DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN (7 page)

“Why not?”

He had no intentions of going there
this soon with her.
 
But then again.
 
“You remember what I said about our
relationship?”

“How we were going to give it our best
try, and how I’m off limits to any smooth Joe that comes along?”

“And?” he asked.

“And how you’re off limits to any
smooth Jane that comes along?”

He smiled at how she phrased that, but
she wasn’t getting to the heart of the matter.
 
“And?”

Nikki hesitated.
 
“And how marriage isn’t in the cards for
us.
 
You went down that road before, it
was a disaster, and you won’t do it again.”

“No matter how deeply--” Daniel
prompted her.

“No matter how deeply you fall in love
with me, you’re not going to marry me.”
 
There she said it, she thought.
 
It wasn’t as tough as it felt.

Daniel, however, wasn’t fully
convinced. “You remember me discussing it with you, but do you accept that,
Nikki?”

“At first it sounded kind of harsh to
me, to be honest.
 
Why would you judge me
base on what your wife did?
 
And besides,
we don’t have a contentious relationship. We have a wonderful relationship.”

“Yeah, my ex and I had a wonderful
relationship too.
 
In the beginning.
 
But things can change, Nikki.
 
Every relationship I’ve ever had started out
wonderfully.
 
But the end is what I
dread.
 
So right now there is no way I’m
marrying you or anybody else.
 
You
understand that?”

Nikki nodded her head.
 
“I understand that.”

“And can you live with that?”
 
He held his breath.
 

Nikki hesitated again.
 
“I can live with it, yes,” she said.
 
Although a part of her was just certain his
mind was going to change.
 
In time, he
would change his tune.
 
No matter how
adamant he was right now, she could not see him treating her based on how some
other woman, or women, treated him.
 
And
besides, he still had to prove himself to her too.
 
She wasn’t ready to marry anybody either
right now.

“But the fact that we’re together
now,” Daniel said, “and we’re going to try and make this relationship work,
carries certain responsibilities.
 
I
represent you, and you represent me.”

Nikki smiled.
 
“Okay.
 
Now what does any of that have to do with being on this car lot?”

“You need wheels, young lady.”

“I told you I ride the bus.”

“And I told you that you represent
me,” Daniel said.
 
“And I don’t ride a
bus.”

Nikki smiled and then laughed.
 
She got his point.
 
But she was still apprehensive.
 
She looked around, at the shiny new
cars.
 
“But a Lexus, Daniel?” she asked.

“Yes, a Lexus.
 
It’s a good, reliable car.”

“But it’s an expensive car.”

“You let me worry about that,” he
said, and was about to get out of the car.
 
Then he stopped.
 
“And another
thing,” he said, looking at her.
 
“I want
you and Val to find a nicer apartment.”

Nikki looked at him.
 
“What’s wrong with the one we have?”

He didn’t respond.
 
Nikki knew what that meant.
 
“Okay, so you wouldn’t live there.
 
And I represent you now so I shouldn’t live
there.
 
And I probably wouldn’t stay
there either if I made your kind of money.
 
But since me and Val both work for a college newspaper that can only pay
us with limited college work-study funds, we can’t afford to live anywhere else
right now.
 
It’s convenient to school and
we like it.
 
So I’m going to stay put for
now.”

Nikki didn’t want to be obstinate this
early in their relationship, but no way was she letting somebody put her in
some luxurious apartment that she couldn’t afford in a million years.
 
What if he became angry tomorrow and dumped
her?
 
How was she going to manage
then?
 
Her credit could suffer and even a
cheap apartment complex wouldn’t rent to her.
 
She had to draw a line.
 
Buying
her a car was one thing, but determining where she could live was an entirely
different matter.

Daniel didn’t like it, and she could
tell he didn’t, but then he exhaled.
 
“Okay,” he said.
 
“Fair enough.”

Nikki smiled.
 
“Now,” she said, “let’s go check out my ride.”

She got out of the car without waiting
for Daniel to open the door.
 
Daniel
smiled and got out too.
 

And just a few weeks ago he was
thinking he was going to have himself a one-night stand with Nikki Graham.
 
A one night stand with a sweetheart like her.
 
Then he smiled again and shook his head, as
he followed her into the showroom.
 
It
was a one-night stand all right.
 
A
one-night stand, he had a sneaking suspicion, that was going to last for
years.
 

If not his lifetime.

CHAPTER FIVE

FOUR YEARS LATER

“Hey,
Hector
!” Wade yelled as he muscled his way between stools at the
crowded bar.

“Yeah?” Hector responded.
 
He was standing behind the bar counter
cleaning a tray of mugs.

“What’s the lady having?”

“What lady?”

“The black chick sitting by herself.”

Hector looked at the woman seated at
one of the far booths against the wall.
 
What distinguished her was the fact that she was the only person sitting
alone in his crowded bar.
 
