Page 37 of Base Block

“Rainey? You want to go in?” He held out his hand.

I nodded. “I’m going,” I said. I would need to figure out how to go even further than this store, though. I had to get myself out of the past, which I hadn’t left behind as cleanly as I’d wanted.

Starting now, I would force things back on course. I took his hand and linked our fingers, and we walked into that bright and unblemished future together.

Chapter 8

“Maverick!”

I froze and got prepared. Maverick was the name of the dog that had jumped on me before and it could jump on me again. But it was a friendly dog, I reminded myself, and it wasn’t trying to attack me. It was just excited to see people and it didn’t know its own strength. It wasn’t mean and it wasn’t trying to bite…

And running didn’t help unless I could jump into the back of someone’s car again, so I braced my legs and turned to face it.

But the big brown and black dog didn’t appear. A woman rounded the corner instead and I recognized her as Maverick’s owner, the one who used flexible voice control instead of a leash to manage him.

She stopped when she saw me. “Where is he?” she asked, her voice loud and angry. “Where’s Maverick?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, but she had already strode past, stomping like she’d done the first time I’d seen them together. I stayed wary because her dog was close by and was obviously not under any kind of voice control, flexible or otherwise. But I didn’t see him as I went to my car.

It was a rental because Callum and I had compromised on that instead of him buying one. “Since your work schedule won’t be totally regular and since my hours are equally weird, it’ll be hard to share. You need a car,” he had reasoned. Then he’d gotten his half-smile. “I don’t mind paying. It feels pretty good to be able to do that, you know? I spent a lot of years worrying about money and now here I am, renting a car like it’s nothing. We can go to the grocery store and buy the food we want. We can fill the gas tank all the way up and we don’t have to pick one bill to pay over another. This is the life.” The half-smile had spread across his whole face, and he’d whistled as he’d gone to his green car.

So, I was in a rental, the cheapest one I had been able to find. Since we were now past Labor Day, most of the tourists had gone home so getting it hadn’t been hard (and prices seemed to have dropped, too). There were still a lot of people in town for the football regular season, though, because they came in from all over the state to see the games. There was one tomorrow, at home.

Callum said that he wouldn’t be playing. “Not unless there’s an injury,” he’d told me, and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. At the same time, I did want him to get a chance to go out there…

I carefully steered around a large moving truck taking up most of the parking lot. I’d gotten a lot more driving practice over the summer, but now I was particularly afraid of this car. It belonged to Aquila Rentals, not me, and who knew what would happen if I got into some kind of accident with it? Actually, that was something I should have known. Once I got to the office, I took a moment to look up that information and to answer a text that had come while I’d been on the road.

“Hello,” it read. “Just about to do a walk-through on the field. Hot today, right? Sunny tomorrow too. You want to bring a hat to wear at the stadium?”

“Hi,” I answered Callum. “I just got to work. I will bring a hat, good idea. Heidi wants me to come over tonight to make applesauce and she says there will be enough to share, so I hope you like it.” He wasn’t picky, though. “I better go inside,” I continued. “TTYL.” I abbreviated that but went back and wrote out the words instead, since he wasn’t up on text shortcuts. Then I hopped out of the overly warm car and walked toward the small office building. The sign above the door of the unit where I worked said only “Beau Gowan,” which I hadn’t thought was a very cute name for the business. But Callum had reminded me that Beau’s clients were mostly men, and they might not have appreciated that as much.

“I wouldn’t purposefully choose a place because the name was cute. I do like ‘Get Beaud,’” he’d told me. That had been one of my ideas in case my boss was looking for something catchier.

He didn’t immediately respond to the message I’d just sent, but he was busy since they were playing tomorrow. Now that he had a normal phone, he texted me a lot and I’d learned that if I only sent a word or two in response, he got disappointed.

I knew that because he had told me so. “When you only write ‘hi’ or something, I get disappointed,” he’d said. “How come you don’t write more? I like to hear from you.”

