The Proposal (13 page)

"No, no, it's not
what you think. Nadine!" he started, the idea was so ludicrous it hadn't
even occurred to him what she might make of it. And he was topless too. He
shook his head vehemently. But each time he moved forward, she moved back.

"Nadine!" he shouted
more out of desperation than anger, "She's just a friend."

"We had a business
agreement, remember?" she found the strength from somewhere. Her voice
steady and her gaze firm though there was hurt in her eyes. She handed over the
check. "Just as we agreed. Two thousand four hundred dollars."

He refused to take it,
his face clouding over and his jaw muscles tightening. He glared at her,
"I don't want it Nadine."

"Take it. I had a
proposal, you agreed. That's all it was to you wasn't it?"  She dared
to look him in the eye.

That’s all I was to
you.

"No! No! No! This
isn't what it seems.  What's gotten into you?" He was furious, the
veins on his forehead standing out and throbbing. Nadine had never seen him
like this. The sudden courage she had found was slowly ebbing away and she felt
weak and wobbly again.  She placed the check on the floor and quickly
turned around and left.

Ethan didn't bother
coming after her or shouting after her. 

And she wasn't expecting
him to either.

Settling back into work
had been the tonic Nadine needed.

 The first week
especially had been full on. She worked twelve hour days, trying to catch up
with the workload that followed such a convention. There were all the emails to
deal with from the international marketing departments that she had met at the
convention. Mario, as nice and as gallant as he had been, was relentless in his
pursuit of information and tasks he needed to run by Nadine.

Each day, Nadine worked
harder and harder. Work meant not having time to think about Ethan. 

Melissa had asked her how
Ethan was doing but Nadine's short remark told her that something was wrong and
the two of them had most likely had a spat. So Melissa made sure she didn't ask
again, although she had taken a liking to Ethan, finding him funny and down to
earth. She thought he was the perfect man for Nadine because she had never, in
the whole time she had worked for Nadine, seen the other funny and carefree
side to her. And now, Melissa watched Nadine return to her former self.

Pre-Ethan. Driven,
focused, relentlessly ambitious.

If she carried on like
this, she would soon end up like Sandra. Everything that Sandra threw at
Nadine, which was about double the workload she had been throwing at her before
the convention, was stuff that Nadine could handle. But only because there was
no Ethan to distract her.

The Noble Vintage account
was getting signed off in a few days time and Nadine knew that Sandra was
clearing her space to dedicate more time for them. Which was why everything on
Sandra's workload was coming her way.

Ethan spent more time at
his workshop, longer hours, sometimes nights too. Billy, the friend he shared
the house with, and Zoe, his girlfriend, noticed his quietness. They didn't
know about the business agreement but they did know he had been away with a
girl.  Someone he had met and he obviously had liked. He had started to
tell them bits about Nadine before they had gone away. They were expecting more
information when he came back but knew something was wrong when he didn't say
anything.

"I'm the cause of
all this," Zoe mentioned to Billy, when they saw Ethan, head down and go
out after breakfast.  "She came back here, to drop something off, and
I opened the door. And Ethan had his shirt off, you spilt your beer on him and
he took it off, remember?" Billy nodded, remembering that day well. Ethan
had been quiet and withdrawn ever since returning from the weekend break.
"

“The lady came back, saw
me, saw Ethan and they had a spat. I think she thinks we're together,” said
Zoe.

"What does Ethan
say?" Billy was curious to know.

"He says she should
know better. But, us women, we don’t think like that, especially when we're in
love. Our emotions get the better of us."

"What're you going
to do about it? Don't seem right to have this situation. He looks as miserable
as hell. I bet she's doing no better." 

Zoe said nothing. She
wasn't sure how to sort this out. She wasn't even sure if she should get
involved.

Ethan went back to his
workshop.

He had been renting a
room downtown at an artist's gallery for the past four years. He created
metal structures and pieces which were sometimes displayed in art
galleries.  It had been a passion of his but it didn’t pay very well
unless you were regularly exhibited and had many customers wanting to buy the
artwork.

It had been almost ten
days since their weekend away at the convention.  He hadn't seen Nadine
since the day she had dropped him off, when she had turned up at his door with
the check for payment. And then they had had that row.

But he thought of her
every day. His was an anger that was slow to build up and slow to release. It
simmered inside him. As it had been ever since she had doubted his intentions.
The first thing that had annoyed him was that she turned up at all with the
check.

He would have gone with
her for nothing.

During the weekend, he
forgot all about the proposal because he had started to fall in love with her.
She had intrigued him from the moment that he had first set eyes on her at her
sister's hen-night. She was the first woman who didn't want to join in and get
rowdy on the floor with him. Where all others were drunk and merry, over the
top crazy, flirting like mad and desperate to touch his body, Nadine had backed
off. She'd hidden in the kitchen behind a laptop working on her report. And
when he had tried to coax her onto the floor, the look of fear on her face made
him back off. He found her fascinating and the more he got to know her, the
more he felt she was the woman for him.

The fact that she showed
up with the payment a short while after dropping him home, told him that she
had viewed their entire weekend as nothing but a business arrangement. That was
all it had ever been to Nadine.

She had worked the plan
to her advantage. At the hotel the double vodka and the champagne had gone to
her head. The Roman Gardens had given their first date a magical backdrop and
he had fallen for her amidst the beauty of the setting. He thought Nadine had
felt the same way too. But he saw now that she hadn’t.

