Layover Rules

Chapter Sixteen



On my way to work Monday morning, back in New York City, I found myself more nervous than ever about the job promotion. It would be more money, enabling me to afford a better place to live, but also a huge step forward in my career.

There would be less traveling, and I would miss that. And I’d miss Sam. Or, rather, I’d miss what Sam and I had before that uncomfortable episode below the Arch.

Why did he have to do that? Things were so good going into St. Louis, and there was no lingering tension after that awkward discussion, but still it was odd that he’d tried to get me to talk about my last relationship.

On the flight back to New York, I considered the possibility that he was wanting more. Could that be it?

He knew what I wanted from the start, and he seemed more than willing to go forward as we planned.

Maybe it was like those articles I’d read about the pros and cons of a friends with benefits agreement. The guy was less likely than the woman to get attached, but guys who did were almost always looking at it from a territorial perspective. Like they wanted to protect their woman.

I didn’t buy it because it sounded so primitive. Then again, maybe I was being naïve. Maybe that did happen, and perhaps that’s exactly where Sam found himself—wanting to make sure that he, and he alone, had me.

I wasn’t ready to accept being anyone’s anything right now. He hadn’t pressed the issue. In fact, he dropped it when I asked him to and didn’t bring it up the rest of the day or even the next.

Maybe he had simply had a moment of weakness. I wasn’t going to run from him after only one conversation like that. Especially since I’d had my own moments of weakness. So I couldn’t hold that against him.

I would go along just like I had, and see if we got along together as we had.



. . . . .



I bumped into Corrine in the ladies’ room. I was walking out, she was coming in, and she asked me to wait a second so she could talk to me about something.

“I really need your help,” she said.

That was unlike Corrine. First of all, she was good at what she did, otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten the interview with Mr. Stein. Secondly, Corrine never asked for help. She even mentioned to me once that she perceived asking for assistance as a sign of weakness.

“What’s up?” I said, trying not to let my facial expression tell her I thought this was strange.

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Get away with scheduling your trips so you can spend time with your boyfriend,” she said, one eyebrow arching, her head tilting to the side a little, a smirk on her face.

I stood there shocked, feeling the blood drain from my face.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “He schedules his trips around me.”

She crossed her arms, striking a know-it-all pose. “Really? I suppose he arranges for the baseball games he covers to be scheduled around your trips, too, so he can be wherever you are?”

How did she know all of this?

Corrine stood there with a smirk on her face, waiting for an answer.

I was waiting for the answer, too, and thankfully it only took me about fifteen seconds to come up with one.

What I had done by scheduling my trips around meeting Sam wasn’t anything that would get me fired. After all, it’s not like I didn’t do work on the trips, and all Creative Director Assistants had the freedom to choose which store to visit, as long as they were stores assigned to our respective Creative Director, which all of mine had been.

I thought about how part of me didn’t even want the promotion. I would miss the trips with Sam. Silly, I know, and in truth I wouldn’t have given up the promotion that easily, and for that reason. But still, the feeling was there.

I stepped toward her, a sudden urge rising within me to regain power over the situation.

“You can have the job, Corrine.” I threw up my hands. “I don’t care anymore. Beth’s not going to fire me. I know that for a fact.” I thought about telling Corrine how Beth had recommended me for the job, but that would have created a mess for Beth, and I didn’t want to do that. “So,” I continued, “you go tell whoever you want that I’ve been seeing someone on the road, and win the promotion that way. Am I going to lose my current job over it? No. Will it look bad for me in terms of the promotion? Probably. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter. I like what I do. I make enough to live in the city and I have a job that lets me travel around the country. And, yes, I see my boyfriend. Speaking of which, if I recall from overhearing you in this very bathroom last week, you haven’t had a date in over a year. So, bottom line: I do my work, and I have a life. Maybe you should look into that.”

I walked out, shocked with myself. Not so much by how I’d just gone off on Corrine, but by the fact that I referred to Sam as “my boyfriend.” I’d have to think about that one later.



. . . . .



I spent the next hour in my little glass enclosure office, occasionally looking at my computer screen, but mostly gazing around at all my co-workers. Okay, I admit it—I was watching to see what would happen after that bathroom run-in.

I had already scripted in my head how it would go down….

I’d see Beth and Mr. Stein getting off the elevator, turning the corner to come down the row of offices, heading straight for mine. They wouldn’t even call me in to Beth’s office for privacy. And they certainly wouldn’t let me set foot in Mr. Stein’s office again. They’d tell me I hadn’t technically broken company policy, but that I was no longer singularly focused on my job and with the economy the way it was, competition was tighter than ever. Or maybe they wouldn’t be so nice about it. Maybe they would announce to me right there, and to everyone within earshot, that I needed to pack my things and leave immediately. Oh, Jesus, would they have security escort me from the building?

Something like that. A nightmare scenario playing out over and over in my head.

But it didn’t turn out that way.

Instead, I got the news from Michael, one of only three male Creative Director Assistants. I didn’t know him well, but I enjoyed being around him when we were both in the building. He stopped by my office, knocked on the glass, came in, and whispered: “I can’t believe she got the job over you. I thought you were going to get it easily. It makes me wonder what—”

I stood, cutting him off abruptly. “I’m sorry, Michael. I have to go do something.” I walked out of my office, determined to do what needed to be done. “Sorry, this just can’t wait.”



