Free Carousel Court by Joe McGinniss Page A

rubbing off on me. This life and world, the small details of JW, his measured but intense breathing through his nose, the ease with which he maneuvered them across the room, the crispness of his shirt, the warmth of his neck and the faint lines around his eyes and the flecks of gray in his sideburns. She was satiating an appetite she didn’t know she had, an appetite that seemed to border on compulsion.
    It was bullshit, she thought. She told him this, laughing, one night in his office. “This is ridiculous,” she said. Her warm forehead pressed against cold glass.
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œThis view.” She held her hands wide, palms spread, pressing hard against the window as she found his eyes in its reflection.
    â€œTell me to stop,” he said, and slid his hand around her tight waist and pressed himself against her. “Tell me I don’t deserve you.”
    How could Phoebe know what this man deserved? She knew enough not to answer.
    â€œYou have everything in front of you,” he said. “To be twenty-six again. Jesus.”
    â€œCome inside me.”
    The decadence with JW was somehow irresistible. It felt mature and otherworldly. Town cars dropped them off and picked them up. He chopped spruce trees for the woodstove in his family’s cabin. He took Phoebe there on a Saturday morning (when work had kept Nickstuck in Hartford for the weekend) and drove her back to the city the next morning. He spoon-fed her frozen cherimoya that seemed to melt on her tongue in his dimly lit office. He made no apologies or excuses for himself and never once told her he loved her or said a disparaging word about his wife except that she tried too hard sometimes to keep everything in order.
    â€œYou,” he said a year or so after their first time together in his office, “need a mentor.”
    â€œAre you volunteering?”
    â€œProduce,” he said. “That’s what you tell yourself. Produce. If you do, you’ll be fine. If you don’t, you won’t last.”
    â€œIs that a yes?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œMake me a senior analyst,” she said.
    â€œWith no MBA.”
    â€œBut with you as a mentor.”
    â€œYou’re on track,” he said.
    â€œFor what?”
    â€œThere’s a path. Don’t overthink it. Follow it and you’ll have everything you want.”
    â€œThat’s a cop-out.”
    â€œYou remind me of—”
    â€œDon’t say your daughter.”
    â€œMe.”
    She wondered briefly if there was something special about her, some intangible quality that cut through—her aggressiveness, the innate ability she’d always seemed to possess to use her looks, her sexuality, in any situation, with just enough subtlety not to offend or embarrass herself. So many others underplayed or overplayed their hand. She never did. She managed it every time, and this time, when it mattered most, she was nailing it.
    â€œCan we make a deal?”
    â€œName it.”
    â€œSomething significant. When I’ve got my MBA. Help me land somewhere.”
    â€œIf you earn your MBA, I’m all yours,” he said.
    â€œI’m not walking away from this without something real. Understand that.”
    â€¢ •
    Idling in the Explorer, air-conditioning blasting, before pulling out of the Bouncin’ Babies lot, she taps out a text message:
    Well it’s late summer so . . . you’re in Maine at the lake house with the wide dock and blue sailboats. You’re in khaki shorts, gray T, and leather sandals, and your Tag Heuer is wrapped around your thick tan wrist as you sip your second mint julep, and you haven’t decided yet: lobster or crab or maybe a Chilean sea bass, and there’s nowhere on the planet you’d rather be . . . with maybe one exception.
    There’s no response.

10
    A ll the night jobs are scheduled late, in the quietest hours, for a reason: High-risk