Turnabout's Fair Play (30 page)

In other words, he’d had a month, and now it was time to get on the ball. Message received. “What are you doing for the Fourth of July?”

Shaking the excess water off the container, she looked across at him. She pulled four paper towels off the roll beside the sink—far more than she needed—and rubbed the container vigorously, making sure to get into all the nooks and crevices. “I usually go with Caylor and Zarah to a family cookout in the afternoon. But that’s assuming I can get this editing done.”

“Cookie invited your grandfather and me over to her friend Perty Bradley’s house for their cookout Monday afternoon. So I guess I’ll see you there, if you can make it.”

Flannery passed the folded grocery bags and the washed container to him. “I guess I should try to get the project done by Sunday night so that I can.”

He backed toward the door. “Good idea. What are you doing that morning?”

“Why?”

“Do you have any plans for that morning?”

“No. Why?” She stalked toward him.

He reached behind him to make sure he didn’t hit the door. “Because if you’re willing, there’s somewhere I’d like to take you that morning. Somewhere…I think we can get to know each other a little better.” He wrapped his fingers around the lever-style door handle.

“You’re being awfully secretive about this.” Suspicion oozed out of her.

“It seems to be a night for secrets. So will you go with me?”

“Do I get to know where?”

He could tell her—and have her decide she wouldn’t be able to get that editing project finished after all. “No. I’ll come pick you up at nine o’clock sharp. Wear comfortable clothes—we’ll be inside, but you might work up a sweat.” He pushed the handle down and stepped forward as he pulled the door open.

“Nine o’clock Monday morning?”

He backed into the doorway. “Nine o’clock Monday morning.”

“All right. This had better be good. I’ll be waiting for you in the lobby, so you can just pull up on the street. Wait—what kind of car do you drive?” She reached for the edge of the door and held it open as he backpedaled into the hallway.

“Big, black, four-door Dodge Charger with tinted windows.”

“Jamie—”

The breathlessness in her voice almost drew him back to her side. “Flannery?”

“Be careful!”

He looked over his shoulder—and swerved to keep from running over one of Flannery’s neighbors. The young woman shot him a dirty look and let her apartment door slam.

Jamie flourished his arms in a bow. “Sir Dork will now be leaving the building.” With that, he turned and escaped to the elevators before he did anything else to embarrass himself tonight.

He took a few deep breaths as the elevator sped toward the ground floor. Inviting Flannery go to with him Monday morning was quite a risk. But she needed to see that side of him, to know what was important to him, before they went any deeper and one or both of them ended up getting hurt.

Chapter 21

From:
Chae Seung

To:
Jamie O’Connor

Subject:
RE: RE: Dinner

Thank you for letting me know you’ll be coming to dinner and bringing a guest. Danny’s parents often ask him about you, so I know they’ll be happy to see you. Please let me know once you have the name of the guest you will be bringing. My mother likes the formality of place cards, even though this is a casual, family dinner
.

I’ve gone back and forth with this, but I’ve decided I must be perfectly honest with you. I wasn’t thrilled when Danny suggested inviting you to come. I know he’s always thought of you like a brother, but I think it’s pretty rotten that just when you start getting successful with your career, you drop him from your life. Then when things look like they’re about to get tough, all of a sudden you want to be buddy-buddy again. Danny believes that you’re truly sorry for having done that. And because I love my husband, I want to believe it, too. I could make all kinds of threats, but I know I could never do anything to you that would rival you hurting my husband again. So all I can do is trust this is a genuine act of friendship, that you do want to participate in his life, and pray that his faith in you is well placed
.

Now, as to your question about Sir Galahad. After we were married, Danny admitted to me that the matchmaker his grandmother hired told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to mention to me anything about the King Arthur stuff, or paintballing, or anything else the two of you used to do together. Ever. Not even after we got married. But because Danny is who he is, he can’t keep anything to himself if he is interested in it. He told me on our first date. I admit, I was a little concerned about his level of interest in a fictional world—and that was before he’d started the weekly (now monthly) King Arthur gaming with his nurse friends. But I came to realize that having a rich imagination is part of what makes Danny who he is, and it’s a big part of why I fell in love with him. It helps that he does have other interests and doesn’t talk about it nonstop—the way one of his friends does. Now that guy, he’s obsessed with that stuff so much that it’s a little scary to be around him
.

I assume you asked because you like someone and you don’t know how to tell her about this. My advice is just tell her. If she freaks out and doesn’t want to see you again, she’s probably not the right person for you. And you never know, she may turn out to share that interest and be the perfect person for you. If you never tell her, how will you ever find out?

“Wow—you look absolutely wiped out.” Zarah draped her beach towel over the wooden deck chair to Flannery’s right.

Caylor handed Zarah and Flannery each a can of soda and returned to her position on the chaise on Flannery’s left. Hanging out at the pool in Caylor’s backyard had been a much better idea than going to the crowded, noisy coffeehouse.

“Could be because she hasn’t slept in forty-eight hours.” Caylor pinned her with an accusatory glare.

Flannery yawned. “I took a couple of naps here and there. But I got the project finished so that I can enjoy what remains of my holiday weekend.”

“By sleeping it away?” Zarah sat and started rubbing sunscreen onto her arms and legs.

