Now the kid sank down beside me on the bench, waiting for me to either need an ambulance or be fine. His cheap pants and generic navy sports coat were out of place in our upscale lobby, but his body language was right. His spine was hunched, his brow was furrowed, and he worried a blue folder back and forth between his hands. Our small midtown building housed mostly dentists, therapists, and lawyers, so everyone who came here looked about this happy. Maybe his diabetic mom had good insurance, the kind that let him pay midtown prices to fix his cavities or his depression.
I tried another Google-approved deep breath, mentally consigning the kid to the void, along with pro bono cases and all damnable silk skirts. I had to focus. I needed to butter and bedazzle our BANK client back into our stable. I had to explain the missed meeting without admitting I’d wasted yet another billable hour driving toward yet another destitute criminal. Then, assuming I got to six P.M. without running into a henna tattoo or a beaded headband and freaking out, I’d go home. I’d scrub this day off my hide in a boiling shower. Maybe work some sudoku with Henry trying to lie down across my puzzle book.
Those images worked for me better than the recommended beaches. The worst of it seemed over. My heart was banging away, but I could no longer feel it in my eyeballs, and the dizziness was gone. I even got the candy to go down, though it left my mouth feeling dingy and coated.
I stood up, and the kid rose, too, turning to face me. His eyes dropped in that young man’s way that seemed almost inadvertent, sneaking a fast glance down my body. He immediately straightened his spine, making himself taller than me, and when his disconcerting eyes came back to my face, damned if he didn’t smile at me all hopeful. It was adorable, how fast he moved me out of the diabetic-mother category once I was on my feet. I had to smile back, though I’d pretty much been dead from the neck down for the last five months. Even if I had been on my game, this kid wasn’t in my league. He was cute, but he was practically a fetus. Also, it was a sucker bet that my suit was worth more than his car.
He knew it, too. He turned pink all the way to his ear tips and grinned, busted. Then he ducked his head and lifted one shoulder in a “worth a shot” shrug I couldn’t help but find engaging.
“Thanks for your help,” I said. “I’m fine now.”
“My pleasure,” he said.
I headed for the elevator bay, and he followed in my wake. My heart was still jangling, but I was on the back side of it, and I had to get upstairs. The BANK client, Oakleigh Winkley, was fat with money, but she wasn’t fat with much else. The more money fat, the less fat clients have of any other kind. In particular, I would never say, Here comes Oakleigh Winkley, fat with patience.
I pressed the call button and the kid reached out and pressed it, too, three or four times.
“Oh, sorry. It’s just, it makes the elevator come faster, if you press it more,” he said, so earnest it took me a second to realize he was being funny. He didn’t talk like someone from Atlanta proper, though his southern accent was faint enough to peg him as suburban, not rural. “Hey, do you work here?” he asked, scanning the directory between the elevators. “Do you know where I can find Cartwright, Doyle, and Vauss?”
He said my last name wrong, as if it rhymed with house instead of loss.
“I own a good piece of it. You must be here to see one of my partners.” I’d already missed my only meeting today, unless I counted Birdwine. So there was that small mercy. The kid’s botched flirt had been charming, but I didn’t want to sit down and stare into his Kai-style crescent eyes across my desk.
“Oh, cool,” he said. “I’m Julian Bouchard?”
He said it like a question, as if he was wondering if I’d heard of him. I shook my head—I hadn’t—and was about to extend a hand and introduce myself when the elevator dinged and the doors slid open.
He stepped back, saying, “After you,” like a proper baby gentleman.
I got on and pressed the button, telling him, “We’re up on seven.”
Julian ducked his head in that engaging doglike way again and turned to face the closing doors. “Thank you.”
He looked too young to be married, much less divorcing, very much less able to pay our rates. His loafers had a man-made upper. We kicked kids like this gently down the food chain to cheaper lawyers, ones who specialized in dividing up hand-me-down furniture and debt.
The elevator dinged our floor, and as the doors slid open, I saw I’d caught our BANK, just barely. Oakleigh was in mid-storm-out. She clocked our human presence, but didn’t look up from her phone long enough to recognize me. She jabbed at the screen, her color very high, waiting for the breathing shapes in the elevator to get out of her way.
The very thought of dealing with this much pissed-off princess made me press my palm against my jangling heart again. I was filled with a sudden longing to let the doors slide closed between us before she saw me. I could ride back down to six. There was an office full of shrinks one floor down, the good kind that could write prescriptions. Surely there was a pill that could stop little pieces of dead mother from manifesting during work hours.
Julian waited for me to step out first, like a mannerly, pale duckling, fully imprinted and waiting to follow.