Extreme Bachelor (12 page)

“What happened is that in the end, she said
it was all very impressive, and that she was totally blown away,
because she couldn’t imagine how we managed, and I asked her,
‘Manage what?’ And she said . . .” Jack paused there, slanted a
look at Michael. “And she said it must have been hard to operate
with phones in our shoes, but at least our cameras were in our
watches, and that was probably more convenient, and then she
laughed and trotted over to her friends and apparently said the
same to them, because the next thing I know, they are all laughing
at me.”

“Shit,” Michael said.

“You’re on your own, pal,”
Jack said. “I’m not getting in the middle between you and any of
your female acquaintances.
Marian! Pick up
your feet and run
!” he shouted at one
woman who was strolling through the roped hopscotch.

Michael sighed and peered across the ropes
field. Damn it if Leah and her three pals weren’t looking at him
now. They burst out laughing when he made eye contact, then shot
forward at once, their heads together, talking and clearly enjoying
themselves.

Okay. No more playing around. Leah didn’t
have to accept his apology—shit, she didn’t even have to hear it.
But she had to believe this about him—his pride was at stake
now.

He knew what he had to do.

At the end of the workday,
Michael walked out to his car, rolling his eyes for every
Bye, Double-Oh-Seven
!
and
Where are you going, another Mission
Impossible? HA HA
. Everyone was a goddam
comedian. He slid into his T-bird, stuck his Blackberry in the
hands-free set, and dialed a number he hadn’t dialed in a couple of
years.

LEAH made it all the way to the 405 before
she pulled into a convenience store and pressed her forehead to her
steering wheel, her eyes tightly shut. He looked so good, he
sounded so good. And every time he looked at her, all she could
think of was sex. The really fabulous sex she’d only experienced
with Michael. No one else could do it like him.

This was really all so unbelievable—all the
times she’d thought and dreamed about Michael, and now here he was,
walking around, pretending he’d been some super-secret spy.

What really hurt is that during the day,
she’d catch sight of him and see something as familiar as an old
pair of pajamas, and her heart would swell, and she would find
herself longing for those days.

But then she’d remember that he was trying
to convince her that he had dumped her because he was a spy, of all
the ridiculous, stupid things he might have said—and she smashed
any feelings that were trying to rear their ugly heads like
bugs.

She found little satisfaction in the fact
that everyone was calling him James Bond and making really crude
jokes about his Mini-Me.

It didn’t matter, because
the bottom line was that whatever was going on with Michael, Leah
was going to have to put their past solidly behind her. It was the
only way she’d make it through two months of production with him.
She
had
to make
it. Last night, she had contemplated quitting— but she’d quit
because of him before, and it had cost her a career. She had never
recovered professionally from her meltdown, and she’d be damned
before she’d let him take that from her again.

She lifted her head, pushed her hair from
her eyes. “Still . . . it’s so weird,” she said aloud.

She got out, walked into the store, and got
a soda. When she returned, she turned the key in the ignition. The
engine made a strange chugging sound, then nothing. “Oh man,” she
muttered, and got out to pop the hood.

BRAD arrived a couple of hours later in his
VW van. That was one good thing about having him as a roommate—he
did know a thing or two about cars. He had her up and running in
about fifteen minutes, and Leah bought a six-pack and brought it
home for him. They ended up on the back porch—which was actually a
concrete slab in a postage stamp of a yard, surrounded by
cinder-block walls. Her lopsided origami peacock joined them,
complete with a smoke stuck in its beak, courtesy of Brad, who
clearly had no appreciation for fine arts.

Brad had gotten a tiny part in an indie
horror film, and was happy that, even though he’d play a spewing
ghoul, his face would not be covered with a mask.

To celebrate, Brad put some chicken on a
rusty barbeque pit. While the chicken grilled, he went over his
lines with Leah, practicing the spewing ghoul part in the backyard
until Leah was laughing so hard she could hardly stand up. They had
just finished the last of the beer and the chicken when the phone
rang. Brad answered and handed the phone to Leah.

