Too Hot To Handle

“I wouldn’t mind if she’d implode,” Jeremy said. “It’s the exploding that’s making me think that job with Hall & Lindstrom wouldn’t be such a bad idea.”

“Jeremy, you wouldn’t!”

“Sarah,” he mimicked her, “I would and will if you don’t…”

“…call him,” her five devoted employees chorused while Sarah glared at them.

SHE WOULDN’T. She couldn’t. They didn’t understand.

That summer, the summer after she and Alex graduated, they were more desperate for each other than ever, knowing that soon they’d be going away to college. They would be apart in body, but not in spirit. They would work it out. What they had was too perfect to let go.

No one could imagine how she felt the night she waited for him, hot and tremulous, already wet and ready for him just knowing she would see him in a few minutes. It was agony to act normal in front of Aunt Becki. But this time Alex simply didn’t arrive. No letter, no phone call, no Alex. Not ever again.

Her knees buckled as she went up the steps to her building. Gritting her teeth against the pain she’d managed to keep in a separate compartment of her soul for so many years, Sarah turned the key in the lock, heard the reassuring click and pushed at the main door, surprised when very little happened. She shoved a little harder.

“Don’t knock over the flowers!” It was her first-floor neighbor Maude who shouted at her from her apartment window. While Sarah hesitated, a door slammed, indicating that Maude had come out into the narrow entrance hall. A series of mutters followed, alternating with oofs and grunts. “You think I have nothing better to do than sign for your deliveries, collect your menus from Chinese restaurants? Where’s my big Christmas tip, that’s what I’d like to know.”

Maude, being a writer and a famous one at that, worked at home, and so, by default, was the building’s doorperson. Her diatribes on this subject were long, loud and venomous.

“Sorry, Maude. What flowers?”

“Your flowers,” Maude said. “So stop trying to break down the door until I get them shoved out of the way.”

The staff had sent flowers to cheer her up, let her know they didn’t really hate her. How sweet of them. They shouldn’t be spending their money, what little they had of it, this way. The door suddenly burst open and Sarah fell into a virtual conservatory.

If not quite a conservatory, it was certainly an enormous bouquet, largely composed of white orchids whose long streamers of blossoms waved toward the high ceiling of the entry. The vase wasn’t a standard florist’s container, but a frosty-looking piece of handblown glass in a pale, smoky hue. Sarah gazed at it, feeling stunned.

“How’re you going to get it into the elevator?” Maude said. Her expression was sour. Beside her, a doleful basset hound uttered a soft moan.

Sarah’s ears buzzed and her voice seemed to come from a distance. “I can’t imagine. Call the Longshoreman’s Union and see if somebody wants a job on the side?”

“I’ve got a dolly.” The words dripped out as slowly as liquid through an intravenous tube.

“Why, thank you, Maude. Just give me a sec to read the card.”

If she wasn’t mistaken, the cardholder that feathered up through the orchids was crafted in sterling silver. Her entire staff put together didn’t have that much money to spare. She knew what the card would say even before she opened the tiny envelope:

Dear Sarah:

Sorry this weekend didn’t work out for you. How about next weekend? You can reach me at any of these numbers….

Her eyes blurred on the string of numbers, written in the neat hand of someone at the florist’s shop, not in a large, rounded scrawl. If the card had actually been in the handwriting she remembered so well as being distinctively Alex’s, she might have fainted.

3

DEAR ALEX:

What a gorgeous bouquet! Thanks so much. It was far too large for my apartment, so I put it on the table in the front hall where all the tenants in my building could enjoy it.

It was very nice to see you again. Unfortunately, I won’t be in town next weekend. I have a new client in…

Sarah halted, her pen poised, thinking of unlikely, out-of-the-way places Alex wouldn’t dream of suggesting he join her. It wasn’t easy. In spite of his wealth and sophistication, Alex had his own interesting way of fitting in everywhere, seemingly as relaxed at the small round table in Aunt Becki’s cottage or eating hamburgers in a greasy spoon as he was in the massive dining room of Eleanor Asquith’s Bel Air mansion.

