Page 12 of We Could Be So Good
Andy lowers his voice even though this will be common knowledge in a matter of hours. “She called off the wedding.”
“She did what?” Nick sits heavily in his chair and stares at him. “Are you sure?”
Andy lets out a humorless laugh and scrubs his hand along his jaw. “I’m sure. She met someone else in London. Her mother’s cardiologist.”
“Her mother’s— Do I look like I give a fuck who? Jesus Christ. I thought she was smart.”
Andy glares at him. “She is. These things happen. You can’t always control who you fall for.”
Something complicated happens to Nick’s face. He holds up his hands. “Sorry.”
“You’re supposed to be friends with her. Don’t be a jerk out of loyalty to me. She’s having a rough—” He swallows and,shit, he’s going to cry in the middle of the newsroom, which is the only thing that could make today any worse.
“All right.” Nick takes a clean handkerchief out of his desk drawer and slides it over to Andy. “Let’s get out of here,” he says, checking his watch.
“It’s too early to leave.” It’s barely three. Andy can’t remember the last time either of them went home before seven.
“I was figuring on spending the rest of the afternoon getting the runaround from the mayor’s office and then heading over to the first precinct to see if I could get a quote from the captain about the fires in the warehouse district.”
“Anotherfire?” Andy asks, momentarily distracted. There’s been a string of highly suspicious warehouse fires in the area just below Houston.
“No, but the building that burned down on Tuesday is ownedby the deputy mayor’s brother-in-law.” He waves a sheaf of papers that Andy recognizes as copies of deeds from the city register’s office. “But that can wait until Monday—”
“Like hell it can—”
“Honestly, with you in this state we aren’t going to get much of anything done anyway.”
Andy frowns. It’s pitiful to drop a lead because Andy issad. His mother filed a story half an hour before Andy wasborn, for God’s sake. But Andy already knows he isn’t cut from the same cloth as either of his parents. The story wasn’t going in tomorrow’s paper anyway, though, so Nick has a point.
Andy twists the handkerchief in his hands. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“Where?”
“My apartment.” He doesn’t want to explain, doesn’t want to think about how empty the place is despite it being cluttered with all the stuff of his mother’s that he still hasn’t thrown out. He definitely doesn’t want to think about all the different varieties of loneliness he’s experienced in the twenty-five years, on and off, that he’s lived in that apartment, all the times he’s woken up there alone, and how little he cares to repeat the experience. He ought to have gotten a cat, but he’d probably forget to feed it. He’d forget he had a cat in the first place. One day he’d absentmindedly arrive at work with the cat on his shoulder.
He drags his mind away from the imaginary world in which he could take care of a cat or himself or a fiancée, and looks instead at the handkerchief, white cotton, crisp and smooth. He wonders if Nick irons them himself.
“You’ll stay with me,” Nick says.
Andy looks up abruptly. “I can’t—”
“Because if you don’t, then I’m just going to have to spend the night wherever you do wind up staying, which means the food in my icebox will go to waste.”
“I don’t have any clothes.”
“I’ll get your things.” Nick has a key—he has multiple keys, because Andy’s occasionally still go missing, disappearing into the same abyss as his handkerchiefs.
“Nick.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
Nick scowls. When he gets to his feet, he claps a hand on Andy’s shoulder.
Andy teeters on the brink between misery and unhinged laughter as he lets Nick all but shove him into a chair in an empty office one floor down from the newsroom. This floor is a hangover from theChronicle’s glory days, when every square foot of the building was crammed full of reporters and clerks and copy editors, not to mention the rest of the staff that makes a newspaper run. Now it, like approximately a third of the building, collects dust. If Andy had his way— Well, no use thinking of that, especially not today.
It’s a relief to be out of the newsroom, with its typewriters and ringing telephones and raised voices, its harsh overhead lighting and the cloud of smoke that lingers even after everyone has gone home. He usually doesn’t mind it—likes it, even, because it’s fundamentally impossible to feel alone in a newsroom. But right now he doesn’t want to be looked at, a fact that Nick somehow picked up on without Andy having to say anything.
