The Other Black Girl(46)
The words had been foreign to her tongue then, a mere mantra she’d already managed to pick up from three hours or so of shadowing Katie. They were especially foreign to Owen, who clearly didn’t find this response particularly satisfying. But instead of pulling at a promising loose thread, he said, “So, are you excited to see the place where Burning Heart was created?”
Nella could’ve kissed him for changing the subject. “Hell, yeah. To know I’m going to be breathing the same air, it’s insane.”
“Maybe they’ll even have a printer named after the two of them. Or a conference room.”
“Maybe even Richard’s office itself. Now, that’d be pretty sick.”
Owen shifted uneasily.
“Now what’s the matter?”
“I just—the idea of you being in this man’s office alone, who you don’t really know anything about. I’m sorry, Nell, I don’t trust it. Maybe all that This is just the way the industry is talk would have worked ten years ago,” he added, holding up a finger before Nella could interrupt him, “but in today’s world, I’d be That Dumb Fool who has to tell people why I let you go to this thing with this old guy without asking any of the hard questions. And I’m not living the rest of my life like that.”
Nella smiled. The “That Dumb Fool” label came from watching far too many true crime TV shows. The “dumb fool” in question was usually the interviewee who said things like No, I never questioned why he had three different driver’s licenses.
Nella had watched too much television to get snuffed out in such an easy way, so she grabbed Owen’s hand and told him it was all going to be fine.
But twenty minutes later, when it came time for him to let go of her hand so she could reach for the front door of the office building, he squeezed it once—a little harder than he normally did when he was merely trying to be cute.
“You sure about this, Nell?”
“Owen.” She pulled her hand away from his as gingerly as she could, placing it on his cheek. He hadn’t shaved in nearly four days, so his reddish-brown stubble scratched at the meat of her palm in that bristly way that she always liked. “He’s pretty old. I’m not saying that pretty old men aren’t capable of terrible things, but I am saying that I have some pepper spray in my purse. And you know I was raised by the streets.” She beat her chest in mock emphasis.
“You were raised in the suburbs of Connecticut,” Owen said drily.
“By a father from Chicago who did not fuck around.”
“I thought he was from a suburb, too.”
“Plus, remember, I’ve got—”
“A black belt,” finished Owen, full-out grinning now. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You always say that, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“See, I already told you—it got lost during the divorce.” Nella kissed him on the lips, preventing any more words of protest. “I’ll text you in an hour.”
He pulled her toward him when she moved away. “If I don’t hear from you after sixty-one minutes, I’m breaking down this door and finding you myself.”
“There’s no need to break anything down.” She let him hold her for a moment before reaching for the door again. “See? This door opens. It’s the doors inside, past security, that you’d have to—”
“Nella Rogers?”
Nella turned her head. Standing behind Owen was Richard Wagner himself: a tall, lanky man with a shock of white hair, wearing a beige jacket and navy-blue-and-kelly-green striped pants. It was an ensemble that wouldn’t make sense for almost anyone else, but his tortoiseshell glasses and khaki-colored leather briefcase gave the impression that he was a smart man in media whose many accomplishments rendered any conflicting opinion of him irrelevant.
Both Owen and Nella moved out of his way instinctively. “That’s me!” Nella said. “Mr. Wagner?”
“Please, call me Richard. I insist.” He strode up to them and shook Nella’s hand. Then he walked to the front door and went through it. “I’ll see you in a few moments, I’m presuming?” he called over his shoulder. He didn’t wait for an answer.
Nella had spun around to look at Owen, expecting to see that familiar look he always wore when he had something to say and knew better than to say it, but he was already backing his way down the sidewalk. She felt a twinge of disappointment—she wanted to ask Owen if she should get him a pair of Richard’s striped pants in his size—but she waved and turned to enter her new place of employment, head held high.
* * *
“So,” Richard said, once they’d gotten past introductory niceties and she’d accepted his offer to collapse into a leather chair that made the setting feel more like therapy than book publishing, “I suppose you’re wondering how I knew who you were.”
He blinked exactly twice before staring at her, rigidly, as he waited for an answer. She hadn’t been wondering—that was the least of her wonders as she rode the elevator up to the thirteenth floor, her heart thrumming in her ears. But she managed to say, with a small smile, “Well, I have been told I look like a Nella.”
Richard threw his head back and chuckled. It felt hollow, but it still shook the room—a fairly impressive feat, given the size of his office. Far bigger than Vera’s, Nella noticed, the office ate up a decent chunk of one of the floor’s corners, and its two large windows—one on each wall—provided more light than her and Owen’s small studio apartment had ever seen at one time. Like the therapist patient chair she was sitting on, its décor was exactly what she had expected from an editor in chief, complete with a big wooden desk that looked like it had been made by an actual carpenter and not purchased at IKEA, and a grand bookshelf so substantial that she could probably free-climb her way up with little difficulty.