“Well, say your prayers for her,” I said. “Isabel’s been through too much as it is.”
We spent the rest of the meeting outlining our duties and roles in the upcoming Ferguson and Sons surveillance job. The retainer check had arrived in the mail over the weekend-just in time to keep me from having to dip into the reserves. We were scheduled to begin installing hidden cameras later that evening. It would be nice to have things back to normal.
After the meeting, I called Toni into my office. I closed the door when she came in.
“Uh-oh,” she said, smiling, as we sat down. “Am I getting fired?”
“Nope,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you alone.”
“What? You didn’t get your fill of me over the weekend?” she asked.
I smiled and shook my head. “No. How ’bout you? You sick of me yet?”
“You kidding? I can barely stand you.”
I smiled. “You look really pretty today.”
She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She paused and then said, “Just today?”
“Let me rephrase. You look beautiful. Every day.”
“Why, thank you.”
I continued. “Yesterday, when I got home, I had the chance to do some thinking,” I said.
“In addition to all the other thinking you did over the weekend,” Toni said.
“Will you stop and let me finish?”
“Sorry.”
I looked at her. “I was with you all weekend long and an hour after you’d left, I found myself missing you.”
“Go figure,” she said.
“Exactly. So I started asking myself ‘what’s up with that?’ See, whenever I’ve been with someone in the past, and I knew that they’d be leaving soon-well, that was pretty much a good thing. A relief. I’m a pretty private guy, and I like my space. Now, though, with you-I’m to the point where just knowing you’re going to be leaving-like yesterday afternoon-well, it really sucks. And you actually leaving-like last night-well, that’s even worse. I don’t like it.”
She smiled. “So you’re saying you like me?”
“No,” I said. I stood up and walked over to her. “I’m saying it took us five years to get together. Silly me. But it’s only taken me three months to realize that I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m flat crazy about you, Toni. And I think I’m getting more that way every day. That’s it.”
She smiled and stood up. “So you’re saying-”
“I love you, Toni.”
She looked at me, and her eyes started to moisten. Then she smiled. “Me, too,” she said, quietly. “I love you, too, Danny Logan.”
I stepped forward and took her in my arms. We hugged for a solid minute, saying nothing. Then I pushed back just far enough to kiss her softly.
“Wait,” I said after a few seconds. “I’m not done. I wanted to give you a present.”
“A present?” she said, sniffling, “This is good. Presents are good.”
I turned and picked up a small box on my desk. I handed it to her.
“Whoa. What’s this?” she asked, looking at me warily.
“Open it and find out.”
She fiddled with the lid, got it off, and then pulled out a shiny gold key. She held it up, knowing immediately what it was.
“When you’re over at my place,” I said, “I don’t want to have to suddenly start worrying anymore about you leaving to go home. I want you to already be home. Us-together.”
She looked at me. “Are you sure you’re ready for that?” she asked.
I nodded. “I am definitely ready. I want you to move in with me. I want us to be together.”
She was quiet for several seconds. Then she said, “I’ve been thinking about this, too. Maybe you’d better sit back down.”
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want to live together, at least not for real, unless we’re married. And-before you get alarmed,” she said, “this is not a ploy to get you to propose.' She smiled. 'Believe me, we’re not ready to get married. Maybe sometime in the future, but not today.”
I hadn’t even thought about marriage. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’d thought about it a little. Then, I had started feeling overwhelmed, so I'd come up with a brilliant solution-I decided not to think about it anymore. And now, maybe Toni was right. As usual. Maybe it was still be too early. Things were already moving fast between us. Maybe moving in together now would be too fast.
“Besides-I like my independence,” she continued. “I’m not saying I don’t enjoy my time with you-I love it, actually, but I don’t know if I’m ready to totally give my independence up yet. Obviously, I’m not seeing anyone else. But I don’t want to screw this up between us, you know?”
I nodded.
“So,” she said, “I have a counterproposal for you.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll keep your key,” she said. “And I’ll put it on my ring. But I’m not going to move in with you. At least not formally. I’m going to keep my apartment. That way, I can always tell myself that we don’t live together. At least technically, anyway. Case anyone asks, you live on Lake Union-I live in Fremont. If you piss me off-just in case-then I’ll still have somewhere to go. Separate.”
I started to talk, but she cut me off.
“But I will start moving some things over. This afternoon. And I will start staying with you at your place. At least some of the time. How’s that?”
I was sitting down, and still, my head was spinning. The first thing I felt was immense relief-relief that she wasn’t flat-out turning me down like I’d started to think. And on the heels of that relief, I felt elation. My heart soared. Toni Blair was going to start moving in with me. I smiled. “I can live with that,” I said. Part-time Toni is better than no Toni at all.
She smiled back at me. “Deal, then.”
We both stood up and stepped toward each other. I took her in my arms and held her tightly. “Besides,” she said, “the view at your apartment’s a lot better than the view at mine.”
She was looking over my shoulder, out the window. “The lake
She smiled and leaned back so that she could kiss me. “I’m not talking about the lake, you big dope. I’m talking about you.”
Epilogue
The Congregation at the Twenty-Third Street Baptist Church spoke quietly to each other as they waited for the sermon to begin. They fanned themselves with hymnals and church bulletins in an effort to keep cool. The church’s ancient air conditioner was working hard, but it was questionable as to whether the air conditioner actually conditioned the air or had given up at some point and simply acted as a large, somewhat noisy fan. But even if it didn’t work well, it was worth a try, since even at the early hour, it was already in the low eighties outside. The people crowded inside needed all the help they could get.
A tall, thin, distinguished-looking black man approached the lectern. He wore a simple black Geneva gown over a blue long-sleeved shirt with a black tie. He was a handsome man, middle-aged with tinges of gray beginning to show in his short hair. Already, his face glistened with sweat. When he stepped up and gripped the lectern, the
