When Dreams Cross (12 page)

Justin leaned back and laid his palms down on his desk. “Andi, I’ve been considering ways to bring Promised Land into my cartoons. But
I
am the animator. I’m the one who comes up with the ideas. Not you.”

“Fine,” Andi clipped. “Then talk to me about them. We’re in this together, Justin.”

Justin tapped the tips of his fingers together, a frown buckling his brows. “I kind of liked the idea of reworking some of your rides so that they fit more into my farm theme. I can’t exactly see Ned the nearsighted farmer trekking up Mt. Sinai.”

Her feigned composure shattered like crystal. “You want to rework my rides? Do you know what you’re asking?”

“Not to any great extent,” he said, stemming further objections with his hands. “We wouldn’t reverse any of the progress already made on them. But since most of them aren’t finished yet, there’s plenty of room for improvement on the original plans.”

“Improvement? I have some of the best creative minds in the world helping plan my park. It would be easier to change the cartoons.”

“Forget it,” Justin snapped. “If it doesn’t fit my story line, I won’t even consider it.”

“That isn’t what B.J. said,” Andi flung back. “He and the others have already come up with ideas for the stories.”

Justin dropped his hands with a loud thud. “Who gave you the right to give assignments to my staff? I don’t like being undermined. I’m the animation director here, not B.J. They’re my characters, and
I
make the decisions.”

Andi’s voice flared louder than she expected. “You gave me the right when you told me that B.J. could make decisions for you while you were gone.”

Justin sprang out of his chair and slammed it back against his desk. “I didn’t know you’d go behind my back and try to rewrite the scripts for me. There’s timing to consider, and the possibilities for gags, and the potential for a different story each week without overdoing the same old things. You think just because you dreamed up Promised Land that you can come in here and do the same thing with my cartoons? Forget it! I’d rather let you sue me!”

Andi stood up and cast a murderous stare at the man across the desk. “I might just have to do that if you don’t stop attacking me every time I approach you with an idea! There are decisions that have to be made immediately. Like how to handle the advertising for the park. Are your characters going to be associated with that or not? And the cartoon that coincides with our opening. Since I’m paying for that, I expect to be in on the planning stages. That’s how I work, Justin! Like it or not. And we can make it as easy or as difficult as we want to. But as long as we keep butting heads, neither of us will make any headway, and we’ll have to give up on this merger as a bad idea.”

Justin sucked in a dramatic breath. “Do you think there’s really hope of that?”

For lack of anything else to lash out at, Andi knocked her chair over with a crash and pointed a shaking finger at him. “There’s always hope,” she seethed. “But if I were you I’d think about it for a while! And when you think you’re ready to sit down and discuss this reasonably without blowing a fuse every time you disagree with me, then you know where to find me!”

The door slammed behind her, leaving Justin fuming with impotent rage. After a moment, he stepped out into the open area of his offices and thundered out Madeline’s name, ordering her to gather his senior animators for a conference. “I’ll come up with some ideas all right,” he mumbled, jerking the chair off the floor and setting it upright with a clatter. “But I won’t need Andi Sherman to help me do it.”

Chapter Seventeen

I
t was past midnight when the exhausted animators convinced Justin to sleep on the ideas they’d formulated. Gene was stretched catatonically across the table that was cluttered and stacked with discarded drawings, and B.J. sat humped over the drafting table in the corner of Justin’s office. Madeline, the only one still awake, had gone to check on some of the things the engineers needed to know about the robot designs before morning. Nathan was half asleep sitting on the floor, his head leaned back against the wall, a mountain of crumpled paper covering the carpet around him. But Justin still paced in front of his desk, studying the drawings laid out across it, searching them for flaws.

