Page 54 of What I'm Looking For

“Well, that day I saw you with Steve? At the community center? I had a hard time reading you. And at the bar, too.” I wave a hand up and down in front of my face. “You had sort of a mask up. But right now, and all day today, you’ve been like a different person.”

“Yeah.” Her gaze out the window, she lets out a little sigh. “I do my best to stay under the radar around the guys I work with. The way I dress, the things I talk about—I keep it all buttoned up.”

“Isn’t it hard to work in a situation like that? Where you have to cover up who you are?”

She shrugs. “It’s the only way I can survive. Plus, I don’t want to be friends with them. I want them to respect me.” Her chopsticks become extensions of her hands, emphasizing her points as she gathers steam. “And most of them have very little respect for women. So, if they see me as this gender-free being who produces the best research and who makes the right calls the majority of the time, I don’t care what they think of me.”

She scoops up more orange chicken. “This is so good. Do you want any more of it?”

“I’m good, thanks.” I give up on the chopsticks and grab a fork. “Jiao seemed surprised to see a man with you.”

She swallows. “Actually, you’re the first person I’ve slept with in three years.”

I have to cover my mouth and cough to avoid choking on the food I just shoveled in. “Are you kidding me? But you’re so… into it.”

Eyes glued to her plate, she pushes her food around. “I had a disaster of a breakup my senior year of college, and I just decided I was going to concentrate on my career for a while. It’s not like I can’t enjoy myself by myself.” One side of her mouth lifts. “There is one more drawer in my nightstand.”

My smile matches hers. Before I can suggest that we check out drawer number three, she asks, “And anyway, what about you? From what Deb and Pam said, it seems like you haven’t been dating much.”

“Ugh, I knew I shouldn’t have left you alone with them. My roommates have big mouths.” I fish around in the bag for the fortune cookies. “Kind of a similar story, I guess. I was dating a costume designer named Callie for a couple years. Off and on.”

Dumping the cookies on the table, I stow empty containers in the bag. “I knew her from college, so it was easy in some ways. Except that we’d break up every few months over one thing or another. When she got a job that took her to Los Angeles, we broke up for good.” I close the containers that still have food in them and arrange them neatly on the table.

“What about all the actresses you work with? It seems like movie and TV actors are constantly falling in love with their costars.” Her casual tone isn’t quite convincing and I guess I can’t blame her for worrying.

“There is intimacy to the work we do that can encourage that kind of thing, especially if you’re pretending to be in love with somebody onstage night after night. But in my experience, that can get messy. Anyway, after Callie moved, I wanted to be free to focus on the acting. Like your work, it takes up a lot of my time.”

Kate gets up to throw away the trash. “I wonder if we’ll ever see each other again after tomorrow.” She leans back against the sink, her arms crossed, and stares at the wall behind me. “I have to be at work so early, while yours probably goes late.”

“What time do you go in?”

“We have a sales meeting every day at eight, so I have to be there by seven thirty.”

“A.M.?” She nods. “Every day?” She nods again. “That’s insane.”

“The stock market opens at nine thirty.” The cat saunters into the room, and she picks him up. “The analysts have to present our recommendations to the sales guys at the meeting so they can get on the phone and get those recs out to their contacts by opening. Plus,” she says, making a face, “I usually get up at five thirty to run.”

“I usually don’t get home before midnight during the week.” Maybe this weekend will be the extent of our time together. That would suck.

She strokes the cat’s fur and it purrs loudly. “What about the film? When does that start?”

“Not till afterAll’s Wellopens. The shoot dates are at the end of June, but I don’t have any idea what that schedule will be. They did say they’d work around my performances, but I’ll believe that when I see it.” Just thinking about it has my knee jiggling.

“But you said you liked the script, right?”

“I do. I guess I’m looking forward to working on it, but it’s so weird that we don’t have rehearsals. It seems like I’m just supposed to learn my lines and show up and do it.” I get up and stow the leftovers in the fridge. I guess she really doesn’t cook. The only thing in there besides a bottle of ketchup, a couple of yogurts and the eggs I brought is a half-empty bottle of white zinfandel. I hold it up, grinning. “Do you have something to confess?”

“I’m taking the Fifth on that one.” The cat yowls, and Kate sets him on the floor. She tosses me a fortune cookie as she calls out “Catch.” She snuggles in next to me as she cracks one open. “What does yours say?”

I smooth out the dusty slip of paper, but that doesn’t help it make sense. “‘The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.’ Huh?”

She grins. “Obviously, that means you shouldn’t get to the film set early. You definitely want to be the mouse, not the bird.”

“If you say so. What does yours say?”

Her eyebrows waggle. “‘A very useful tool will soon be part of your life.’”

“Hmmm. A hammer? A wrench?”

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