“Who?” Leah mouthed.

Brad shrugged. “Some guy named Rex.”

Rex.
Rex
. She’d known a Rex in New York,
Michael’s friend . . . wait just a damn minute. Not him,
too.

Leah grabbed the phone from Brad and slipped
inside through the patio door. “Hello?”

“Hey Leah Kleinschmidt, it’s Rex Anderson.
Remember me?”

How could she forget Rex? He had a boat, and
she and Michael used to hang out with him and his
flavor-of-the-month girlfriend off Long Island on the weekends. “Of
course I remember you!” she exclaimed. “How long has it been? Five
or more years?” she asked, in spite of knowing full well just how
long it had been.

“At least that long. So how’s it going out
there in L.A.?” he asked jovially. “Do you miss Broadway?”

Leah slid into a chair at the scarred
kitchen table. “A little. So I suppose you heard that from our pal
Michael, huh?” she asked, unwilling to discuss the precipitous
decline of her career since she’d last seen him. “I’m guessing you
called to tell me that good ol’ Mike was a spy, right? And since it
seems like all his friends were involved, I bet you were a spy too,
huh?”

Rex chuckled. “You were
always a firecracker. Mikey warned me you still were. Well here it
is, doll—I
did
call to tell you that Michael was a spy, or as we like to
call it, an operations officer. Me, too. Now the difference between
me and him is that Mike isn’t a spy anymore. He left the agency,
but I’m still with them. I’m in Langley now, and if you want to
check that out, you can call the number I am going to give you.
It’s the CIA, and when they answer, you will ask for me, and
they’ll put you through.”

Leah snorted into the phone.

“Just try it,” Rex said with a laugh. “It’s
true. Mike and I, we had some close calls in the field. And after a
really close one, our cover was pretty well blown, so I came back
home and took a desk job. But Mike, he thought the last one was
just a little too close for comfort and decided to get out for
good. That’s when he hooked up with Jack Price.”

“What sort of close calls?” Leah asked,
squinting suspiciously at a front door desperately in need of
paint.

“Now, Leah, those details would just bore
you.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked,
spying Brad’s laptop on a chair. She hoisted it onto the table and
opened it, then punched the power button. “Just try me. I’m not the
least bit bored. In fact, this is the most entertaining
conversation I’ve had in a while. Oh wait, I stand corrected.
The
most
entertaining conversation I’ve ever had was just yesterday,
when Michael told me he was a spy. That was classic.”

“I wouldn’t kid you, Leah. I have no reason
to. And I wouldn’t lie for him, either,” Rex avowed.

“So let me get this straight, Rex,” Leah
said as she waited for the laptop to boot. “Do you seriously want
me to believe that you and Michael were spies? International covert
operatives? And those Sunday afternoons we were sailing on your
boat, that you were playing a role?”

“No, of course not. On Sundays, we were
pretty much who we were. Just a couple of guys having a good time
with a couple of hot babes.”

“You mean me and your half-dozen hot babes,”
Leah muttered as she Googled the CIA.

“Hey—I confess, I have issues,” he said with
a laugh. “I still do.”

“You and your pal both, apparently.”

“I can’t speak for Mikey.”

Leah didn’t say anything—she was reading the
mission of the Clandestine Service on the CIA Web site.

“You’re looking at the Web site, huh?” Rex
asked.

That startled her, and Leah reared back,
looked at the phone in her hand for a moment before putting it back
up to her ear, then suddenly dipped down, looking under the table.
“How did you know that?”

“Don’t freak out—there isn’t a camera
anywhere. I heard the Windows music when you turned it on.”