It was called noblesse oblige, or you could call it plain good manners.

Extensive travel with his mother and her entourage had made him flexible. He could handle cold weather, hot weather and rainy season in the tropics, mountains, deserts and forests.

One thing he hated was inconvenience. Waiting. He liked his trains to run on time, so to speak. So…where could you almost not get to from San Francisco? Someplace you might not choose to go in the first place.

It struck her that Dubuque, Iowa, might be the perfect solution. A quick Internet check showed her that although Dubuque wasn’t impossible to reach from San Francisco, it could not be reached very directly.

…in Dubuque, Iowa, and must make a trip there on Friday. Perhaps another time.

Again, thank you for the magnificent bouquet.

Most sincerely,

Sarah

She paused again, then added “Nevins.” Alex would read her message—“shove off” —loud and clear in her formal language and the use of her last name. He liked getting his own way, yes, but he also had an inner dignity that would keep him from pushing.

Not daring to give herself time to think it over, she licked the envelope flap, pounded it down with her fist, slapped on a stamp and raced for the corner mailbox.

She’d waited until morning to decide how to react to Alex’s floral offering, and felt she’d handled it well. As she sauntered back to her building, she saw that a crew had arrived to do their annual maintenance to the carefully preserved slate roof of the nineteenth-century town house.

At least her apartment house was managed by a responsible, sensitive building management firm, quite unlike the skinflints who managed her office building. She paused for a moment to admire the broad, muscled back and spectacular buns of the man who was directing his workers to the back of the building where a scaffolding was already in place. Wouldn’t it be great if she could lure him into her home for a brief interlude before her own workday started?

It was one thing to entertain such a delightful thought, and quite another to emerge from the shower a short time later and see a man’s face looking through her bathroom window.

Sarah opened her mouth to scream. The neighborhood had been plagued by a Peeping Tom in the last few years. Maude, who claimed to have sighted him twice, had warned her to keep her windows closed and locked and her shades down as the scaffolding provided such easy access to all floors of the building, but had Sarah listened? No, and here she was, facing the Village Voyeur himself!

“Whoa!” the man said through the open window, just before her scream emerged.

She clutched her bath sheet tighter and glared at him. “What do you think you’re doing, looking in my…”

All of a sudden she realized she was seeing the front of the very man whose back she’d been admiring earlier. He gave her a broad, brilliant smile and tipped the bill of his cap. “I’m the roofing contractor, ma’am. Don’t mind me. I’m just on my way up.”

His words trailed off as his gaze focused directly on her. The scene took on the misty quality of a romantic movie as she gazed back. Tall, dark, handsome, deeply tanned—and he was a roofing contractor. Perfect, simply perfect.

Before the fantasy ended, they’d made a date to go out for Thai food that very night. By nine o’clock that evening she wished she had remembered to pull the shades down. The roofing contractor might be breathtakingly handsome, but he was not going to become her man-for-the-moment. Not even for a split second. He told terrible jokes terribly, quizzed the waiter relentlessly until he was sure he hadn’t ordered any Thai food that had any Thai seasonings in it, and she had a deep-seated suspicion he’d neglected to mention he was married. His line, delivered in a low, sexy voice while his eyelids drooped in a manner he must have thought was suggestive, was: “How about we head up to your apartment for a quick one before I hit the road to Brooklyn.”

As the word Brooklyn came across the table, Sarah conceded that the misty quality of their accidental morning meeting was entirely due to steam from the shower. “I don’t drink after dinner,” she said, then added, “Tonight’s my treat.” She whipped out her billfold.

“I wasn’t talking drinks, foxy lady, I was talking…”

Foxy lady? Bleah-h-h-h. She knew perfectly well a drink was not the “quick one” he had in mind. She handled the transaction so swiftly, estimating the tip, rounding it off on the high side and paying in cash, that she was off in one direction and he in another before he had time to absorb the situation.

Not that she was giving up on the idea of finding a man. She would demand to have her office windows washed at once or the management company could look for a new tenant.