Beverly Bird - Playing By The Rules

“She has a crush on you,” I said.

It was an opinion I’d shared before, but this time Sam wiggled his brows at me. “Jealous?”

“I am beside myself with anguish. Where’s my hot dog?”

“Anguish obviously doesn’t affect your appetite.”

“Not a bit.” The vendor held a hot dog in my direction, gooey with melted cheese and fried onions, just the way I like it. The monkey made a grab for it. “Back off,” I warned. “Mine.”

“See?” Sam said to Julio, the vendor. “She’s jealous.”

I took a bite. “I was referring to my meal. He’s paying this time,” I said to Julio. The poor guy’s gaze was whipping back and forth between us now. He seemed confused and wary.

“We have an arrangement,” Sam told him, then he looked at me again. “By the way, it’s started now, right?”

Things danced inside me. I managed to nod. “But if you call me something like doll, I’ll clock you.” It was one of the few rules I’d been able to come up with last night. No saccharine endearments. I’d included this mostly because I’d overheard a good many of Sam’s over the last six months, and they all tended to be nauseating.

He shook his head seriously. “Doll? I don’t think that particular term has ever passed my lips.” He bit down into his own hot dog. The monkey did not try to take his.

“Yes, it did,” I said. “With that redhead.”

“What redhead?”

“A couple of months ago. The one in the rust-colored spandex. We arrived home at the same time—me and Frank and you and her. And when you opened the door for her, I distinctly remember hearing you call her doll.”

“Oh, that redhead. Of course I did. That was her name.”

I laughed. “Doll?”

“Eee. Doll-y.” He grinned that crooked grin. “So do we have a marriage or what?”

The last bite of my hot dog jammed in my throat. I swallowed hard to push it down. Last night he’d been calling this thing an arrangement, and now he was talking about marriage? I felt like I’d fallen asleep in the theater and woken up at the end of the movie. “Come again?”

“The Woodsens,” Sam explained. Then he lifted the little monkey from his shoulder. “There now, darling,” he cooed to her, giving her back to the vendor. “I’ll be back before you know it.” He picked up his briefcase from the sidewalk and headed toward the courthouse steps.

The Woodsens, I thought. He was talking about the Woodsens. Of course he was. I paid the vendor without even thinking about it—because Sam hadn’t—and I went after him.

“Did you talk to Lisa?” he asked when I caught up.

“Yes. She’s says she’ll attempt a reconciliation rather than lose her kids.” We were back in lawyer mode. There was a great deal of comfort to be found there. Not that I didn’t want to proceed with our arrangement. I did. But I was finding that it was a little like walking a tightrope, and every once in a while it just seemed best to step down and plant my feet on solid ground again.

“It’s never going to work if that’s her attitude,” Sam said.

“He dumped her and filed for divorce over a simple medical problem!” I protested.

“Simple medical problem?” Sam laughed as we trotted up the steps. “Is that politically correct for running around the house naked?”

“Only when your partner perceives it as an invasion from Pluto.”

We stopped in front of the big oak doors. “Lyle’s going to need more of an enthusiastic response than that,” Sam insisted. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“And he’ll get it. Eventually. She’s just going to make him jump through a few hoops first.”

“See all the games and garbage we can avoid with our arrangement? Doll?”

I laughed, but I think it came out a little hoarsely. “What else are we avoiding?” I asked him. “Did you decide on your ground rules yet?”

“Sure. They didn’t take much thought.”

For a brief moment, I hated him. “Great,” I said. “So you go first.”

“All right. No sleepovers. Also no sharing of toothbrushes. Those two sort of go hand in hand.”

I frowned. They fell into my “companionship” category, but I had been getting by without that sort of thing for a while now and I figured I could keep on doing it. “Okay.” But then my curiosity got the better of me. “Why not?”

“It’s just part of keeping it uncomplicated,” he said. “It will be neater if we just keep all that cuddly stuff out of it. You know, that’s always where I get into trouble.”

“With cuddly stuff?”

“Yeah. That’s the point of this, right? We’re friends. We don’t have to cuddle. We don’t hold hands. We’re talking sex and companionship here. Period.”

He didn’t seem awkward with it today. He really had it down. “My turn,” I said, and I latched on to the rule I’d mentioned earlier—in part because for a moment I couldn’t remember any of the others. “None of those endearments of yours. Absolutely no…you know…darlings and dolls and snookums and babycakes.”

“Honestly, Mandy, you’re not the babycakes type.”

I wasn’t sure if I was insulted or pleased. I decided not to try to figure it out.

“No complaining or handing out guilt trips,” he said, ticking off another rule on the fingers of his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding his briefcase.

Now I was insulted. “When have I ever done that sort of thing?”

“You haven’t. Yet. But that was when we were just…you know, us. Now we’re getting into uncharted territory so I’m just putting it out there. If I decide I want to stay in some night and read, there can’t be any whining and making me feel bad about it. Also, it works both ways. You get to go to the gym like you’re always doing without me busting your chops because I wanted to see you.”

