my brilliant mind. I just happen to have brought an umbrella along – imagine that!’
She placed a banknote on the table and, triumphantly, held up the umbrella in question.
Lauren rolled her eyes but got up, too, and hugged her friend goodbye. She followed her with her eyes as she left the diner, grateful that her parents had made it possible for her to follow her passion and attend art college in Maine. They hadn’t forced her into a job that she didn’t enjoy. A job in which she had to touch the shoulders of men like Mr Mathison, she added to herself. To make up for it, she would help her dad in his law firm during term breaks. Peter Latham would have liked for Lauren to follow in his footsteps and become a lawyer. Instead, she filed documents and destroyed old, outdated case files.
Which was what was waiting for her over the next few days, and so she decided to enjoy her last day off. And just as she was wondering what could make a day better that had started with a great breakfast with Rachel, the stranger’s face popped up in her mind. She threw an inconspicuous glance over her shoulder. He was still there. A sign, surely!
Lauren tried to check out her reflection in the windowpane, but it was pointless. Looks-wise, she wasn’t at the top of her game today, but if that stopped a guy from talking to her then he wasn’t the right guy to begin with. Besides, she reminded herself silently, he couldn’t be the right guy anyway because he had a girlfriend. Still, she made herself get up and casually strolled over to his table. The weight she had recently lost gave her a little extra self-confidence, and she even seductively swayed her hips.
There was a moment, when she looked at him full of expectation and he at her, full of surprise and interest, when he raised his eyes and smiled . . . This moment seemed to last forever. Lauren breathed in and out again. Her heart was beating fast inside her chest and she was nervous, her fingers were trembling when she ran them through her hair.
‘Hi,’ he said, and the corners of his mouth twitched. Lauren’s head was suddenly full of thoughts. Except her reason for crossing the diner. It was the amused expression on his face that was to blame, because Lauren knew what it meant: women talked to this guy all the time. Flirted with him, too, probably. Women like her, who dared to approach him and then . . . what? Who wanted to marry him? Women who, like her, couldn’t take their eyes off his full upper lip with the tiny scar and who almost climaxed just because he said hi? Whatever the reason, women flirted with him and she didn’t want to get in line, didn’t want to be one of those stupid women who, more than likely, were far better looking than she.
‘Uh – excuse me . . .’ she muttered, desperately trying to find a reason, any reason at all, why she had crossed the diner and was standing in front of him. There had to be something!
Lauren desperately looked around. Saw the cup in his beautiful hands.
‘Your coffee . . . Did you find . . .’ Jesus, even his hands were beautiful! ‘. . . Did you find that it was too hot?’ she managed to squeeze out the pitiful question and could feel herself blushing.
Well, this sure was embarrassing! But all right. She didn’t want to get in line with all his other conquests anyway, so it wouldn’t be so bad if he thought she was a little loopy.
‘Too hot?’ He seemed confused, and his beautifully shaped eyebrows rose quizzically. Lauren gave him the gravest nod she could muster and stared at the tips of her boots. The bottoms of her pants were almost completely dry again. A little bug was crawling across the joint from a black floor tile to a white one. She kept an eye out for the crack in the ground that was going to open and hopefully swallow her whole, to spare her the embarrassment. But there was no crack. She had to go through with it. ‘Yeah, hot,’ she explained as matter-of-factly as possible.
‘I’m only asking because . . . because I just burned myself on the coffee . . . and . . . and if that were generally the case, I . . . I would tell the . . . the waitress. I mean, I wouldn’t want . . . anyone to get hurt or anything.’
Phew! That was quite a struggle but, hey, not too bad. Quite satisfied with herself, Lauren now straightened up and turned to an older couple sitting at the opposite table.
‘What about your coffee? Hot? Not too hot?’
* * *
‘Oh God, how embarrassing!’ Lauren giggled and snuggled deeper into Tim’s arms.
Even though the fire was still burning, the nightly cold had started rising from the earth.
‘That wasn’t embarrassing at all, it was . . . entertaining,’ Tim retorted with a grin.
Rachel, who was sitting on the opposite side of the bonfire, laughing and shaking her head, inched a little closer.
‘Why has nobody ever told me this in all these years? If I had known, I would have blown my appointment with good old Mr Mathison and stayed to watch the show!’
‘Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. I thought you were cute back then at the diner. But I really only took notice of you later – at the law firm,’ Tim recounted.
‘So you don’t think I’m cute anymore?’
Tim kissed the back of Lauren’s neck and lovingly rubbed her arms to keep her warm.
‘Of course I do. And all I can wish for today is that we get the time to laugh about so many more things to come.’
Mountains of Files
Lauren was humming along to the song she had heard earlier on the radio when she was driving to the law firm with her dad. She couldn’t remember the song title, but the melody had been stuck in her head all day. And she didn’t even particularly like it.
Gingerly, she climbed the wobbly step stool and fished the next handful of binders from up high on the shelf, all the while deriding herself for picking such a short skirt that morning. She had decided to show the world that her diet was working – as motivation to herself, in a way. But this stepladder would be far easier to navigate wearing a pair of jeans. Back to back on the shelves sat the legal files of clients, the court records, the case files, and the statements of claim. Everything older than ten years had to be destroyed on a regular basis, and this was her job during term break. She pulled out five binders all at once, heaving them onto the big desk in a corner of the sparsely lit basement. The computer screen in front of her flickered in the faint light of the fluorescent tube, and with dusty fingers she typed each binder’s record number into the system. Every page, every sheet of paper she fed into the document shredder had to be meticulously recorded.
After she had finished that task and checked each number one final time, she grabbed the binders and made her way to the fourth-floor copy room where the only shredder stood. Years ago Lauren had suggested they purchase an additional document shredder for the basement archive, just so she wouldn’t have to haul every single binder from the basement all the way up several flights of stairs. But her request had been denied. The risk of accidentally destroying a legal file would be too great, she was told. Right! Lauren could see it before her now: one of the paralegals would pull an extremely important binder from the shelf, would then trip, tumble from the ladder, switch on the shredder in mid-air, and somehow the binder would then disappear in-between the heavy-duty rotating blades. Yes, this sounded extremely likely and probably happened all the time in companies around the world. Which was why she was now trying to balance the stack of binders on her arms, bending backward so that the files rested against her chest, neck, and chin rather than falling to the floor. If one binder slipped, the others would tumble along with it.
After