. . . . .



I immediately went to Beth’s office. The door was closed, but I opened it and walked right in without knocking.

She was behind her desk, reading something. She looked up over her reading glasses. “Blair. What is it?”

“Sorry to barge in, but I have to talk to you.” I sat down in one of the guest chairs across from her. “It’s about Corrine.”

She took off her glasses and leaned forward on her desk. “Before you start—”

“Please. I just want to get this out in the open. I know you put in a good word for me, and I’m sorry I let you down, and I know it looks bad and Mr. Stein probably isn’t very happy about it, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, if he’s going to end up firing me anyway or what, but I’ve always done my job and done it well, you know I have, Beth…” I paused to take a deep breath after speaking the longest run-on sentence in my life.

“Blair, wait. What in the world are you talking about?”

My elbows were on the arms of the chair and my hands were on either side of my face, fingertips pressed into my temples. I looked up at her, moving only my eyes. “I’m talking about…”

Oh, shit. Did she not know? Had I just confessed to something that I didn’t have to? No, actually I hadn’t given any specifics.

Beth put me out of my misery. “Let’s start over, and this time I’ll go first. Corrine got the job, obviously. But there was something I couldn’t tell you. Until now, anyway. I’m leaving the company. Stein was interviewing Corrine for a different Creative Director position. And when you met with him, it was just a formality. You’ll be taking over my job when I leave.”

I dropped my hands to the arms of the chair and sat forward. “So you…this wasn’t…”

The words just weren’t coming. It made sense, but somehow also didn’t.

Beth stood. “Come on. I’m taking you out to lunch to celebrate.”

She walked around her desk and put out her arms. I stood and she hugged me. “Congratulations.”



. . . . .



“So you were worried about nothing the whole time,” Alicia said.

“Yep.”

“Now that bitch has nothing on you.”

We were on our way to have a few drinks and celebrate. Alicia took the subway and met me at my office, and we walked to the club. When I called her, I didn’t tell her anything. I wanted to talk in person, so when we met up I shared the events of the day, including how I found out I didn’t need to worry.

Towards the end of my lunch with Beth, she had asked me what I was talking about when I first came into her office. She had done so much for me and I trusted her enough to be truthful with her. When I told her, she waved it off and said, “That’s it?”

Beth told me it would have had no bearing on whether I got the job or not. It wasn’t like I’d been using company money to fly to places where we didn’t have stores, and furthermore, I hadn’t used a penny of company money to buy anything for Sam. And the two days I took off—one in San Francisco, one in St. Louis—were not a big deal, either. Beth said when she held my position she often went to museums and movies, sometimes spending entire days shopping and sightseeing. What mattered was that the work was done and done well, and my work always was. She said it may seem unconventional, but Stein actually used to openly encourage it.

When I told Alicia that, she said, “Sucks to be Corrine. She’s probably missed out on a lot of cool stuff when she traveled.”

“That’s exactly what Beth said.”

The evening was filled with laughter, dancing, singing, flirting with some guys, and a lot of drinking for Alicia…not as much for me. I felt fine physically, but I still hadn’t mentally recovered from that last hangover, and I didn’t want a repeat.

Alicia was half in the bag, as they say, when she told me she thought she was going to give up Internet dating.

“Finally,” I said.

“Hey, it’s only been, like…” She looked upward, counting, I supposed.

I supplied the answer: “It’s been too long, is what it’s been.”

“I wasn’t thinking about time. I was thinking about how many guys.”

“Oh, well, in that case, too many. I hate to break this to you, but it’s not working out for you. Meet a guy here, or at the gym, anywhere.”

“Easy for you to say.” She nudged me. “You meet a guy by accident. You don’t even have to try.”

“It wasn’t that simple,” I said. “And I already knew him, remember?”

It was at this point that I remembered calling Sam “my boyfriend” when I had the run-in with Corrine. She had used the term first, so was there a chance I had simply parroted it back to her? I didn’t think so. I didn’t say it with sarcasm, or the intention of denying that that’s what he was. I knew I wasn’t thinking of him as my boyfriend, and I had no intention to, but maybe my subconscious didn’t mind it so much.

“Maybe we read too many of those books,” Alicia said.

“What do you mean?”

“Okay, maybe I read too many of those books. Maybe it made me think I was going to meet a guy who was impossibly handsome, great in the sack, had half the money in the world, and was willing to protect me 24/7. It’s not real. It’s not how life works.”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“No?”

I shook my head. “They’re fantasy, nothing more. Like Disney princess stories. Only for adults. And with way more anatomical descriptions. If they were real-life stories, they wouldn’t be so unique. I won’t stop reading them, but I know I’ll stop thinking it’s possible. And by the way, if there really are guys like that in the world, how many of them do you think are looking for dates on the Internet?”

“Ouch, that hurts,” she said.

“No, I’m serious. You know you weren’t going to find a guy like that on those dating sites. So you weren’t really looking for that, anyway.”

She didn’t respond right away. She tilted her head from side to side, as if she were letting the thoughts mix around in there, and then finally said, “I hate how rational you are sometimes, you know that?”

“Yeah, right.”

“It’s true. You’re always able to see something the way I can’t, and you always figure things out.”

I sipped the last drops of my drink, and looked around the club, thinking it would be nice if I could figure out my own problems as easily.