A Special Relationship (32 page)

 
Now everything was all over Robert’s guest bedroom, a bedroom he was now referring to as her room.
 
Her room.
 
She didn’t know if she could go that far, but she was grateful just the same.
 
She also had a job, as the assistant to his executive secretary, a job that paid her fifteen bucks an hour (the most she’d ever made anywhere).
 
It also made crystal clear for her exactly what she had to do.
 

 
Find herself an apartment was number one.
 
She needed to have her own place, live by her own rules.
 
Then she’d save, and eventually, when she was on her feet again, enroll in college.
 
In that order.
 
No more excuses.
 
No more waiting until somebody gave her permission to live her life.
 
She was going to live her life.
 
For her sake.
 
For her self-respect’s sake.
 
For Millie’s sake, who always seemed to have such confidence in
her.
 

 
Then she sat on the bed thinking about Millie, about how kind she had been to her, and tears almost stained her lids. Poor Millie, she thought.
 
Until she sniffed the smoke.

 
“Robert?” she said as she got off of her bed and went out into the hall.
 
She didn’t see any smoke, but she certainly smelled it and knew that it was coming from downstairs.
 
Then she heard the smoke alarm begin to blare.
 

 
“Robert?” she said again, this time louder and more desperate as she hurried down the long corridor and then down the winding stairs.
 
She hurried into the kitchen where she saw, to her amazement, Robert with an apron around his waist grabbing a burning pan from the stove.

 
Carrie immediately jumped into action, looking for and finding the fire extinguisher and spraying it with great precision over the sizzling burner.
 

 
They both started coughing as the smoke bellowed upward.
 
“Let up the windows and open the door!” Carrie ordered Robert and Robert quickly obeyed.
 
He looked at the ruin around him and then at Carrie, who was still holding the extinguisher.
 
“Good work, Sojourner,” he said.
 

 
Carrie looked at him as if he’d lost his mind calling her that.
 
Then, when she saw he was smiling, his red face smudged with smoke, his white apron black, she smiled too.
 
“What in sand hell were you doing?” she asked him.

 
“Cooking you dinner,” he said.

 
“Well,” Carrie said, looking around at the damage, “I don’t know about cooking, but you sure know how to light a fire.”

 
Robert laughed, quietly at first, and then bellyful.
 
Carrie shook her head and laughed for the first time in a long time, too.

***

At work the next day, Carrie found herself with very little to do.
 
Her desk was in the same office as Marva Cox’s, Robert’s secretary, and both their desks were outside of Robert’s huge office.
 
Carrie had seen him off and on all day, as he went to meetings, came back from meetings, and had numerous meetings with different executives in his own office.
 
He was so busy and so in the zone at work that many times he would forget Carrie was even there and
walk
right by her without speaking or smiling or anything.
 
It was a decision he made that Carrie actually liked.
 
Although she lived with him, which made her more than just a casual acquaintance, their business at Dyson was strictly that: business.
 
Robert’s behavior made certain of it, and Carrie made sure that hers did too.

 
But she still couldn’t shake the feeling that her arrangement with Robert, if that was what you called it, could easily be perceived the wrong way.
 
Marva Cox certainly perceived it that way.
 
Especially when she discovered that Carrie’s home address was the same as Robert’s.
 
She knew she knew because some chick from human resources came by the office and called herself whispering it to Marva and Carrie heard her.
 
Marva looked at the girl as if she didn’t believe her.
 
“
You have got to be kidding
!” she said loudly before remembering that the target of their gossip was right in the same room with them.
 
Then she quickly handed Carrie a stack of papers and asked her to take them to the senior VP.

 
As soon as Carrie grabbed the papers and closed the office door, she stood there long enough to hear the gossip get going full blast.
 
She couldn’t hear every word, but she did hear Marva comment that she’d never known Robert to bring “one” to his home for any reason, let alone let one live with him.
 
He had an apartment in town, according to Marva, that he kept for entertaining the ladies.
 

 
Carrie remembered taking the papers downstairs to the senior VP’s office and thinking as she went how Marva Cox knew so much about Robert, and how she knew so little.
 
She remembered how Millie also said that he was always coming into Jetson’s with different females too.
 
But the idea that he would have a sex apartment, if Marva was to be believed, still surprised her.
 
Robert just didn’t seem like that kind of man around her.
 
He was warm and caring and didn’t seem to have eyes for any other woman.
 
But, of course, she’d only started being around him.
 
There was a lot, she knew, she didn’t have a clue about.
 

 
And a lot, she realized, she had to put up with.
 
That happened as soon as she came back from her sudden errand.
 