My head was spinning. But he was right. It made a certain amount of sense, I supposed. He wanted to take a break from the whining and the guilt trips. That was the whole purpose behind this thing. That, and getting him out of my system.

“Your turn again,” Sam said.

I dredged through my memory. “I, um, don’t have to run around picking up the apartment just because you’re coming over.” It sounded as lame now as it had last night.

“You never do that,” he pointed out. “Your living room is a Barbie metropolis.”

“Uncharted territory,” I reminded him.

He frowned. “Okay. No picking up.”

“And Chloe comes first. She’s my top priority.”

“Of course she is. And, anyway, that’s part of my rule. No whining or guilt trips if you prefer to spend time with her.”

I nodded. So far, this was very…civilized, I thought. “What else?”

“It’s not necessary for us to touch base every day.”

“Sam, we’ve been touching base every day for the entire six months I’ve known you.” For some reason, this was starting to bother me.

“But things are different now, so if it should ever happen that we don’t touch base for some reason, there won’t be a major conflagration.”

“No conflagrations,” I repeated.

“And nobody’s going to go falling in love,” he said. “That’s the big one. I don’t need to be going there again.”

I finally laughed at that. It came up from my belly. “I think you’re safe, Sam. I’ve already seen you at your most impressive and it hasn’t overwhelmed me. I’ve also seen you at your worst. Wearing pink, for instance. Or remember when you broke your finger putting in my air conditioner? You howled more than a woman giving birth.”

“The hell I did.” He scowled. “Anyway, this brings us back to throwing drinks and timing devices like Frank Ethan’s watch.”

“Exactly where we came in,” I agreed.

“Right.” He opened the courthouse door for me.

I stepped inside, but then I turned back to gape at him. “You never open doors for me.”

“That was before, when you were one of the guys. Now you’re my girl.”

“I’m—” I broke off. Somehow, it seemed diametrically opposed to everything we had just discussed.

“Figuratively speaking,” Sam explained.

“Oh. Of course.”

I knew then that I had to get a grip. This wasn’t going to work if the world kept tilting on its axis with everything he said. I was supposed to feel clinical and practical about this, not light-headed and weak-kneed and on the constant verge of passing out.

“They’re meeting for lunch right about now,” Sam said, looking at his watch. “Or at least they are if she agreed to see him.”

“Who?” I asked dazedly.

“Lisa and Lyle Woodsen.”

“Where?” And what the hell difference did that make?

“The same restaurant where they had their first date. So where’s ours going to be?”

I grabbed my wits about me halfway across the lobby. “I have show tickets for Atlantic City this weekend.” No, I thought immediately, that wouldn’t work. It would be better to take Grace or Jenny along, because that sort of occasion would almost necessitate an overnight. Would one of us sleep on the floor? Would we take two separate rooms? How would that fit into our rules?

“I was thinking more along the lines of tonight,” Sam said while I was picking at the problem.

Tonight? That was…soon.

I looked at him. He grinned that crooked, bad-boy grin, and I knew—suddenly I just knew—that he realized how flustered I was by all this. And he liked it. I decided I was damned if I was going to let him keep yanking my chain.

That was the only reason I did what I did next in full view of a lobby bustling with lawyers, litigants and various law enforcement personnel. Okay, maybe Mill had a little to do with it, too. I knew it would get back to him. I caught Sam’s tie with my left hand and gave it a tug until he stepped closer to me.

“Hey,” he said, startled.

I kissed him hard on the mouth. That had been my intention anyway—one strong smack to reestablish my upper hand. But then something happened. A rolling kind of jolt went through me. Because while I’d meant to smack, his mouth turned out to be as soft as a wish, and I stayed a little too long. At some point while I lingered, he obviously recovered from his surprise…and I forgot all about Mill.

His tongue slipped fast, neatly, past my lips, tangling with mine. It teased a moment. Then it was gone. I reeled back.

“Sneak preview,” he said, and winked at me. “Good idea.” Then he left me standing there like a dumbstruck idiot and headed for his courtroom.

I have no recollection of being in court that afternoon, though I know I must have been because I billed Robert Awney for my time. The man was grinning when he left the courthouse. His wife had left him and he’d never gotten over it, so he took her back to court once a year, trying to change his child support or his visitation, just to harass her. Celia Awney Neulander’s expression was predictably murderous as she stalked off.

I stood on the cold, aged tile of the lobby floor watching them go, then I looked around for Sam. He was nowhere to be found. I found myself thinking about our arrangement again, and I was suddenly swept by the conviction that it would never work. Nothing between us would ever be as simple as he was making this whole thing out to sound. We both had our egos. We were both strong-willed. Each of us had a decided preference for being in charge. This was going to be a tug-of-war, I thought.

I decided that what I really needed to do about the situation was talk to Grace. I whipped around, swinging my briefcase like a deadly weapon, and headed for the elevator bank instead of the lobby doors.