“I don’t want to hear it from either of you. I know quite well that both of you have had to pull all-nighters to get a project finished just within the last couple of months.”

Neither could argue, so they stopped ragging on her. She waited until Zarah was settled on her lounge chair to drop her news on them.

“I’ve been meaning to tell y’all—I’m not going to go out with Pax Bradley.”

As expected, Caylor’s head popped up, and she frowned at her. “You promised.”

“I know. But…I also know whom I’m going to invite as my date to Caylor’s wedding.”

Both Caylor and Zarah sat up from their reclining positions.

“What?”

“Who?”

“It’s probably just Jack, and she’s teasing us.” Caylor swung her long legs around to sit sideways on the chair, facing Flannery.

“It’s not Jack.” Flannery took a deep breath, maintaining her relaxed pose and a straight face. “It’s Jamie O’Connor.”

That drew even more drastic reactions from her two best friends.

“You’ve hated him ever since that first time you met him and he called you Fanny.”

“And I distinctly remember you complaining on several occasions about his inclusion in my wedding party.” Zarah turned onto her side so she could see Flannery.

“Which is exactly why I’ve been debating whether or not to tell y’all. Because I knew you’d never let me live down that initial impression of him. But I’m telling you, he’s changed in the last few weeks. And most of it comes from his whole life being shaken up when he got laid off a month ago.”

“That’s terrible—a month ago? But the wedding was a month ago. How come I didn’t hear about this?” The guilt for having been wrapped up in her wedding when someone else was going through a hard time would eat at Zarah for some time to come, if past experience had taught Flannery anything.

“He didn’t tell a lot of people in the beginning. But then he went out to Utah to visit his family”—she grinned over his new attitude toward them—“and he came back almost a completely new person. And I like that new person.”

Adjusting her sunglasses, she stole glances at her friends from the corners of her eyes. “We had lunch Friday, and then he came over and brought me dinner that evening.”

The girls demanded details. Flannery gave them what specifics she could—he came over with the leftovers from Cookie, fixed her dinner, played with the cat, they talked, he shared some of his background, he left.

It sounded rather dull and dry the way she told it.

“So you just talked—at lunch and at dinner. Just…talked?” Caylor leaned forward and scratched her foot.

“He’s got a lot of stuff going on in his life right now, and he needed someone to talk to, someone without a vested interest in what’s going on.” Except she did—because she definitely didn’t want him moving to Utah. Not now.

Were there any major fiction publishers in Utah? Or maybe Jack would let her work remotely. No—that would never work. She’d have to figure out how to make a go of it as a freelance editor. If that’s what she must do, she had the industry contacts to be able to make it work.

“Not vested yet.” Zarah—ever the romantic. Or at least for the last nine months or so, since the love of her life, her first love, had come back. “It sounds to me like you’re starting on a good foundation of friendship. You should have that trust in each other—knowing that you can tell the other person anything and they’ll never judge you or think less of you, even if it’s something you can’t tell anyone else.”

Flannery turned her head and studied the usually taciturn historian. The idea Zarah would have any secrets in her life that she felt she couldn’t share with her and Caylor…Flannery couldn’t imagine it. “But that’s why I don’t want to go out with Pax. I want to see what this thing with Jamie is before I go out with someone else.”

Pushing her sunglasses up to the top of her head, Flannery straightened into a more upright position. “Speaking of secrets, there’s something else I need to tell you two. Something I’ve been keeping from you for a while now.”

“Sounds serious.” Caylor touched her arm. “You know you can tell us anything.”

“I know.” Now that Jamie had called her out and made her admit the truth, it seemed silly that she’d kept it from her two closest friends. “You both know that I sometimes spend my free time writing Arthurian-legend fan fiction.”

Both nodded.

“You’ve done it your whole life. You used to torture me by reading it to me.” A wink followed Caylor’s tease.

“But, Caylor, you remember what happened at prom—what ruined it for me.”

“I don’t,” Zarah said.

Caylor launched into an explanation, relieving Flannery of the emotional expense of having to tell the story again this weekend.

“Those people are just lucky that I didn’t go to your high school.” Caylor rubbed her hands together.

“It wouldn’t have mattered even if you did—you were finishing up your first year at Vanderbilt.”

“True.”

“Anyway”—Flannery turned more toward Zarah, who didn’t know as much of this backstory as the woman she’d grown up with—“after that, I made sure that no one knew that I wrote fan fiction. I even invested in a locking file box in which to keep my notebooks. Once I had my own computer, I password-protected the files and gave them coded names that only I would understand.”

She took a sip of soda, her throat dry from the long talking sessions and the lack of sleep she’d had the last two days. “But the thing about writing fan fiction is that we have a tendency to want to share it with other fans of the original story. After that movie came out several years ago—the one with Clive Owen in it—a bunch of Arthurian-legend fan sites, as well as a multitude of places to share and read fan fiction, cropped up. For the longest time, I read—the stories and the discussion forms—but didn’t participate, and definitely didn’t post anything. But I finally got so tired of the poor quality of stuff I’d read—not to mention how raunchy and sometimes downright depraved some of it is—I needed to provide an alternative, especially with the story of the characters who are my favorite. So about six months ago, I created a profile on one of the sites and started uploading my completely revised and updated story about Dame Ragnelle’s life.”