One of These Nights

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His head came up. “Yes. Yes, I do. Josh Redstone is one of a kind. He gave me a chance when no one else would, and I owe him everything.”

“It’s nice to have a boss like that,” she said, meaning it in the exact way he did, although he didn’t know it.

“Yes. He’s the best. It’s why everybody who works there stays, and he’s got hundreds of applicants to chose from for any job that opens up.” He dived back into the bag before he said casually, “How did you know I’d be leaving this early on a Friday?”

She made a note to herself never again to assume she could distract this particular mind. At least not for long.

“Actually, I’ve been off since four-thirty. My boss went out of town,” she improvised. “So I figured I had time to grab food.”

He looked up from the bag of small white boxes. “You really don’t have to be my taxi service every day.”

“I know, it’s a sacrifice,” she said with mock melodrama. “I have to drive an entire one hundred yards out of my way to cruise the Redstone driveway.”

“Yeah. Well.” He sounded rather embarrassed. “I got a call today that they have to order a part for my car. And they don’t know how long it will be.” He sounded disgusted, but not truly upset. St. John’s words came back to her. Ian is rarely tense….

“Sometimes parts are hard to find,” she said neutrally.

“I could make it myself faster.”

Sam had to stifle a smile. With any other man, she would have laughed at the comment. With Ian, she knew he was probably right. But he didn’t know she knew what he really did, so she kept quiet. And Ian wasn’t done yet, anyway.

“When I had to have a fender repaired a while back, just because it’s an older car they spent forever trying to match the paint. Like I cared. Henry Ford had it right.”

“Henry Ford?”

“With the Model T. He said you could have it any color you wanted as long as it was black.”

Ian was always tossing off bits of historical trivia like that, she thought yet again. He seemed steeped in history, and as he’d admitted, many of the nonwork-related books she’d seen him with had been historical in nature. She herself was very much of the present, and only cared about history in passing as it applied to her or her work, and given their similar ages the difference intrigued her.

“Everybody driving the same car, same color. Or rather, no color,” she said. “Sounds kind of boring to me.”

He looked at her for a long, silent moment during which she wondered what he was thinking.

“Yes,” he said finally, slowly. “I imagine it would.”

And suddenly the easy camaraderie in the car vanished. It was as if Ian, who’d seemed to finally relax around her, had thrown a wall up between them.

She managed to maneuver it so that they ate dinner at his place—hers was, as befitted a temporary home, minimally furnished, enough to appear curious—but the withdrawal she had sensed continued. The only good thing was that his silence gave her the opportunity to surreptitiously inspect his home further. The more she knew about him, the easier her job would be, she told herself.

“Nice set of pots,” she commented, looking at the copper utensils hanging from a pot rack over the stove.

“My mother’s,” he said briefly. “Cooking is a production with her.”

“But not you?”

“I never learned that kind of cooking. Can’t afford the time.”

Which both answered and didn’t answer her question—time to cook or to learn? Weary of pushing when she wasn’t sure what she was pushing against, Sam finished her meal in a silence that matched his. She helped him clean up, then picked up her purse and keys.

She hadn’t intended to, but at the doorway she stopped and looked back at him. “If I said something to offend you, Ian, I’m sorry.”

To his credit he didn’t deny it. But he didn’t look at her when he answered. “You didn’t. It’s not you.”

Her gut told her to push; her common sense told her to back off. She was here to protect him, after all, not probe his psyche.

As she made her way next door, she wondered why she was having trouble remembering that simple fact.

Ian sat alone in the dark for a very long time. His parents hadn’t lived in this house for ten years, yet he could hear their voices as if they were here in the living room that now gave them heart palpitations to look at. As if he were still the child they didn’t understand.

“Why didn’t you invite your friend in?”

“Why didn’t you go to the party?”

“Why don’t you put that book down and go outside?”

He’d wanted to scream at them. Because I’m not like you, I can’t be like you, I’ll never be like you!

But it would only have hurt them, and he couldn’t do that. He knew they loved him; they simply didn’t understand that he was different. In so many ways. What was so simple for them, that easy, warm charm, just wasn’t in him. He was a throwback or something, a changeling. It wasn’t bad enough that he thought differently than they did, he had to be different in every other way, too.

A misfit, that’s you, he told himself.

It was the only explanation he could think of for what had happened tonight. All Samantha had done was give a simple opinion, and he’d shut down.

No color. Sounds kind of boring to me….

He’d shut down because in that simple statement all the differences between them had leaped out at him, and he wondered what the hell he was doing. More than once over this past week he’d caught himself eagerly looking forward to seeing her. He’d had the thought that the timing on the breakdown of his car couldn’t have been better. He’d even started to leave work at a regular time, and that was a real first.

And today, as much as he wanted to leave early, after a tension-filled day when he hadn’t been able to shake himself free of either Rebecca or Stan, he’d hesitated. He hadn’t wanted to miss riding home with Samantha.

He supposed it was only to be expected. He’d been alone for a long time, since Colleen had given up on him and walked out. Dump him into close proximity with a beauty like Samantha and it was inevitable he’d be drawn like an already singed moth to a new, even brighter flame.

But if he got singed again, he’d have no one but himself to blame.

He rubbed a hand over his eyes. For a while longer he sat there in the darkness. Finally, for the first time in longer than he could remember, he went to bed early, and without even cracking a book.

When the light in the converted living room never came on, Sam sat up straighter and watched the house intently. A short while later the upstairs light in the master bedroom came on, but only for a few minutes. When it went out, she expected the light downstairs to come on at last; he must have forgotten something upstairs.

The house stayed dark.

She looked at the clock on the bedside table. It was barely nine, and this time of year, barely dark. And Ian rarely went to bed before midnight.