DANIEL'S GIRL: ROMANCING AN OLDER MAN Page 6

  “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?”

  “I remember it well,” Val said with a wary smile of his own. “But then you met Daniel and I met Reality. Daniel told you that you were staying right here with him. Reality told me that there were just so many reporters who got to trot the globe, and a black gay guy like me wasn’t going to be one of them.”

  Nikki looked at her best friend. He’d had his share of disappointments in this life, and sometimes she was amazed at how good he weathered every storm.

  “It’s the assignments they give me,” Val went on. “What does a brother like me look like reporting on a coalminers strike? What the hell I know about coalmining? Yes, I’m from Indiana, and yes we border Kentucky, but I don’ know nothing about no damn coalmining!” Nikki laughed. Then Val added: “But a brother’s got to work.”

  “I hear that.”

  “So I journey to the Kentucky’s of this world and watch those straggly-haired men wipe the soot from their faces and complain endlessly about how everybody wants to take their guns away from them, and how they’re going to take their country back one buckshot at a time, or whatever t
he hell they be saying. And I continue to report all of that. While you, on the other hand,” he added, as he looked at her with a concerned look on his face, “continue to get thrown out of press conferences.”

  The waiter arrived with Val’s scotch and soda just as he said that. He accepted the drink, waited for the waiter to leave, and then looked, once again, at Nikki. Nikki was staring at him.

  “You know about that?” she asked him.

  “No you didn’t ask me that. This is my hometown too. I still have friends in this town. Besides, I saw the tape.”

  Nikki continued to stare at him. “But what did you think when you saw it?”

  “You called him out. There’s nothing else to think. Mayor Bainbridge gave every one of those contracts for his road improvement plan to his friends and relatives. Every one of them. And not one of them went to any minorities when he knew they were supposed to set aside some of those contracts so all of the different businesses can get a piece of the pie. He can’t abuse tax dollars like that. And you called him out on it.”

  “I felt I had to. He’s so corrupt it’s not even funny, Val. But nobody challenges him. You used to work here. You know where I’m coming from.”

  “You’d better believe I know.”

  “But he orders me to leave the press conference because he claims I’m being disrespectful. I’m asking the tough questions, which, by the way, is what a journalist is supposed to do, but he calls that disrespect. And he never answered my question. He would never tell me what I was saying that was so wrong.”

  “Because you told the truth and he knew it,” Val said firmly. “His ass is even worse than what you said, if you ask me. And you were absolutely right to call him out on his bullshit. But what about Daniel, Nikki? That’s the thing. He is going to have a fit when he finds out. If he hasn’t found out already.”

  “He’s still out of town and won’t be back until later today, but I get your point. He still could have heard about it.”

  “He’s going to be furious with you, girl.”