds around her. “Don’t
they ever turn the lights off?” She wondered, not expecting an answer. “And who
are all these people? It’s almost four o’clock in the morning!”

“You’re in the city that never sleeps, hon. Come
on.” He drew her forward, guiding her around groups of gawking tourists, street
hawkers, a work crew paving over a pothole, police officers on foot patrol.
“Let’s go sit up there where you can soak it all in.” He pointed to some
illuminated red stairs that ran up one side of the TKTS booth.

She followed in a daze, staying close to his side
as he walked up to the top row of steps and tugged her down to sit beside him.
After several minutes of gawking like the rest of the tourists, she became
aware that Jason wasn’t looking at anything or anyone but her. She glanced up
at him. “Thanks for bringing me here.”

“You’re welcome. I usually avoid this area like
the plague. But everyone needs to see it at least once.”

“Do you like living in the city?”

“My company is headquartered here. But, no, I
can’t say that I like living here. I enjoyed living outside of the city and
taking the train in when I wasn’t traveling. I’d like to find a home like that
again, maybe something in Connecticut with a little bit of land, a place for
the kids to run around.”

“That sounds nice,” she said wistfully.

His expression was gentle. “I can’t help but
notice that you change the subject every time I ask about your family.”

She knew her face looked guilty. “That obvious,
huh?”

He nodded.

She pressed her lips together, glanced away for a
moment before meeting his eyes once again. His expression was nothing but kind,
receptive to anything she had to tell him. She took a deep breath. “There’s
someone I want you to meet,” she murmured. She pulled her wallet out of her
purse, took out a picture and handed it to him. Her hands shook slightly as she
put the wallet back in her purse. She tucked the purse under her legs and then
clasped her hands in her lap, her thumbs rubbing together nervously as she
waited.

Jason studied the photo closely before giving her
a quizzical look. “Is this your mother?”

Her mouth had gone dry. She licked her lower lip,
cleared her throat. “No. That’s me.”

“
You
?” He looked at the photo again, then
back at her. “I don’t believe it. This looks nothing like you.” To her relief
there was no derision in his voice, only befuddlement.

She flattened her palms together, held them
pressed between her thighs. In spite of the warm night, she shivered. Hearing
Dr. Moira’s voice in her ear, she took several deep, calming breaths before
speaking. “It’s best if I start at that very beginning, to help you understand
who that girl…who
I
was. How I became that person you see in the
picture.”

“Okay.” He set one hand on her knee, a gesture of
comfort and encouragement.

“My parents married young, right after high
school He’d gotten her pregnant. The way he tells it, my mother’s father forced
them to get married. There was no love in that marriage. A few months after my
older brother was born, my mother began having affairs—all of this I learned
secondhand from my father’s mother, so I’m not sure how much of the story is
exaggeration and how much is truth. But I was the result of one of those
affairs, or, according to my fath—Hank—more likely a one-night stand with some
drunk my mother doesn’t even remember.”

“Hank sounds like a real winner. How old were you
when you found out?”

“I was around five or six year’s old the first
time I remember him calling me a bastard. He was screaming at my mother,
calling her a cheating slut, a whore.”

Jason clutched her leg. “Did he hit you?” His
voice was icy calm.

“No. He never touched me at all. I mean,
never
touched me once in all the years I lived in that house. He never held me in his
arms when I was a baby, never rocked me to sleep when I had a nightmare, never
hugged me when I got straight A’s in school. To him I just didn’t exist at
all.”

“What about your mother?”

“She was hot and cold. When I was a little girl
sometimes she’d shower me with hugs and kisses, buy me pretty dresses. Looking
back I realized that she was just using me to goad him, to remind him that he
wasn’t the only man she’d been with. Mostly, though, she just ignored me,
especially after I started to gain a lot of weight.”

“What the hell? Why didn’t they divorce each
other? And where were the grandparents? Child protective services? There was no
one around who could’ve removed you from that environment?”

