Page 39 of The Perfect Deception

He buzzed again.

He wasn’t get­ting the hint.

He leaned on the buzzer with­out stop­ping.

Oy gevalt. Lovely.

He started mak­ing pat­terns with his buzzing.

He had more of an at­ten­tion span than she’d given him credit for. Her neigh­bors, how­ever, had lit­tle pa­tience for noise, so un­less she wanted them let­ting him in, she was go­ing to have to an­swer. Re­peat­ing “We have an agree­ment” to her­self one more time, she pressed the but­ton, opened her door and waited for him to climb the stairs.

“You’re very per­sis­tent,” she said, hands clenched to­gether be­hind her back. His hair was mussed and she wanted to run her fin­gers through it to smooth it.

“You didn’t an­swer.”

She shrugged. Stand­ing this close to him, she could smell his spicy clove af­ter­shave and it was all she could do not to throw her­self at him. But they had an agree­ment, and throw­ing her­self into his arms wasn’t part of it.

“Can I come in? We need to talk, and I don’t think we should do it in front of your neigh­bors.”

“I don’t know. Mrs. MacAvoy loves gos­sip. It would be a shame to de­prive her.”

He raised an eye­brow and she held back a smile. What she would give to see that eye­brow raise all the time. She moved deeper into the apart­ment and let him fol­low her in­side. What would he think of her apart­ment? It was com­pletely dif­fer­ent from his: all col­or­ful fab­rics, grav­ity-de­fy­ing stacks of books, and mis­matched fur­ni­ture with Ju­daica scat­tered around. It prob­a­bly screamed “sin­gle girl” to him, but at least she didn’t have a cat. Yet.

She perched on her fa­vorite wingchair, a pur­ple one with daisies she’d bought at a garage sale, and pointed to her gold over­stuffed sofa for him to sit on. She’d curl up on it later and in­hale his lin­ger­ing scent, dream­ing of what could be. For now, she needed space.

“I’m sorry about what hap­pened at the of­fice, Dina. Truly.”

She shook her head. “Don’t be. I over­stepped.”

“No, you didn’t, but you did mis­un­der­stand.”

Their re­la­tion­ship? Of course she did. Was he re­ally go­ing to re­it­er­ate their deal? She opened her mouth to stop him, but he held out a hand.

“Let me fin­ish.”

She shut her mouth to avoid look­ing like a fish, or a mouth-breather. Nei­ther was at­trac­tive.

He ran a hand through his hair and stared down at his feet for a mo­ment be­fore con­tin­u­ing. “I’m sorry I didn’t in­tro­duce you to my friends at the of­fice. It wasn’t be­cause of you, it was be­cause of me.”

Was he re­ally go­ing to use the “it wasn’t you, it was me” ar­gu­ment?

“I’m hav­ing a prob­lem at the of­fice. I’ve be­come sort of a pariah, even with my friends. I was afraid if I brought you into their of­fices or stopped to talk to them for long, they’d say some­thing about it to you.”

“Why are you a pariah and why would I take their side?”

“Ev­ery­one else has.”

“I’m not ev­ery­one else,” she said.

It was like she’d stuck a pin in him and let out all the ex­cess air. “You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

Dina nod­ded. Why was he a pariah?

He shook his head and mum­bled some­thing. She thought she heard the word “fa­ther,” but she couldn’t be sure. “Par­don? Why are you a pariah?”

He fid­geted. “Work pol­i­tics. But I should have called you my girl­friend when I in­tro­duced you to Marie. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe it was just me be­ing care­ful…”

“No, you were right.”