Something About You (Just Me & You) (5 page)

Cruising for a bruising, aren’t you, son?

Gage heard Grandpa Fitzgerald’s voice in his head as he
pulled his headphones off during the next commercial break, aware that his last
ad lib was dangerously revelatory. Gage normally made it a rule to regale his
listeners with tales of one-night stands and girlfriends from his distant past.
Skewering Sabrina March on air — even though he hadn’t mentioned her or
her boss by name — had been a little over the top.

But how could he resist after she handed him the perfect
fodder?

“So say, dude.” Gideon downed the last of his energy drink
and looked at Gage curiously. “That story about the maid of honor — you’re
not just yanking my chain, are you?”

“Absolutely not,” Gage replied with a lazy grin. “God
created Mondays so man could make his sordid weekend confessions.”

“Then you better hope the lady herself isn’t listening,”
Gideon laughed nervously and downed the last of his energy drink. It wasn’t
even eight in the morning, and Gage’s lanky coworker was already on his third
can.

“Not a chance,” Gage assured him. “She’s more of the NPR
type.”

Or perhaps she was into classical music. He could easily
imagine Sabrina driving to the Capitol office in a brand new Lexus — she
was a luxury car kind of woman if he’d ever seen one — and listening to
Chopin plink through the speakers. There was no way she would intentionally
tune into “Fitz and Giggles,” he assured himself.

He’d stayed well inside the safe zone.

Gage took advantage of the rest of the break to refresh his
coffee and check in with his assistant, a recent college graduate who gave him
the rundown on the types of calls that were coming in. Predictably, a lot of
former groomsmen had phoned in with their own tall tales to tell. Even more
predictably, most claimed to have sealed the deal with one of the women
standing on the opposite end of the aisle.
Am I the only one willing to
admit defeat?
Gage wondered.

While pre-taped props for sponsored advertisers aired, he
kicked back in his chair, sipped his coffee and put his brain on idle. When he
embarked on his career, he’d discovered that his best ideas came to him when he
didn’t try to script them out in advance. Fortunately, the station had paired
him up with Frank Gideon, a talk show veteran of fifteen years and master of ad
lib who didn’t mind letting Fitz take center stage. “Giggles” fluidly fed into
the on-air banter, goading Gage into riotous monologues and punctuating his
one-liners with jittery chuckles.

The position at KCAP had opened up at an opportune time, and
in light of Chicago’s floundering economy, Gage had booked a one-way ticket to
Austin posthaste as soon as he’d received an offer from the station. That his
oldest college chum, Sebastian Cole, happened to live in the same city was
added incentive. After the two men graduated and went their separate ways, they
had kept in touch through the rare phone call and even rarer cross-country
visit. But to Gage, it seemed as though they spent most of their talk time
frenetically trying to play catch-up with each other’s lives. Now he looked
forward to reconnecting with the kid genius at leisure. They’d drink a few
bottles of beer over a game of pool, just like old times. In the process, Gage
hoped to get to know Sebastian’s new bride, Molly, much better.

Gage never doubted he’d made the right move. “Fitz and
Giggles” had reached dizzying levels of success during the first month that it
had aired. For the first time in his life, he felt like he’d found a permanent
place for the rest of his career to play out. There was no shortage of lonely
men in the City of the Perpetually Single, so his show came with a built-in
audience — mainly blue-collar workers who needed to vent about angry
ex-girlfriends, nasty breakups and bar prowl failures. The station’s program
director came around for the occasional finger-shaking whenever the show took a
sudden foray into subject matter of questionable taste. But for the most part,
The Powers That Be kept “Fitz” on a long lead.

Gage could think of worse things to do with his day than
shooting the breeze with Gideon for the better part of five hours. He looked
around at the soundproofed studio. The small room was decorated with concert
posters, station stickers and Gideon’s collection of vintage bobbleheads. A
large dry-erase board affixed to the wall behind them tracked the number of
times a technician had to use the dump button whenever a caller used language
forbidden by the FCC. “Fitz and Giggles” had racked up an impressive five hash
marks, he noticed.

And it was only Monday. 

