Gemini

I must have been doing eighty-five miles per hour down I-93 when I thought about her name: Allison. It’s pretty just like her. But of course, I knew she would be more than pretty. And she smelled like green apples.

She seemed nervous. Her hand trembled and her cheeks turned rosy when she approached me and that made me want to rub her sweet face with my hand.

I wonder what her story is, why a girl that looks like that is waiting tables in a diner in the suburbs. Surely, she at least could do better at one of the trendy bars in Boston. She could have anything she wants with a face and eyes like that.

Not to mention her slamming body…the way that tight uniform hugged her ass.

Fuck!

She’s the last woman I should be thinking like this about. Yet, all I can focus on now is whether she tastes as good as she smells.

Snap out of it, Callahan. She’s the one woman you can’t have.

Which is why I want her.

I need to control my thoughts, but I didn’t expect to be so fucking captivated liked this.

I have to see her again when I can calm the fuck down. I just don’t know how I am going to manage it. The next two weeks are jam packed with client meetings.

***

I get back to the office in record time, passing my assistant Julie who immediately points to my office.

“Karyn is waiting for you,” she said.

Karyn.

I had been in a relationship for six months with Karyn Keller, an attractive blonde television reporter I began representing after she walked into the agency and demanded to be added to my client roster. We were immediately attracted to each other and decided to ignore the agency’s non-fraternization policy.

D.N. Westock represents some of the biggest names in broadcast news and I was their highest grossing agent and rising star after nabbing one of the hosts of a national morning show as a client. Not bad for a kid from Dorchester.

To say I had humble beginnings is putting it lightly. I grew up on the third level of a triple-decker apartment house in one of the highest crime sections of Boston, the middle child of an Italian mother and Irish father. My parents, older brother Caleb and I and my sister, Callie, who’s ten years younger, shared the two small bedrooms in the apartment. My parents, Paul and Bettina, went with the whole ‘C’ name thing for the kids, which went even further because our last name is Callahan.

Money was tight, but our parents did the best they could to provide for us. My father worked as a steelworker and my mother was a maid. Even so, no one was surprised when I, the boy who survived an accidental drive-by shooting on my fifteenth birthday right outside our front door, left home as soon as I graduated from high school. Marked with a bullet hole on my left arm, I managed to get into Northwestern on a merit-based scholarship because studying and school came easy to me, plain and simple.

Northwestern was known for its Communications program and I knew that I wanted to major in something where I would be able to use my innate ability to write and speak publicly. Mostly, I was good at mouthing off and could have taught an AP class in Bull

shitting 101.

It was there in Chicago, nearly twelve years ago, during my senior year that my life fell apart. Even with what happened, though, somehow I managed to finish up and graduate.

Three years after the nightmare senior year, while working in Chicago, I began an affair with an older woman named Lana Ford, who happened to be a broadcasting agent. I had taken a position as her intern and even though Lana was fifteen years older, she taught me everything she knew—in the boardroom and the bedroom. I would follow Lana around during the day while she met with clients and then we’d head back to her loft at night. I was closed out emotionally after what happened to me back at Northwestern anyway, so the fact that she was using me for sex and I was using her to get ahead suited me just fine. I didn’t want to feel my heart break ever again. I didn’t want to feel anything at all, for that matter.

One day, Lana found out I took one of the other young female interns back to her loft, so she cut me loose. She had to know it wasn’t going anywhere romantically, but she was…understandably, very bitter. I thought she might try to sabotage me, but I immediately got another better internship, safely working under a male this time.

I eventually used the (non-sexual) experience I gained from watching Lana, to snag an actual junior agent job in the Chicago office of D.N. Westock. I worked my way up the ladder and began representing some major names in the Chicago area before being transferred to the Boston office. I requested the transfer to Boston four years ago after my father died suddenly of a heart attack.

I wish I could say the day my father died felt like was the worst day of my life, but I had already experienced that day eight years earlier.

After I moved back to Boston, I was more determined than ever to forget everything that happened in Chicago. That is, until now. Four years after arriving back home, I now have to face my past again. I just couldn’t believe out of everywhere in the country, she was so geographically close to me. I have to see her again, if nothing else, just to stare at her beautiful face.

For now, I’d have to see Karyn.

“Hi hon. What took you so long?” Karyn asked sitting with her high heels crossed over my desk, clutching her usual venti non-fat two-pump vanilla latte. She handed me a now cold tall coffee.

I lied. “I had a meeting with a potential client outside of the city.”

“Anyone good?” She batted her eyelashes and twisted her straight blonde hair into a bun.