“How come you don’t send more to me?” I had asked him back.

“I don’t think I’m doing much that’s interesting,” he’d answered. “Do you really want to hear about it anyway?” He had been surprised when I had nodded hard, and he’d smiled. “Well, ok, then.” So now, I was getting more updates when he was able, but he wasn’t only busy today—his schedule was constantly full. They had one day off every week but even then, he was getting treatments for aches and injuries, and he was also trying to sleep. I understood what Heidi had meant when she’d said that I needed something to do myself, because the days were pretty long. I took time to exercise, to keep the house running by making food and paying bills, and then…there was time.

It was better that now I was gainfully employed. I had my own bank account, too. I smiled whenever I saw my ATM card in my new wallet, next to the Michigan driver’s license that had replaced the one that Millie had somehow gotten for me in California. I remembered going to the DMV in Los Angeles but I’d been very hungover, and I didn’t remember doing much to deserve a new license. The process here had been very official and I had enjoyed it a lot. I’d encouraged Callum to go get a license, too, since I’d liked the Michigan Secretary of State office. It was fun to do stuff that made you a part of the community.

“You’re pretty weird,” he’d told me, but he’d been laughing and I had, too.

Beau Gowan, my boss, was out of the office right now, on a buying trip in New York with one of his non-Woodsmen clients. I would be here today by myself but there was plenty to do. For one thing, it seemed like he had been letting a lot pile up, like letters and emails. I’d found two potential clients in his inbox and he’d said to go ahead and contact them, and now they were my clients. He had read the emails I’d written back and approved them before he’d told me that I could handle the rest of the communication on my own. He also had a list of the services we provided based on the fees he charged, which gave me some direction.

I had been very nervous that I’d mess it up, but he didn’t mind when I asked him questions. I wished that Beau was around more and also that he was better at responding to my texts. I’d seen him leap to answer when someone wrote about his son or if it was a message from his girlfriend, but he often overlooked what I wrote.

There was even more to keep me busy today because I was talking to two of the Woodsmen WAGs about consulting for them. It was going to be on an hourly basis, rather than a full makeover thing. One of them was Jenae, who had been on our first tour of Woodsmen Stadium and who was…well, she seemed to be a little difficult.

But that was ok. We would talk, they would send me pictures of some looks they liked, and then I could put together a portfolio of suggestions for new pieces for their wardrobes. Then, they were responsible for making their own purchases in the stores I listed or off the websites I would find. For his real clients, Beau put everything together in a black boxes and garment bags tied with light blue ribbons, which was why I had thought that “Get Beaud” was a great name—

I jumped, thinking that I heard a noise. This whole building was very quiet, because the two other units were occupied by companies that depended on tourism (guided hiking trips and summer rental properties). Now that their busy season was over, the owners had closed up shop for a few weeks and gone on vacation, so I was probably the only person here today. And I blamed Callum for my jumpiness. He was always concerned about me, although he didn’t always say it. I noticed it in other ways, like how he had walked around the rental car and checked the tires, poking them and putting a coin in the tread. He’d played endless phone tag with our condo’s maintenance guy about installing an extra lock on the door (it hadn’t been allowed, since we were only renting short-term, but they had eventually sent someone to fix the dishwasher).

His behavior had made me think more about my safety, too. Before, I had taken pills that were offered to me without questioning the source, or even questioning what they supposedly contained. I had drunk so much that I had been hospitalized, two times. Once, I had jumped off a balcony into a pool, and only afterwards did I realize that I should have checked how deep it was. Even then, I had only shrugged. Who really cared what happened?

I hadn’t wanted the dog on Callum’s street to bite me and I hadn’t wanted to get in the middle of Millie’s bathroom brawl, so I had retained some kind of self-protective instinct. But not enough. When I thought about the risks I’d taken, I shook my head and almost didn’t believe it. What if Callum had acted that way? I would have been furious with him!