Leah sat up and frowned. Was she honestly
going to believe this? “So . . . so Michael asked you to call me
and tell me that he was really a . . .” —she could hardly say it—
“an operations officer or whatever you said?”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you. Look,
for whatever reason, it’s really important to him that you know the
truth. Hell, I haven’t even heard from him in two years—I didn’t
even know how to get hold of him. I’m glad he called, because there
was some stuff I wanted to tell him, but the point is, you are
important enough for him to come out of the closet, so to
speak.”

For once, Leah was speechless. It was one
thing for Michael to hand her some lame excuse, but quite another
to rope in a couple of friends. “Okay,” she said, nodding. “If I
believe you—and I’m not saying I do, but if I did—then what was the
story in New York?”

“We’d been out of the country for a long
time,” Rex said easily. “We got called back to New York to do some
consulting. But after being out of the country for a couple of
years, New York was like Disneyland. And then Mike met you. I don’t
think he ever meant it to go so far.”

Leah’s gut clenched.
That’s what Michael had said that night in New York.
I am sorry, I should never have let it go this
far.

“But girl, he had you under his skin, and
apparently, he still does,” Rex was saying. “Unfortunately, at the
time, there were some things he hadn’t quite finished, and he knew
that it was going to break eventually. I guess it took a little
longer than what any of us anticipated, but when it did, he had to
book,” Rex explained.

“But he worked on Wall Street,” Leah
argued.

“He said he did. But if you think about it,
you only saw his office once. Every other time he met you in the
lobby. Let’s just say he borrowed an office to show you one day,
and that was all it took.”

Damn. If that was true, that was good—she’d
only seen his office once, on a day his secretary . . . “But what
about Donna, his secretary?” Leah demanded. “She answered the phone
every time I called.”

“Calls were routed through Washington.”

“What about his boss?”

“Bill. He called every Sunday.”

“No, that was his
dad
.”

“No, that was his boss. Michael doesn’t have
a dad. At least not one he knows about. He has no family—he was
orphaned, grew up in foster homes, and it was his boss that called
on Sundays.”

Leah obviously needed to go lie down because
she really was beginning to believe the spy story. Not that she
didn’t have some pretty strong doubts—somehow, a huge guy
conspiracy was a lot easier to swallow than an outlandish tale of
spies. But could Michael really talk two friends into going along
with it?

She continued to chat it up with Rex,
throwing him a couple of curve questions to catch him in a lie. Rex
handled each one flawlessly.

She sat at the table a long time after she
hung up, staring at the CIA Web site, trying to absorb this strange
little twist in the history of her life. All right, so what if she
did believe it? It didn’t really change anything . . . did it? Of
course it didn’t change anything! It was just a curious and unusual
turn of events in something that was really ancient history and had
absolutely no effect on her now. No matter why he left, she could
never forgive the way he left.

She just had to keep reminding herself of
that.

Subject: Re: Spies and Other Stuff

From: Lucy Frederick

To: Leah Kleinschmidt

Time: 10:34 pm

Rex Anderson! Oh gawd, he was so CUTE! So
you really think the spy thing might be true, huh? I guess it could
be—if you think about it, there’s really no reason three grown men
would lie about it, even if they are friends. And there’s nothing
for M to gain from lying about it—it’s not like you’re going to get
back with him. ROFLMAO!! You’re not, right?

Subject: Re: Re: Spies and Other Stuff

From: Leah Kleinschmidt

To: Lucy Frederick
[email protected]>

Time: 7:48 pm

God, NO! He could get down on his knees and
BEG and still there’d be no way I’d go back. Who cares, anyway? I
mean, think about it, he’s telling me that he dumped me because he
was a spy but he lied about being a spy. The obvious question is,
what else did he lie about? Maybe the whole damn thing was a lie.
Anyway, I do not want to go back there, I really honestly don’t, so
please let’s not talk about it anymore.

So listen, the buttercup yellow dress you
attached in your e-mail this morning? You know, the one you said
was gold but was so yellow that it made me want a fried egg? If
that was supposed to be a joke, I’m dying here . . .

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Spies and Other
Stuff