She went back into the office she shared with Marva and found none other than Tyler Langley sitting and waiting for Robert.
 
Her heart pounded when she saw the one female she classified as a true enemy since she’d been in Florida.
 
The woman who had slapped her.
 
She even began to itch for a confrontation as she entered the suite and began heading for her desk, daring that female to get aggressive with her this time.
 
Although her situation was still precarious, she was fairly certain that, unlike Alphonso, Robert wouldn’t fire her for defending herself.

 
But the witch didn’t even remember her.
 
She looked Carrie dead in the
eye,
even had the nerve to smile and nod at her in a kind of arrogant greeting, but there wasn’t an ounce of recognition in her eyes.
 
Carrie sat down behind her desk a little off put.
 
But it only confirmed her theory.
 
People like Tyler Langley, the so-called jet set, never paid attention to the help.

 
Robert’s office door opened as a gentleman he had been meeting with was shaking his hand and saying his goodbye.
 
Tyler stood up as the man walked passed, speaking to her but ignoring Carrie, and Carrie could see a sudden but subtle change in Robert’s demeanor when he saw that Tyler was waiting for him.

 
“I need to see you, Robert,” she said before he could say a word.
 
He cut a glance at Carrie, which worried her, and then he stepped aside so that Tyler could enter.
 
When the door closed, shielding them both inside, Marva was staring at Carrie.

 
“What?” Carrie asked before she realized it.

 
“I didn’t say a word,” Marva said.

 
“Yeah, but your eyes said plenty.”

 
“That’s Mr. Kincaid’s girlfriend.”

 
“Yeah, I know.”

 
Marva was surprised by Carrie’s response.
 
“You know?”

 
“Yes.
 
Of course I do.
 
She’s one of many, right?”

 
Marva hesitated.
 
“Right.”

 
“Since I’m not one of any, I don’t see where it concerns me.”

 
Marva smiled.
 
“You mean to tell me you ain’t his girlfriend?”

 
“No.
 
Why would you think that?
 
Just because a girl lives with a guy and he gets her the best job she’s ever had doesn’t mean they have a relationship.
 
Wait a minute.
 
I’d better rephrase that.”

 
Marva laughed.
 
“Yeah, I think you’d better.”

 
Carrie smiled.
 
“But for real, me and Rob, I mean Mr. Kincaid, are just friends.”

 
“No hanky panky?”

 
“None,” Carrie said.
 
Unless you counted that morning in that hotel room.
 
Then Marva laughed even at that.

 
“That’ll change,” she said confidently.
 
“You’d best believe that’ll change.”

 
Carrie didn’t like the sound of that, but she ignored it just the same.
 
Her mind was still on Tyler.
 
And why Robert seemed so displeased to see her.

The answer came almost three weeks later.
 
Robert and Carrie had had dinner, Chinese takeout, and then Robert suggested they go outside on the patio and play a game of cards.
 
He seemed almost giddy with happiness, it seemed to Carrie, and she therefore readily agreed.

 
Once outside they pulled up a small, round, wrought iron table and two matching chairs.
 
It was a warm Florida night and both were coolly dressed in shorts and t-shirts.
 
Carrie sat back as Robert, claiming to never lose, began shuffling the cards, and she could hardly believe it was her.
 
Carrie Banks.
 
Sitting in the backyard of a beautiful, luxurious home, about to play spades with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
 
She wanted to pinch herself.
 
She wanted to question if this was real, or was she playing this out in her overactive mind.
 

 
And best of all was Robert.
 
He treated her like a queen.
 
Over these last three weeks, he’d take her to work, bring her home from work, and never leave the house again.
 
That didn’t mean that he didn’t work past midnight most nights, he did.
 
But he never left her to visit one of those numerous girlfriends everybody kept telling her he had.
 
Not that his ladies weren’t calling him.
 
They were.
 
He’d get tons of calls every single night.
 
And at first Carrie would never answer the call, believing that it wasn’t her place to try and upstage some woman Robert still planned to be with.
 
But then he started asking her to answer the calls, and to tell them that he was unavailable.
 
Although it was painfully obvious in those women’s voices that every one of them wanted desperately to know who Carrie was, none of them, not one, dared ask.
 
It was as if they knew they were sharing Robert and had decided, in some kind of sick logic if you asked Carrie, that part of him was better than none of him.

 
Carrie could understand why they would feel that way.
 
Robert was simply wonderful, not just because of the kindness he showed to her in her hours of need, but because of the way he’d been treating her since she moved in with him.
 
Not once had he tried to come onto her sexually.
 
Not once had he intimated that she had to “pay” to stay with him.
 
Not once had he disrespected her.