Hot Desk: A Novel - 26

“ ‘Sensitively and masterfully edited’!” Rebecca yelled from her own small but cheerful office in the Lower East Side apartment she shared with Ben. It turned out that Betty Jack was the neighborhood landlady and had been happy to move Ben and Rebecca into a more spacious apartment in a building next door to his old place.

“Come in here and read it with me!” Ben yelled back from the bedroom.

Rebecca closed her laptop, went into the mostly separate kitchen, and turned on the electric kettle. They were both tea drinkers now. While waiting for the water to boil, she texted Stella about the Bon Appétit interview. She put a few pieces of homemade biscotti on a plate for Ben, who was no doubt hungry. The rest she wrapped in parchment paper and stored in a tin to bring uptown to Mimi’s for their weekly dinner. The rustling roused Butch from his chair perch and he lumbered over to sit on one of her bare feet.

“Ouch—off! Fine—here you go.” Rebecca slipped Butch some biscotti.

“Don’t feed him people food!” Ben yelled, displaying once again an uncanny ability to sense what she was doing through at least two walls. “You and Ava are going to make him sick!”

“Good boy,” Rebecca murmured to Butch. “You stay out here. Sorry your dad’s so mean.” She gathered two mugs and balanced the plate precariously. Butch padded down the hallway after her, but she closed the door with her hip. “He’s making sad whale eyes.”

Ben was lying in bed, reading on his phone. “He’ll be okay. He loves to give us privacy.” There was a thud as Butch, crestfallen, positioned himself on the floor outside the bedroom door.

Rebecca deposited the mugs and plate on the pile of books in lieu of a bedside table. She tucked herself under Ben’s arm and touched his face. “I love you so much that I don’t even mind that your stubble is basically ginger.”

Ben didn’t look up from his phone. “I love you so much that I still want to have sex with you even though you’re wearing a Sixers shirt that belonged to your brother.”

“Ha ha. Ava says she’s going to meet us at Mimi’s.”

“Yeah, tell her to bring the leftover tofurkey for herself. We should call Rose and Jane. They’ve got to be so happy with the review.”

“It’s not tofurkey,” Rebecca corrected him. “It was Stella’s recipe for mushroom loaf, it was delicious, and you know it. My parents stayed in the Hamptons with Rose after Thanksgiving. We should have gone there straight from Vermont.”

Ben kissed the top of Rebecca’s head. “I promised Mimi when you moved out that we wouldn’t miss too many Sunday dinners.”

“I guess we’ll always have Oceaaaaaaaaan House,” Rebecca replied. “And thank you. But you don’t have to be afraid of Mimi.”

“I promised her,” Ben repeated. “Hey, Stella’s interview was great. You’re going to get even more business now. You’ll need another assistant.”

“I know, right?” Rebecca pressed her foot against Ben’s calf. “Now read me the review. I want to hear it again. You’re the star, baby…”

Ben read the review out loud, then dropped his phone next to the bed.

“Masterful and sensitive! Sensitive and masterful!” Rebecca pinched Ben delightedly. He caught her hand and pinned it with the other one above her head. “I’m going to print it and frame it for your desk.”

“Chloe will definitely approve. She owes me after the scented candle debacle.” Rebecca’s departure and Chloe’s promotion had resulted in Ben and Chloe sharing the desk. Ben found her a much neater partner but one with an unfortunate predilection for perfumed everything from tissues to what Ben believed might be scratch-and-sniff notepaper.

“She owes both of us after the great cactus deception.” Rebecca squirmed a little and Ben rolled on top of her. Chloe and Howie had revealed themselves as what Howie referred to as the “cactus yentas”—interested only, Howie claimed, in bringing together two people whose happiness would result in making the workplace more pleasant if the cactus didn’t die first. Ben knew that Howie would have also been interested in more than a matchmaking scheme with Chloe, but now that he was in graduate school, his texts to Ben were less pining about Chloe and more enthusiastic about a Chomsky scholar named Clementine.

“Speaking of succulent…” he said, kissing Rebecca’s neck.

“So corny.” She shivered. Ben released her hands and she clasped her arms around him. He thought about his incredible luck and Rebecca’s perfect mouth. She thought about how she couldn’t tell the sound of her heart from the sound of his.

On their windowsill, basking in the late morning sun, the cactus thought it kind of missed workplace drama. And that it was somebody’s turn to water it.

THE END