Drew put his arm around her and leaned back against the pillows.
“This program is really important to you, isn’t it?”
She nodded, her head against his chest.
“Tell me about it,” he said, his fingers moving through her hair.
She hesitated. Was she ready to get into this with him just yet? Or ever, really? Would he understand? Would he even care? He kept waiting, though.
“I’ve always been interested in how to help teenagers. There are all sorts of programs for little kids, lots of reading groups and playgrounds and stuff like that. But people stop caring about kids once they hit the age of eleven or twelve. And everyone hates teenagers. Which sucks, because that’s just the time of life when everything is changing and scary and you need help. And then when teenagers screw up, no one ever wants to give them a chance again. Especially teens of color.”
“But an arts program?” She looked up at that tone in his voice and saw his raised eyebrows. “Isn’t that just rewarding kids who get into trouble? How’s that going to deter them from getting in trouble again?”
She sat all the way up and pulled the robe tighter around herself. She should have known he wouldn’t get it. But this kind of attitude from him made her even more disappointed than she thought she could be. Disappointed and angry.
“Sending kids to jail for low-level offenses doesn’t deter them from anything; it just makes it worse. People write them off. People like you.”
He tried to interrupt, but she talked over him.
“And that just makes them more likely to screw up again, because at that point they know that no one cares about them. A program like this would show them that people care. It’s not a reward; they would be required to attend and complete the program, but it would give them different ways of coping with stress, and not push them into a system of punishment that could ruin their lives.”
She shook herself and sat up. How was it that she could argue this point totally dispassionately at work, but not with Drew? See, this was why she couldn’t be trusted with difficult personal conversations; her temper always got the better of her.
“I’ll jump into the shower now, if you’re all done with the bathroom.”
Well, he’d fucked that up. He’d clearly hit a nerve there, and before he’d had the chance to figure out what to say, she’d fled to the shower.
He wondered if he should say something after she came out of the bathroom, but she gave him that bright smile she’d kept using on Amy at the wedding and said she was hungry, so he didn’t bring it up.
Instead, he drove her out to the Valley for dim sum for lunch, to a place Carlos had told him about. After they both had fits of giggles about the embarrassing amount of dumplings on their table, things seemed normal again.
They took a long nap in the afternoon sunlight when they got back to his apartment. He woke up to the breeze blowing her hair into his face and her nose nuzzling his neck. He turned over in bed and pulled her underneath him.
She laughed up at him from the nest of his sheets and pillows and his body, her dark hair fanned around her head like a halo, her brown skin glowing against his white sheets. He laughed, too, just because she was here and he was here with her. He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her eyelids, and finally her lips. They kissed like that for a while, nothing more, both with their eyes open, looking straight at each other.
After a while, she sighed and put her finger on his lips.
“Drew, as much as I would like to keep doing this . . . what time is it? My flight is at eight thirty, remember.”
He took a deep breath and rested his forehead on hers. He wasn’t ready for this weekend to be over.
Finally, he looked up at his bedside clock.
“Five.”
She sighed and wrapped her arms around him.
“Okay. Did you still want to stop at that burger place on the way to the airport?”
He touched her cheek with his thumb.
“I would rather stay here in bed doing very dirty things with you until we have to go, but if you’re hungry . . .?”
They didn’t have time to get burgers.
Right before he got off the freeway to LAX, he cleared his throat.
“I’m not on call next weekend, so I could maybe come up. I mean, if you’re free.”
She glanced over at him, opened her mouth, and closed it again. Finally, she said, “Yeah, that works for me. You should come. I’ll probably have some work to do, but—”
He interrupted her.
“Did you hear from your boss about your memo?”
She shook her head, reached for her phone to double-check, and shook her head again.
“Hopefully tomorrow.” She shrugged. “I can’t count on it, though.”
He cleared his throat.
“Um, I really hope he says yes.”
She touched his hand, and he grabbed hers.
“Thanks. Me, too.”