“You gonna try to see this chick again? Pick up where you
left off?” Gideon leaned in closer for the confidential scoop with a lascivious
smile.

“Oh, I’ll see her, all right,” Gage told his coworker. That
much was unavoidable. “But the chances of anything coming to fruition are zero
to nil. She and I usually don’t frequent the same social circles, as you might
have guessed.” He reached for the tin of Hershey’s chocolate syrup that resided
next to the coffeemaker and poured some into his cup.

“I dunno,” Gideon said. “If I were you, I’d try to run the
rest of those bases. Trust me, dude. Those hard-edged types end up being a
pretty soft squeeze once you get them inside the four corners of your
mattress.” His coworker cracked open another energy drink and lifted the can in
a knowing salute.

Soft squeeze or not, there was one thing that Gage
intuitively knew about Sabrina March. She was five feet and three inches of
nothing but trouble. When he asked Sebastian about the maid of honor he’d
likely be paired with if Jace pulled one of his disappearing acts, Sebastian
had summoned up his best academic’s flair and pulled out a quote from “The
Taming of the Shrew.”

That gave Gage a fair outline of what he could expect from
Molly’s best friend, but it was still only a bare sketch of her personality.
Then when Sabrina had told him that she was Chief of Staff for one of Austin’s
most renowned legislators, he saw the full picture. Determined and
career-focused, she was exactly the kind of self-made woman who’d scrapheap a
long-term relationship if she had an inkling that she wouldn’t always get to
call the shots. Gage could see her meticulously striking out items on a “honey
do” list while the poor schmuck who summoned up the balls to propose played
water boy to her star hitter.

“Confession: I was going to keep this little baby for
myself,” Gideon drawled slyly. He produced a business card from a grubby wallet
and flicked it in Gage’s direction. “But because you struck out so miserably at
the wedding, she’s all yours.”

“I don’t know anyone named Tara Reese.” Gage studied the
card, which identified its former owner as the assistant manager of Oasis, an
upscale day spa.

“Remember the marathon the station hosted last week? We ran
into her there. You definitely made an impression.”

“Which one was she?”

“Tall? Blonde? Hot body? D-cups? I think she had a boob
job,” Gideon smirked.

“Congratulations, bro.” Gage feigned enthusiasm. “You just
described almost every female contestant in the race. So what the hell am I
supposed to do with this?” He tossed the business card back to his colleague.

“Call her.” Gideon pushed it back with his fingertips. “She
asked me if I thought you would.”

“Wonderful. What did you tell her?” Gage groaned. His
coworker had one criterion for sussing out what he considered to be women
suitable for dating: their level of physical “hawtness.” For all Gage knew,
this Tara person could have the personality of the average houseplant.

“I told her that you might or might not. That you were
fickle that way.”

“Jesus, Gideon,” Gage groaned. “You’re an ass.”

“Hey, I just do whatever it takes.” His coworker shrugged.
“Seemed to make her even more interested.”

Gideon didn’t mind using his fame as one-half of Austin’s
most famous on-air duos as leverage to score women who would have made
themselves unavailable to him otherwise. Gage
did
mind. He didn’t like
mixing business with pleasure.

“You gotta stop taking candy from babies.” Gage reluctantly
pocketed the business card. “I don’t even remember this woman.” Whoever Tara
Reese was, she was probably a perfectly nice woman, even if she wasn’t too
interesting to talk to. A woman who was waiting for him to call her and ask her
out.

If he didn’t,
he
would be the ass.

“You don’t need to remember her.” Gideon gave Gage a knowing
look. “Trust me, all you need to know is that she’s
hawt
.”

The conversation came to an abrupt halt when Gage’s assistant
poked his head through the doorway near the end of the break. “We finally got a
live one,” he announced. “Caller was supposed to get married this weekend, but
his fiancée ran off with the preacher.”

“Sounds juicy,” Gideon commented as he rubbed his palms
together.

“Bump him to the top of the queue,” Gage told the assistant.