She had papers
in front of her, and appeared to be looking over some notes, while everybody
else was taking advantage of their lunch break with festive talk and
laughter.
 
She was pretty enough, Hector
decided.
 
But nothing out of the ordinary.
 
He hadn’t noticed she was there until now.

He looked back at Wade.
 
“How should I know what she’s drinking?
 
Go ask her yourself.”

“Just give me two beers and cut the
commentary,” Wade replied.

“You’re wasting your time with that
one,” a voice further over said.
 

Wade looked at him. Like Wade, he was
one of those young, white, super-ambitious upstarts who worked in downtown and
frequented Hector’s bar at lunchtime.
 
But unlike Wade, he already had a seat at the bar counter and a
drink.
 
He, in fact, seemed almost tipsy.

“Oh, yeah?” Wade asked him, while
wondering how was that his business.

“Oh, yeah,” the young man said,
nodding his head.
 
“She’s taken.”

“So what?
 
We’re all taken.
 
To some degree.
 
What’s the big damn deal about her?”

“She’s taken by the Crane.
 
She’s Daniel Crane’s old lady.”

Wade frowned.
 
“Daniel Crane?
 
From over at Dreeson?”

“One in the same,” the young man
replied, lifting his drink as if in a toast to an accurate answer.

Most of the crowd in Hector’s Bar were
young executives who worked in the various businesses around downtown
Wakefield.
 
Those businesses kept the
town booming and helped land Wakefield on the
best mid-sized towns
list ten years running.
 
But there was no business anywhere in town,
or in the entire state of Indiana, that was larger and more highly-regarded
than the Dreeson Corporation.
 
Even Wade
interviewed there countless times, hoping to advance his career, but he never
even got a call back.

“Who is she?” he asked the young man.

“Her name’s Nikki Graham,” the young
man replied.
 
“Work as a reporter for the
Wakefield Gazette.
 
She’s supposed to be
pretty good at it too.
 
I wouldn’t know
that for a fact, but that’s what I heard.
 
She was on TV this morning.
 
She
apparently got into some kind of argument with the mayor.”

“With the mayor?”

“Yup.”

That sweet young thang
, Wade wanted to say.
 
Then he looked back at the young man at the
bar.
 
He was still doubtful.
 
“But I thought Crane was . . . I can’t see
him. . . I didn’t know he liked dark meat.”

“He’s been
liking it
for years apparently.
 
Crane and that chick’s been together for years.”

Wade looked at her again.
 
And he just couldn’t see it.
 
Her with Crane?
 
But she was Wade’s own age.
 
She couldn’t have been twenty-five yet.
 
Whereas Crane had to be in his forties, or
damn near it.
 
How could a girl that
young wrangle herself a man like that?
 
What did she have, Wade wondered, that could possibly be that special?

Hector looked at him, but was grinning
as he did.
 
“Still wanna buy her a
drink?” he asked.

“Very funny,” Wade said without the
least bit of humor and moved away from the bar counter.
 
Hector and the other young man laughed.

As Wade made his way around the
opposite side of the bar, in search of friendlier faces, Val made his way
inside of the bar, searching for Nikki.
 
He had to look just five booths back to see her waving him back.
 
He smiled and pressed through the crowd to
get to her side.

“Nikki!” he said as she stood and they
hugged.
 

It was a playful hug, as Val rocked
her side to side, and then, when they stopped embracing, kissed her cheek to
cheek.
 

“What in the world took you so long?”
she asked him.
 
With his smooth, handsome
face, and his dreads framing that face, he looked as adorable to her as he’d
ever looked.
 
“I was about to file a missing
person’s report on your ass.”

“Don’t even try that,” Val said, as he
removed his purse strap from his shoulder and slid onto the booth seat across
from her.
 
“Do you realize how tough it
is to find a parking space anywhere near Hector’s at lunchtime?”

“And don’t you try
that,
” Nikki shot back, sitting down
too.
 
“You’re an hour late.
 
It didn’t take you no hour to find a parking
spot, don’t even try it, Val.”

Val grinned.
 
He could never get anything over on his old
friend.
 
“I made the wrong turn on Adams,
okay?
 
Satisfied?
 
Then I had to fight traffic and all of these
one-way streets to find my way back around.”

“You were born and raised right in
this town.
 
Same as I was.
 
Yet you act as if you’ve been gone away from
this place for decades every time you come back to visit.”

“And I barely have an hour to visit
this time before I have to keep it moving.”

Nikki frowned.
 
“An hour?
 
But I set aside my entire afternoon for you.
 
I thought you were going to have a five-hour
layover?
 
I rarely get to see you since
you moved to Michigan anyway.
 
Now I only
get an hour?”

“It’s my schizophrenic editor.
 
He made me change my plans.
 
He knew I had a layover here in Indiana on my
way to cover that big march in Atlanta.
 
But he wants me in Kentucky now, and he wants me there like yesterday.”

