The small wooden box inside the top drawer. I’ve kept this box with me for six years. And it’s calling out to me in a haunting voice, an ever-present reminder that I can’t forget or ignore.
I answer the call once again. I open the drawer on my nightstand, and I remove the box, place it in the middle of my bed, and take a deep, calming breath. I know what’s inside, but this thing is a bomb nonetheless. It’s living and ticking and it’s tried to destroy me before.
I reach inside the drawer, pull out a chain that holds a tiny key and unlock the wooden box. Before I even look at the pictures, I can see him perfectly–Aaron. Dark hair, close-cropped, light brown eyes, and that dimple on the right side of his lips that made me fall for him. His sense of humor, the jokes he made about our school mascot, the dozens of red roses he brought me when I played in our production of Mamma Mia. Those are the good things.
I reach into the box, my fingers shaky. I take out a picture. Him and me at prom. I’m wearing a red dress that falls to my knees and my hair is in a French twist, with a few loose tendrils. He’s unbearably handsome in his tux, that smile giving nothing away. I open the note next, the folds in it so permanent now they’re like tattoos. I read the first few lines.
“God, I f**king love you so much, Jill.”
That’s what gets me every time. Those words. Those awful, painful words.
I close the box, lock it and return it to the drawer.
* * *
The next morning I’m on the train, a cute knit cap pulled over my blow-dried hair, a red scarf wrapped around my neck, and a skirt on even though it’s winter. But Patrick doesn’t board at the same time. Or on the same car.
I peer into the car next to me, then head down to the other end, weaving in between passengers holding onto straps and poles. I look in the window to another car. No Patrick there, either. As I exit on Fiftieth Street, it only vaguely occurs to me that it would be really unusual to be on the same car of the same train at the exact same time every day.
I’ll have to snag some one-on-one time during rehearsal.
I walk up the steps and into the building with the studio, heading to the elevator panel to press the button.
“Hold the elevator.”
I turn, and it’s Davis.
“Please,” he adds when he sees me. He shifts to a playful tone and flashes a smile that feels as if it’s just for me. His inky blue eyes twinkle and for the briefest of moments, I have this strange sense of him appraising me from stem to stern, surveying my body from the short gray boots that Kat brought me from Paris, to the black tights on my legs, to my blond hair peeking out from the hat. It should bother me, his eyes on me, drinking me in, but it doesn’t. Maybe because it’s so fleeting, so brief, that I might have imagined it.
Besides, I’m guilty too of being less than professional in my random thoughts. Even though I have no intentions for him, given that it was all a mistake.
I try to delete from my head the conversation Kat and I had about him last night as I speculated on his predilections. But I keep thinking about that scarf and I can picture Davis twining it around feminine wrists, pinning them, having his way.
Fuck.
I can’t go there. I shouldn’t go there. What happened in his office was wrong.
“Elevator’s not even here yet,” I say in an effort to focus on the innocuous.
“I’m sure there will be another one,” he says, and I notice he’s not wearing a winter coat even though he’s just come in from the cold. He wears jeans, shoes, and a white button-down shirt that must have been tailored for his chest. He’s holding a coffee cup in one hand, and a sesame seed bagel in the other. It’s only us in the lobby. Waiting. I glance at Davis again, and he’s not even shivering. It’s like he’s made of iron, impervious to the elements.
“Don’t you ever get cold?”
“No.”
“You’re kind of badass.”
His lips quirk up in a grin. “Thank you.”
Then I press my hand against my mouth. “Shit,” I mutter.
The grin is erased and he now has this caring look in his eyes as he reaches a hand toward me, as if he’s about to rest it gently on my arm. But he doesn’t, and I find myself missing the possibility of his touch. He stops halfway, then pulls back before he asks, “What’s wrong, Jill?”
He seems so genuinely concerned. It’s such a different side of him than I see in rehearsals with the whole cast.
“Sometimes I forget to turn on the filter that’s supposed to prevent me from saying things like that to my boss,” I say, because that’s the only way I should think of him, and you shouldn’t be too personal and chit-chatty with your boss. But I can’t get a read on him in any capacity.
It’s as if my finely-tuned internal calibrations on people-reading don’t work with him. On the outside, I can size him up in seconds. He’s the type of good-looking that could grace the pages of a GQ ad, relaxing in a leather chair, a suit jacket tossed casually over the arm, wearing a crisp white shirt, a few buttons undone, holding a sturdy glass of scotch, his midnight blue eyes impossible to look away from.
When it comes to work, he’s a drill sergeant times fifty. He’s a colonel keeping us all in line. But he’s also an artist and a gentleman, and he has this soft side every now and then. A side he seems to show to me. Davis Milo is the strangest mix of sophisticated class and unbridled intensity I’ve ever seen. It’s as if a Merchant Ivory movie f**ked a Quentin Tarantino flick and made him.