“Let’s just say his parents weren’t good people.
They died within a couple of years of each other. They were both alcoholics.
And her parents moved to Florida when I was ten and never looked back. Hank and
Fran—my mother—divorced about five years ago, long after I’d moved out of the
house. I left the day I graduated from high school and haven’t been back
since.”

“
Jesus
, honey. I’m so sorry you went
through all that. Here, give me your hands. You’re shaking.” He’d tucked her
photo in his jeans pocket. He took her hands and held them pressed together
within his own. “What about your brother? Where’s he?”

She made a derisive sound. “Like father, like
son. Phil took his cues from Hank. He pretty much ignored me. He was two years
ahead of me in school. He would just watch when the other kids taunted me about
my weight. A few times he joined in.”

“Son of a
bitch
. I want to tear him apart.
Where is he now?”

Tears came to her eyes. It was the first time in
her life that a man had come to her defense. It was a deeply powerful emotion,
this feeling of being protected, championed. “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“Hey, now. Don’t cry. You don’t know what it does
to me when I see your tears.” He released her hands to pull her into a tight
hug.

“I’m not crying about my past,” she insisted.
“These are tears of relief. I was really nervous about sharing all of this with
you. You’re reacting a lot better than I expected.”

He drew back, put one hand under her chin and
lifted her face to his. He studied her features, eyes narrowed. “Did you think
I’d be disgusted by your story? By the way you used to look?” Seeing the
unspoken confirmation in her eyes, he took her face between his hands, frowning
fiercely. “None of that crap matters in the here and now, Maggie Rose. Don’t
ever feel that I think any less of you because of your parentage or because you
used to be overweight.”

A deeply-seeded bitterness, one she and Dr. Moira
had analyzed over and over, shoved its way to the surface. “You wouldn’t have
given that fat girl a second glance if it’d been her sitting in the bar that
night. Admit it.”

He looked almost livid now. “No. I wouldn’t have.
But not for the reasons you’re probably thinking.” He let go of her face and
retrieved the photo from his pocket. He thrust it in front of her. “You called
this
someone
—like she’s a completely different person. And you know
what? She is. My first reaction wasn’t that she’s fat. No, I was thinking that
this is a girl who doesn’t love herself, a girl who’s profoundly unhappy, maybe
someone who used food for comfort. Believe it or not, I’ve known many very
attractive women over the years who were on the heavy side, some extremely so.
What makes them attractive, Maggie, is that they clearly like themselves, they
carry themselves with pride. They don’t give a shit that they don’t fit some
media-hyped mold.
That’s
attractive. Don’t put me in some box of
stereotypes you might have inside your head. Yeah, a lot of guys are
superficial assholes. I’ve never been one of them.”

She took the photo from him, looking at the
person she used to be. She was quiet for several moments. She felt his agitated
breathing and understood just how much she’d offended him with her foolish
assumptions. “I know, Jason. I
know
. That was a stupid thing for me to
say. You didn’t deserve it.”

He said nothing as she put the photo back in her
purse. She glanced at his profile. He still looked upset. She put a hand on his
arm. “Were you never teased or bullied in school?”

He gave a short, scathing sound. “Yes, as a
matter of fact. I wore braces
and
glasses all through grade school. I
was called Four Eyes and Metal Mouth more often than my own name.”

“Something tells me you didn’t turn the other
cheek.”

His expression softened. He gave her a sideways
smirk. “Let’s just say I spent a lot of time in detention for fighting in the
school yard.”

She hooked her arm through his, propped her head
against his shoulder as she looked straight ahead. “I wasn’t able to fight
back. I’d become so used to hiding from Hank and Fran at home that I did the
same thing at school. I buried myself in my books and homework, and I pretended
that I couldn’t hear what the other kids said about me. I thought things would
be different in college. But pretty much everyone there just ignored me. I
can’t say which was worse, the verbal abuse, or being made to feel like you
just don’t exist at all. Almost everywhere I went it was like I was invisible.
People looked away from me or right through me like I wasn’t even there.”