She was still the same
business minded woman she had always been.

He had to face the facts
of the situation now.

A woman like her would
not want a man like him to get in the way of her progress up the management
ladder.

He busied himself back
down in the workshop. He was working on his next creation; a huge architectural
metalwork structure that he hoped he would be able to showcase in a gallery. He
hadn't been able to spend as much time as he liked down here, he'd been busy
trying to earn some extra money to buy the metals and to pay for rent and the
workshop. He almost wished he'd never taken the escort route but that was far
better than being a stripper, which is what Billy did and Zoe didn't seem to
mind.  Although, he thought with a sense of relief, that standing in for
Billy that one night at the hen-night, the only night he had ever tried the
stripper routine, had been worthwhile.

Because that was the
night that he met Nadine.

"Thought I'd find
you down here," Billy sauntered in, wearing his baseball cap back to
front. He had his hands in his pockets and wore an Abercrombie & Fitch
sweatshirt. "Want to talk about it?" he asked, looking at Ethan, who
acknowledged him with a nod but didn't get up. He was busy planing a panel of
metal.

"Nothing to talk
about," said Ethan serenely as he skillfully sanded away.

"You've been
brooding around down here ever since you came back."

"I've got an
exhibition over in Phoenix in September. This is a piece I have to get ready, a
lot of work."

"Hey, congratulations.
I’m happy for you bud. Maybe this'll get you noticed more."

Ethan nodded. "Let's
hope." Then he bent down, his strong arms easily shaping the metal the way
he wanted it to go.

"Chrissie at the
agency keeps leaving messages on the home phone. Says you've been ignoring your
cell phone messages."

Chrissie was the booker
at the agency Ethan had joined and which introduced him to rich women looking
for company.

"I'll call her when
I'm ready. But I'm jacking that all in. I needed it to raise a bit of cash on
the side. Now I have that cash, I'm putting my time and energy into what I do
best."

"And I can't tempt
you into the stripper side of things either?" Billy tried to keep a
straight face. Ethan knew he was kidding but his face gave nothing away.
"I don't regret the one and only routine I did for you."  He
turned and fiddled around in his metal toolkit. 

Billy walked over to him.
"She must have been special."

"She was." Said
Ethan, then started chiseling out a design on the metal plane.

"Zoe said it wasn't
her fault. She misread the situation. She must have been madly in love with
you, to get it that wrong."

Ethan thought about it a
while. A glimmer of hope skirted across his face. If Nadine had purely seen
this as a business arrangement, she wouldn't have cared if he was messing about
with Zoe or having a threesome at his place. But the fact that she flew off the
handle, that she looked so hurt and angry, meant she must have cared for him
deeply. 

But why had she turned up
with the check for payment? Perhaps it was to just keep her side of the deal.
Being Nadine, she would have felt she was withholding something from him. After
all, they did have a deal, even if she didn't feel that it was a deal anymore.
She still would have honored it. 

"Don't throw this
away, over a misunderstanding, dude." Billy punched him lightly on the arm
before heading off. "Adios."

"Thanks. See you
later," Ethan continued to stare at the door long after Billy had left.

But he was filled with a
flicker of hope and that was enough for him.

"She says she's a
friend of a friend and she's insisting on seeing you," Melissa's voice
came through the phone a little too loud and clear.

Nadine sat in her leather
chair and was staring out through the window at the city before her. She often
did this. Sometimes it was peaceful to just turn away from her desk and gaze
out of the window. 

But her thoughts were
filled with Ethan more and more as time went by. She could no longer hide
behind the pressure of work. And a part of her didn’t seem to care so much
about the work anymore. She wondered where he was and what he was doing. 
She saw him wherever she went, in a crowd, at the coffee shop, walking along
the road, driving along the street. She saw the backs of many men, similar in
height, in build, in haircut and wondered if they were him.

"Who does she say
she is again?" asked Nadine in annoyance.

"Zoe," Melissa
replied, “she won’t tell me more. She says she needs to speak to you.”

"From which
company?" Nadine's voice had an edge to it. She was up to her eyeballs in
work and she really didn't have the time of day to give to any one trying to
wrangle their way into her office in order to pitch her something she didn't
want.

"Just get rid of her
Melissa, please," Nadine was insistent.

"She says she's a
friend of Ethan’s." Nadine went silent. She grasped the phone tightly in
her hands, wondering if anything bad had befallen him. All of a sudden she was
afraid. She had a feeling it would be bad news. "Send her in," she
said quietly.

Nadine got up and walked
towards the door, only to be stopped half way, as Melissa opened the door and a
slim, young looking girl stood nervously outside. Being nervous was not an
emotion that came very easily to Zoe.  Even at the delicate age of twenty
four. She was street smart and cocky, self-assured and defiant. But she seemed
slightly in awe of the swish offices of the Zimmerman Group and especially the
inside of Nadine's office, with its panoramic view of the city before it.

Nadine recognized her
straight away, as the woman at Ethan's house on that day. This made her even
more afraid because if anything had happened to Ethan, this woman would be the
one to know.

"Come in," said
Nadine quickly, "thanks Melissa, that will be all." Then she turned
to the girl and asked, "Is he alright?"  Her eyes were large and
she was pale.

Zoe walked towards the
big window and looked out. "No, he's not alright at all. Nice view."
The sentence annoyed Nadine who was anxious to get the information.
"What's happened to him?" asked Nadine hesitantly, not sure if she
wanted to know the answer.