Too soon, they pulled into the terminal and he got out of the car to pull her suitcase out of the trunk. Still holding it, he joined her on the sidewalk and kissed her. Her arms went around his waist, and he marveled again at the touch of her hands, how they turned him on and soothed him all at the same time.
She pulled back first.
“I shouldn’t miss my flight.”
He let go of her but didn’t get back in his car yet.
“Right, okay. See you next weekend?”
Her smile almost knocked him down. She nodded.
“Yeah. See you next weekend.”
Alexa drove herself home from the Oakland airport, still in the combined mood of euphoria and confusion that she’d been in since getting out of Drew’s car at LAX. He’d kept making little references to the future all weekend, from saying that they’d go to the doughnut shop “next time,” to asking about Theo “for future reference.” The whole time, she had been too afraid of destroying the mood to ask him what he meant by all that.
But then when they were almost at LAX, damn it, he’d gone and said that he’d come up to Berkeley next weekend. What was she supposed to have done then? Quiz him on his intentions in the drop-off line at LAX? It’s not like she thought this relationship was going anywhere significant. Drew had made it very clear in the elevator that he wasn’t that kind of guy.
So instead, she’d just said okay. She wasn’t overthinking this, remember?
But she couldn’t sleep that night. Her mind cycled around thoughts of Drew, her boss, her memo and what was probably wrong with it, the weekend and how much fun she’d had, Drew, work the next day, his text asking her to text him when she was home and his increasingly dirty texts after that, the new policy director she was going to have to hire, Drew, the way he’d looked at her when they were in bed. Finally she got up and made a cup of chamomile tea and washed it down with half a Tylenol PM, which gave her about four hours of too-deep sleep.
She woke up groggy but in a much better mood than the night before. She was on her way to the job that she loved, she’d spent all weekend having sex with a hot doctor, and if she was a betting woman, she would bet that Theo would bring doughnuts in that morning.
Sure enough, she ran into him on her way into the building, a pink box in his hand.
“My hero!” she said as she handed him the coffee she’d bought him.
“How did you know I was going to bring doughnuts?” He eyed his coffee and the grin on her face.
“I had a hunch.” She popped open the box and took out hers. “Just what I needed.”
He tested his coffee for temperature, not taking a sip yet.
“We all know you got lucky this weekend. Do you need to flaunt it?”
She just grinned and took a big bite of her doughnut as he followed her into her office.
“Before I forget, did you hear anything? Normally, I wouldn’t have even had to ask, but with you gone this weekend . . .” His voice trailed away as she shook her head. He sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk.
“Okay, we’ll talk about that in a minute. First: the weekend went well, I’m guessing?” He sipped his coffee and reached for his own doughnut.
“It did, thank you.” She pushed all of her anxieties from the night before away and grinned at him.
He leaned back in his seat as she sat down and turned on her computer.
“Excellent. Are you going to see him again?”
She shrugged.
“He’s going to come up here this weekend.”
He toasted her with his coffee cup.
“Good job, Lex. I’m glad one of us is having fun with something that isn’t work related.”
She laughed.
“Me, too. Now, about my program—when do you think the boss will give me a yea or nay? Or even a maybe or nay?”
Theo took a long sip of his coffee and sat back in the chair.
“Well, either he read it over the weekend and will come in with questions for you today . . . or he didn’t even glance at it over the weekend and you’ll have to remind him about it today. We’ll know that soon, at least.”
But she heard nothing from the mayor about her project all morning, even though she sat through two meetings at his side. The third of the day was their biweekly meeting with the city attorney. After the city attorney ran through the list of current lawsuits against the city (protestors, slip-and-fall cases, employment matters, something about a clown) and pending settlement offers, the mayor looked up from the doodles on his notepad.
“Great. Now that we’re done with all of that, Alexa has an idea to run by you. It’s not a legal problem, but I want to make crystal clear that there are no liability issues before we bring this to the council, got it?”
Thanks, boss, for springing this on me. She didn’t even have her notes with her. Luckily, she could recite this from memory.