The waiter arrived to take Val’s drink
order.
 
He looked at Nikki’s drink.
 
“What are you having?”

“Diet Coke.”

“Diet, Nikki?”

“Yes, diet.
 
My thighs are getting kind of chunky.”

Val looked at his best friend.
 
She had one of the prettiest faces around in
his view, with her big, brown, intelligent eyes, and her little button nose,
and her unblemished brown skin that even up close had that soft, velvety
texture.
 
And that body of hers?
 
He glanced down at that body.
 
She wore a pair of jeans, a silk blouse
tucked in, and a form-fitting blazer. On her worse day she would still be
considered small and shapely.
 
Especially
her thighs.
 
He looked at the
waiter.
 
“I’m
not
having what she’s having,” he said, to laughter from Nikki.
“Give me a scotch and soda, please.”

“Scotch and soda, yes, sir,” the
waiter said, and left.

“Diet,” Val said again, shaking his
head.
 
“I’m the one who needs to be
dieting.
 
And you have the nerve to
criticize your thighs?
 
Now if you want
to see a thigh,” he added, “I’ll show you a thigh.
  
And it will not be pretty and toned like
yours either.
 
But I get it.
 
You’ve got to stay all cute and tight for
that man of yours.
 
I get it.”

 
“You don’t get anything if you think that’s
why I like diet sodas.”

“Oh, girl, you know it’s true.
 
Daniel Crane is not the kind of man who will
tolerate you gaining an ounce of weight.
 
He just isn’t.”

“You don’t know Daniel at all if you
think he’ll dump me if I gain some weight.”

“I didn’t say he’ll dump you.
 
He’ll never dump you.
 
But it’s for damn sure he’ll make you lose
that weight.”

Another misconception about Daniel,
Nikki thought.
 
She pushed her reading
glasses up on her face.
 
“Anywho,” she
said.
 
“You said you’re headed to
Kentucky?”

“That’s where they got my black ass
going now, can you believe it?
 
They
called me while I was still at the airport about to catch a cab here to
Hector’s and told me to get to Kentucky as soon as possible.
 
So I rented a car instead of catching a cab,
and after I leave you, I’m headed to Kentucky.
 
To the bluegrass state.
 
To a
coalminer’s strike.
 
My black ass.”

Nikki laughed.
 
Val could always make her laugh.
 
“But a coalminer’s strike?” she asked. “I
don’t get it.
 
With all the problems
going on in Detroit, why would a Detroit newspaper care about a coalminer’s
strike in Kentucky?”

“Because our publisher’s brother runs
one of the unions down there, and he figures our newspaper can help get the
plight of the workers into the national consciousness.
 
Not to mention help get his ambitious
brother’s name in that consciousness too.
 
But of course that’s not the official reason.
 
The official reason is that it’ll make a
great human interest story.”

Nikki laughed.

Val shook his head.
 
“It ain’t easy being me, Nikki.
 
I declare it’s not.
 
If I see another toothless yahoo complaining
about this country and the job they readily signed on to do, I think I’m gonna
holler.
 
But these are the assignments
they’re giving me nowadays.
 
The ones
nobody else wants.
 
I’m young, yes, I’m
young, but they act like I’ll never be in their so-called league.
 
I don’t get any respect.”

Nikki smiled warily.
 
She knew what he meant.
 
Two years working for the Gazette herself and
they still treated her like a rookie.
 
Not because she wasn’t good.
 
She
was, if they would ever admit it, the best reporter on staff.
 
She was the one who hustled and got that big
interview with the governor when he came to town.
 
She was the one who worked the phones and
pounded the pavement until she was granted the much sought-after interview with
the parents of a murdered high school student.
 
She was the one whose story on the increasing rate of drug addiction in
rural Indiana got the paper its only Pulitzer Prize nomination last year.

But because her boyfriend was Daniel
Crane, she never got the credit for her efforts.
 
The governor talked to her, her fellow
reporters insisted, because Daniel Crane’s office had arranged it. The parents
of that murdered boy allowed her to interview them, her fellow reporters
declared, because the unemployed father was promised a job at Dreeson.
 
And the only reason she was nominated for the
Pulitzer last year, let her fellow reporters tell it, was because Daniel Crane
knew members of the nominating committee and called in favors on her
behalf.
 

It wasn’t true, none of it, but truth
was always beside the point with her colleagues at the Gazette.
 
It also didn’t help that Nikki was the
youngest reporter on staff.
 
By something
like two decades.
 
And many of the old
guard couldn’t handle the fact that a youngster like her produced far more
results than any of them.

“No matter how hard we work,” she said
to her friend, “they still won’t respect us.”

“I know,” Val agreed.

“And we were so idealistic in
college,” Nikki said fondly.
 
“Remember
when we dreamed of being globetrotting journalists together?
 
And how we were going to set the world on
fire?”