Perfect
, he thought, adrenaline rushing through his blood, making it even more unbelievable to him that the others could have dropped out on him like this. They’d found a way to incorporate all the different themes of Andi’s park into his stories, and the kickoff cartoon on ABC that would coincide with the park’s opening would be an international invitation to Promised Land. He’d discovered a way to have the characters still live on their eventful farm, but instead of making Ned simply a nearsighted farmer bumbling around his own farm, they would send him through time warps in which he experienced real biblical stories in his klutzy, slapstick way, getting him into trouble from which his farm animals had to rescue him. Khaki Kangaroo would be his sidekick, stirring up more trouble and getting them into the thick of all of the greatest events of the Bible. Their travels could take them to other countries, leading to adventures related to Promised Land’s “Hands Across the Sea” area; or other planets, relating to the “He Also Made the Stars” portion; or to oceans, associating the cartoons with the Jonah and Nineveh sections of the park. The adventures were limitless, and the basic gags and story lines would require very little alteration, since the villainous troll would be swept into the travels with them in each episode, representing the ever-present Satan tugging them toward his own ways. The potential for evangelism was limitless, and he could even see parents watching the cartoons with their children and learning growth principles about their own walk with Christ. Principles he would do well to learn himself, he mused.

Biting his victorious smile, Justin began to stack the drawings. “You guys go on home,” he said absently as he slid them into an envelope. “I’m going to put these on Andi’s secretary’s desk. She’ll hit her with them first thing tomorrow.” Caught in his thoughts and exuberance, he didn’t realize as he hurried across the floor that not one of the animators had stirred.

A
ndi sat with her bare feet curled under her on her office sofa, studying her father’s Bible that lay open in her lap. She had done it again. She had let her pride drive her, had forgotten all the regrets and apologies … Once again, she had allowed them to become enemies.

She’d knocked off work hours ago, since she didn’t have the heart for it, and had decided to spend some time in prayer. She had wept and confessed it all to God—all the jealousy and pride, all the lies and games she had played with Justin, all the bad feelings and bitterness, all the sorrow and hopelessness.

And she had confessed that she still hadn’t gotten into step with Christ, even though she had seen that it was the problem. She had put her work before him, and she had let her obsessions with Justin distract her.

So now she had gone back to the Bible, the only source from which she could get real strength, the only place she could go for real advice. As she read, a peace came over her. God had forgiven her. It wasn’t too late to get things right.

She could have taken the Bible home to read, but she had decided to do it here.

She wasn’t tired, and lately she’d avoided her apartment until she was too exhausted to think. Life had been disturbingly empty since her father’s death and Justin’s trip to New York. There had been no direction for her, no place to go after hours. She missed her father desperately, as well as the bland hospital food and her quiet friendships with the nurses and doctors who had attended him. She missed the few days she had spent with Justin, the supportive smiles, the gentle touches. And she knew she would never know those things again.

A shadow in the area outside her office startled her, and she sat up, alarmed, as the dark shape of a man came into view.

“We’re suffering from the same disease,” Justin mumbled in a gravelly voice, making her exhale in relief as he stepped into her yellow circle of light. In a weary stance, he leaned his wrist against the doorjamb over his head and set the hand with the envelope on his hip, but his eyes were bright and wide-awake.

“What disease is that?” she asked, trying to stop the smile creeping across her face as she sensed gratefully that he had put the morning’s fight behind him.

“Workaholism.” Stepping inside, he plopped down on the opposite end of the sofa and threw his arm across the back. “I didn’t think it was possible that anyone else could be working this late, and here you are.”

Andi sighed and set her Bible on the cushions between them. “I just can’t seem to turn off my mind and go home. Is it that way for you?”

“You know it is,” he whispered, raking his hand through his hair, his blue eyes beginning to smile in answer. His eyes swept over her, and her hand gravitated self-consciously to her hair. It was still up, but stray wisps had eased out of their pins and feathered around her neck and face in slight disarray.

Their eyes locked for a long, quiet moment, and finally Justin tore his eyes from her and looked down at the envelope he’d brought. “I’ve been working on this,” he said in his lazy baritone. “I think we’ve come up with something you’ll like, but it can wait until morning if you’re too tired. I was just coming to leave it on your secretary’s desk.”

As if she’d just been tempted with a gift, her smile grew with anticipation, and she leaned forward to get it.

Forcing his attention to the drawings, he explained in a soft voice what each one represented, and the new twist in the story line, and the way the park would be an important part of the cartoons. Andi’s eyes glittered with appreciation as she turned the pages, and she laughed under her breath at each situation. When she had finally seen them all, she handed them back to Justin. “Brilliant,” she said. “It’s everything I wanted.”

