Free Secrets of the Apple by Paula Hiatt Page B

fortuitous interruption. He could hear her scrabbling around to pick them up when her phone rang. She answered it sounding perfectly sweet and innocent. No defense against her.
    She stuck her head around the partition. “Will you need anything else tonight?”
    “No, thank you. See you tomorrow.”
    She spoke into the phone, “Meet you at the theater in forty-five minutes.” She hung up and he heard the papery whoosh and rustle of a desk being tidied, the buckle of a laptop bag and the final grainy swish as she pulled her trench coat from the stand and slid it up her arms. “Goodnight,” she said, her hand on the doorknob.
    Ryoki found he wasn’t quite ready for her to leave. “Forty-five minutes to the theater?”
    “I don’t think it’s too far, but there are those one-way streets and parking’s a bit iffy,” Kate trailed off, rolling her eyes. He’d forgotten to factor in the indispensable “time to get lost.”
    “You better hurry,” he said.
    When the door shut behind her, some invisible detail changed in the room, maybe something to do with the air pressure, or possibly the temperature. Gradually minor noises took on a strange magnification, like the grinding tikka tikka of the antique clock on the credenza and the splatter of raindrops against the windows as the long drizzle finally turned ardent. He felt a chill in his arms and rose to put the clock in a drawer, wondering how he could have occupied this room for two weeks without consciously noting such an irritating sound. Back at his desk, he picked up a pen, reminding himself how rejuvenating it was to work in solitude, free to swear all he wanted. He put the pen down, remembering he didn’t need it. He sat back in his chair. The office felt dead.
    He ground forward, eyes on his screen, occasionally checking his watch, jealous of Kate’s escape. Was her friend a man or a woman? What movie were they going to see? Comedy? Action? Romance? Popcorn? Dinner? Such invasive curiosity made him feel like a stalker and he struggled to focus, fidgeting like a schoolboy until he gave up at 10:15.
    By the third week Ryoki had mastered the intricacies of his chair, leaning and dropping without a thought. But Kate was still a puzzle. It had become his habit to observe her at odd moments, through lowered lids or from the corner of his eye. Every morning she arrived five to seven minutes late, heels clicking, heels slipping, chirping a “Good Morning” or a “Hey, you,” to everyone from partners to clerical staff, calling many by name—except him, of course. It had taken a week and a half to realize she never called him anything, not Mr. Tanaka or Sir or Ryoki. He didn’t let on he’d noticed, but it was more than bothersome; it was faintly insulting. He tried nearly every day to trick her into giving him some kind of appellation. No luck so far.
    He observed that a few of the men in the outer office had little crushes on her, even tried to detain her as she swept past their desks. What’s-His-Name from legal research always spoke to Ryoki with the crisp authority of a pompous master of his craft, until Kate appeared and he began blushing and choking on his tongue. Ryoki thought she must have noticed, but he wasn’t sure. After so much close contact he’d begun to sense in her a certain insulating self-containment that made it hard to say what she did or did not see. Sometimes he found her lunching at her desk, an uninspired peanut butter and jam sandwich with a half-moon bite pushed to the side as she scribbled barely legible notes in a schoolgirl’s wide-ruled notebook—or typing furiously on a Word file, or writing slowly in a scuffed and stained leather binder that bore no company logo. A few times he caught her standing like a stork, one shoeless foot bent up to rest above the opposite knee, intently gazing into some inner universe. Her toes fascinated him, especially the bright rose-red nail polish with a single flower on the right big toe, so