Her father was hardly a gift horse, Kerra thought, and decency had nothing to do with why he’d offered the marketing job to Alan. He’d made the offer because they needed someone to promote Adventures Unlimited to the masses but they also needed a certain kind of someone to do that marketing, and Alan Cheston appeared to be the kind of someone Kerra’s father had been looking for.
Her father was deciding based on appearance. To him, Alan was a type. Or perhaps better said, Alan was not a type. Her father thought the type to be avoided at Adventures Unlimited was a manly sort: grit under the fingernails, throw a woman across the bed, and have her till she saw stars. What he didn’t understand?and had never understood?was that there actually was no type. There was just maleness. And despite the rounding of his shoulders, the spectacles, the bobbling Adam’s apple, the delicate hands with those long, probing spatulate fingers, Alan Cheston was male. He thought like a male, he acted like a male, and most important, he reacted like a male. That was why Kerra had put her foot down, which had ultimately done no good because she wouldn’t say more than, “It won’t work out.” That proving useless, she’d done the only thing she could do in the situation, which was to tell him they’d likely have to end their relationship. To this, he’d calmly replied without the slightest tinge of panic to his words, “So that’s what you do when you don’t get what you want? You just cut people off?”
“Yes,” she’d declared, “that’s what I do. And it’s not when I don’t get what I want. It’s when they won’t listen to what I’m saying for their own good.”
“How can it be for my own good not to take the job? It’s money. It’s a future. Isn’t that what you want?”
“Apparently not,” she’d told him.
Still, she hadn’t quite been able to make good on her threat because in part she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have to work with Alan daily but not see him nightly. She was weak in this and she despised her weakness, especially when she’d chosen him primarily because he’d seemed like the weak one: considerate, which she’d taken for malleable, and gentle, which she’d taken for diffident. That he’d proved himself exactly the opposite since coming to work at Adventures Unlimited scared the hell out of her.
One way to terminate her fear was to confront it, which meant confronting Alan himself. But really, how could she? So at first she’d fumed, and then she’d waited, watched, and listened. The inevitable was just that?inevitable?and since it had always been that way, she spent the time attempting to harden herself, becoming remote within while playing the part of certain without.
She’d carried the act off until today, when his announcement of “I’ll be gone a few hours down the coast” sent the sirens off in her brain. At that point her only choice was to ride fast and far, to exhaust herself beyond thinking so that she exhausted herself beyond caring as well. Thus, despite her other responsibilities that day, she’d gone on her way: along St. Mevan Crescent and over to Burn View, down the slope of Lansdown Road and the Strand, and from there out of town.