“Even though you didn’t think of it?” he asked, cocking a heavy brow.

“Justin, when are you going to learn?” she asked, her eyes luminous with conviction. “I’m not out to be your enemy.

It’s just that I don’t like settling for things. Everything can always be improved on.”

“But you don’t have to be the one who improves everything, Andi,” he said without rancor. “The world won’t deflate if Andi Sherman rests. And it won’t fall to pieces if you miss something. You’ve held it all together beautifully, but you’ve got to trust me to know what’s best about my part in all this.”

Andi leaned her head back against the cushions and looked off at nothing across the room, a sigh punctuating her thoughts. “I know. It’s just that it all means so much to me. It’s so important.”

“I know.” His voice was soft with gentle understanding. “It means a lot to me too.”

When quiet settled between them, tension mounting to the point that there was no place for the conversation to move except into the realm of the personal, Justin decided it was time to go.

Standing up, he took the drawings and gave a careless, feline stretch of his arms, starting toward the door. “Guess I’d better go get some sleep so I’ll be worth something tomorrow,” he said.

Was it disappointment he saw flash in the emerald depths of her eyes or only fatigue, he wondered for an instant?

“Me too,” she said, picking her Bible back up. “Thanks for coming by.” Her voice was so soft, so cautious, that he wasn’t sure how to read it. Pushing the ambiguity in her tone and her expression out of his mind, he strode back through the darkness to the elevator and rode down to his floor.

B.J. and Nathan had gone home, but Gene still lay like a cadaver across the table in Justin’s office. He shouldn’t have worked them so hard today, he thought with a smile as he sat down behind his desk. Only people like himself and Andi, who did it because they couldn’t help themselves, should be forced to stay this late. He considered waking Gene, then decided against it. He seemed to be sleeping soundly, and waking him to go home and sleep seemed to defeat the purpose.

His mind drifted four floors above him to Andi curled up on that sofa all alone. He had wanted so much to linger there with her. But she had made it clear before his trip that she didn’t want a relationship with him. Still … there was something in her eyes when she looked at him …

His eyes fell to the golden form of Khaki Kangaroo. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands as he thought what a jerk he had been when he saw it this morning. Instead of realizing that it had taken a caring person to dream up a gift like that, much less execute it, he had discounted it as cheap strategy aimed at … what? Appeasing him long enough to spring her ideas on him? Her ideas hadn’t been so far off base. Even if it had come from her staff, he knew it had been Andi’s idea. And that meant something.

As he turned it carefully in his hand, the light of his lamps played softly off the bottom of the kangaroo. He squinted and held the statue closer to the bulb, trying to make out the letters inscribed in script. “To Justin, for victories without wars. You win, I win … Love Andi.”

You win, I win,
he chanted mentally. From the song by Jackson Browne, Andi’s longtime favorite singer.
You win, I win … we lose.
Was that what she had meant? Or was it just a rebuttal of the thought she’d uttered days ago?
Neither of us can win when we’re together
.

Whatever the message meant, it sent his heart careening. It
was
a personal gift, and he had been so ungrateful that he’d humiliated her into lying about it, only proving the point of her engraved message.
You win, I win …
We lose. Again the words flitted through his mind. Was that why she had cut things off with him? Had his constant resistance to her ideas—his determination to always be right—convinced her that was the only way?

He looked at the door and wondered if he should follow his impulse to go back to her office. What would he say?

Deciding that he’d know what to say when he got there, he dashed into the elevator hoping he wasn’t too late to catch her.

She was just where he had left her, but as he approached her door, he saw her simply staring with sad, sullen eyes across the room to the large window. The lonely glare in her green eyes disappeared at his knock, and she flashed a welcoming smile so convincing that he wondered if he’d imagined the sorrow.

Walking in, he answered her smile. “I was thinking,” he said softly. “What do you say we find a pizza place that delivers this late? We owe ourselves a celebration for the amazing thing that happened tonight, and frankly, I forgot to eat.”

Andi laughed with bewilderment, the sound playing like wind chimes in his heart. “What amazing thing?” she asked. “Wasn’t it an ordinary night?”

“Not by any stretch of these vivid imaginations of ours,” he said, “because tonight we finally agreed on something.”