Jason clasped her hand with his, tilted his head
to rest on hers. “What made you…change?”

“I’d tried to lose weight over the years.” She
gave a brief, cynical laugh. “I’m a wealth of information when it comes to
diets, Jason. I’ve tried them all. But I never addressed the root cause of why
I’d put on all the weight in the first place. My first year in college, I got a
job at the student recruitment office. It was a behind the scenes job, putting
together all the promotional materials. I liked that job and stuck with it
after graduation. My co-workers there, aside from a few snotty interns, were
nice to me. But I watched them get promotions or eventually leave for bigger
and better things while I just stayed in my little corner, day in, day
out…slowly dying inside. Then I became friends with another girl, Sarah, who
managed all of the campus events. She was the first real friend I’d ever had.”
She swallowed, fighting to keep any trace of self-pity out of her voice. “She
confided in me one day that she used to be overweight, too. She told me about
this therapist in Des Moines who specialized in treatment of women with weight
issues. Sarah kept pushing me to see her and I finally got up the courage to
make an appointment. And…well…the rest is history.”

Jason was silent for a few minutes. Then he
pressed a lingering kiss against her temple. “There’s a lot of hard work and
struggle and pain in those last four words, Maggie Rose.”

She gave a soft sound of agreement. All of that
pain was worth this moment, being here with this amazing, wonderful man.

“Sarah sounds like an angel. I’d like to meet
her.”

“You almost did. Not that I would’ve been sitting
in that bar if she’d been with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was with me or, rather, I was with her in
Chicago. She now works as an event manager for an information technology
company. They were having their bi-annual sales conference at that hotel. Sara
invited me at the last minute to help her onsite. We were both going to stay an
extra night in one of the hospitality suites the hotel sales manager had
provided complimentary to the group. Her boyfriend showed up that afternoon and
they went to stay in the city instead.”

“Aha. That explains why the hotel couldn’t give
me the name of the person who’d reserved that room.”

Maggie lifted her head to look at him askance.
“They shouldn’t have given you any information at all. That’s confidential.”

“I sweet talked the girl at the front desk into
showing me the folio. There was no name on it. Just VIP, master account. She
wouldn’t tell me anything more and I had to rush to catch my plane. I’d been
kicking myself ever since. I should’ve changed my flight, taken the time to dig
deeper.”

“This really is a miracle, isn’t it,” Maggie said
in amazement. “Us finding each other like this.”

 “Come here,” he murmured, pulling her into his
chest and covering her mouth with his.

All of the noise around them diminished, drowned
out by the loud thundering of her heart.

When he eventually lifted his head he rubbed his
thumb across her lower lip, his eyes delving into hers. “You know what I think,
Maggie mine?”

She slowly shook her head, unable to speak.

“I think you’ve been trying to find me ever since
that night and just didn’t know it. It was you who came up with the idea for
that beer ad, wasn’t it? The ad that had me asking Sean to hunt down your
agency.”

She felt her face brighten as realization dawned.
It’d been a simple ad, an overhead shot of a woman’s hand sliding a note across
a glossy bar table towards a man’s hand, the glimpse of an old-fashioned room
key peeking from beneath the note, the numbers 1208 visible. Beside his hand
was a glass of beer. It had been a subtle and sexy ad, the message clearly
conveying that the man who drank Goldfinch Beer always got the girl.

She recalled how nervous she’d been when she’d
presented the idea to Tim and Rob, but she also remembered how vitally important
it was to her that the client like it. That same anxious feeling had assailed
her for the last week as she’d fought to get the Jagz Vodka ad details just
right. “Yes,” she admitted. “But I never realized what I was really doing until
now. I mean, what were the chances that you’d even see that ad? It was a regional
campaign.”

He kissed her forehead. “I had a strange feeling
from the moment I saw it, but I didn’t put two and two together until I saw the
vodka ad. Like you say, it’s a miracle.”