Wedding celebrations — even those riddled with drama
and dysfunction — had a strange way of putting Gage in a sentimental mood,
although he’d never admit it to anyone. Not even to Sebastian, who seemed
ridiculously happy with his new bride. Weddings reminded him that the hopeful
teenaged boy his romance-dissuaded radio personality mocked was still inside of
him somewhere. That somewhere in this cold, crazy world teeming with too many
people armed with too much high-tech gadgetry to distract them, couples like
his grandparents, buried side by side just shy of their sixtieth anniversary,
still found a quiet place to exist.

Weddings always made him want to kiss the girl.

Then he’d seen Sabrina March standing on the porch looking
at him with curiosity and wariness in her eyes. He knew nothing about her other
than one thing. He knew that someone needed to kiss her, and that it needed to
be done right. 

He’d
definitely
done it right.

The commercial break came to an end, and Gage slid his
earphones back on. “You’re listening to ‘Fitz and Giggles’ on KCAP,” he brayed
into the microphone. “You got a name, caller?”

“Yeah, I do—” He heard a man’s voice tremble after a short
delay. “—And if it weren’t for that miserable f-(BEEP)-in’ b-(BEEP) I nearly
got hitched to, I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to say it.”

Gage recognized the on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown quaver in
the caller’s voice.
Only women have the ability to inspire that
, he
thought. And to think they were called the “gentler sex.”

“Sounds like you, sir, have a sad story to share,” he
commiserated as he tossed Gideon a red marker.

His coworker smiled gleefully, popped the cap and drew two
more hash marks on the dry-erase board.

**

As Sabrina entered the main rotunda, the staccato click of
her heels echoed across the whispering gallery’s glossy terrazzo floor of the
old main Capitol building.

She never tired of admiring the ornate plasterwork that
adorned the Dome’s supporting columns or the gargantuan paintings of Texas
governors that lined its circumference. She inhaled deeply.
There it is.
That familiar smell: old books, cold stone and decades-old dust.

The musty smell faded when she stepped off the elevator that
took her to the underground annex. The extension that housed Theo’s offices had
taken quite a bit of tricky architectural maneuvering to mimic the Classic
Revivalist style of the main rotunda. Strategically placed skylights made the
structure appear large and airy. At the core of the underground structure was a
vast open-air rotunda known as the “fish bowl,” where legislators and staff
hobnobbed. The offices were tucked in a confusing labyrinth of passageways.
Sometimes Sabrina still got turned around when it was night and she couldn’t
use the cast of the sun as her guide.

She breezed through the doorway and automatically directed
her smile at the front desk, where Violetta Vasquez, the receptionist, usually
sat. Only this morning, the phones were unmanned, and the front desk was devoid
of Violetta’s cheerful personal clutter: a family of small porcelain ducks,
numerous pictures of nieces and nephews and her Maxine coffee cup.

Otherwise, everything else was in its place, from the
crumbling dried flower arrangements that Theo’s wife, Jillian, had adorned the
reception room with to the four large blue recycling bins on the far side of
the room. Each bin was decorated with flower decals and painted in a child’s
irregular print:
Paper, Glass, Plastik, Alumimum
. The office was redolent
with the smells of hazelnut coffee and the furniture polish Theo’s private
eco-friendly cleaning team used.

Sabrina frowned.

Where was everyone? Theo normally didn’t grace them with his
presence until later in the morning, but Carlton and Moira, her coworkers, were
always in the front office bantering and bickering.

More pressingly, where was Violetta?

Her ears picked up the sound of chatter coming from the far
back office, which Sabrina and her coworkers had christened the Think Tank.
Crossing through the War Room, where office meetings were held, she found Moira
and Carlton hovering around the office radio, coffee and pastries in hand.
What
could possibly be so riveting?
Sabrina wondered as she stared at their
backs.

“
—so keep it on KCAP for more ‘Fitz and Giggles’—
”

She cleared her throat. The pair looked around, bug-eyed.
Moira stopped chewing her jelly donut. Carlton, the quick thinker of the two,
hastily turned the volume down. His dark skin was coupled with pale green eyes
and a shock of glossy black hair — an exotic combination on any human
being, but with his bone structure, he could have been a model. He certainly
had the fashion sense. He wore a double-breasted designer suit she hadn’t seen
before. Likely another high-hanging fruit harvested from his success at
e-trading.