Free The Travelers by Chris Pavone Page B

of working for that tiresome douchebag Malcolm Somers?”
    She forces herself to hold Dean’s gaze. “Malcolm’s not so bad. But when Will joined the staff, we thought that two travel writers for one magazine in one marriage would be one too many low-paid absentee spouses. We’d never see each other.
Ever
. Plus, you know, print journalism is not what’s referred to these days as a growth industry. So it seemed prudent for one of us to, um, divest from our single revenue source.”
    “Why you?”
    “Will was brand-new, and he was excited about the magazine. Me, I’d been there a decade. That’s a long time with one employer, doing the same thing. Life isn’t that long, and it’s getting shorter every day, and it seemed like maybe I should see if I could do something else with my life.”
    “So what is that something else?”
    She knew this question was coming, and she knew she wouldn’t have a great answer for the eminently enviable Dean Fowler, who has three careers flourishing at once. “Right now, I’m still trying to figure it out. In the meantime I’m doing a little of this, a little of that. I’m part-time at an advertising agency, writing advertorials.”
    “Ooh. Sexy.”
    “Plus articles for wherever, traveling now and then.” She shrugs. “You know, freelance life. Just like you, albeit without the bestsellers and the literary prizes and the Academy Award nominations and the questionable investment choices and the long line of pretty young things waiting to unfurl their panties for you.”
    “You know you could always jump to the head of that line, don’t you?”
    Now that Chloe has wandered down this alley, she doesn’t quite know how to exit. “So this place is draining your bank account, huh?”
    Dean accepts her non sequitur with equanimity. “You know, I’ve never in my life made a single decision based on money.”
    “And yet here you are, rich.”
    “And yet here I am. Just so.”
    Chloe takes a sip of her drink, and watches Dean’s eyes watching her mouth, and she lets that moment play out. It doesn’t take much effort to make men useful. She runs her tongue across her lips.
    “Ah!” Dean says, his attention shifted over her shoulder. “There he is!”
    Chloe spins around to see her husband, popped up out of nowhere. But that’s not true, not at all: it’s her husband, appearing exactly where and when he’s supposed to appear. She’d allowed herself to forget that, to forget Will, momentarily blinded in the flattering attention of another, more engrossed, less familiar man.
    She halfway regrets never having been to bed with Dean, finding out what the big deal is. Another experience she has never had, never will. For a long time she thought of life as an accumulation of experiences, but recently she’s realized that it’s also the opposite: a narrowing. Living the same day, over and over.
    This is one of the reasons she left
Travelers,
looking for new ways to fill her days, to crawl out onto a different, more exposed branch of her career’s tree. She hasn’t yet found any fruit out there.
    FALLS CHURCH
    Raji is packing up, contemplating dinner, when Brock struts by, his shirtsleeves rolled up, carrying a squeeze ball, distorting the SEMPER FI tattoo on his hypertrophied forearm. “Whassup, Raj-man?”
    Raji nods at his supervisor while the tiny tinny speakers of his monitor bling at him, a supposedly pleasant trill that drives Raji berserk. This new alert is an advance check-in to a flight that departs tomorrow evening, a long-haul overnight trip to another hemisphere.
U.S. passport number: 11331968
    Flight: 8 JFK to EZE
    Ticket Category: B2
    Seat: 19D
    Alert code: 4
    This guy sure does get around. Raji himself hasn’t been out of the northern Virginia suburbs in a half-year, hasn’t even been into D.C. proper since last fall. He has never left the United States in his entire life. And here is this guy, just back from France, headed to Argentina. Who the hell knows