The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [69]
“Oh, I see. I had no idea you two were together.”
What the hell was wrong with this woman? “We’re not together. We work together.”
She swiveled around and gazed at some framed photos on the shelf behind her. “And,” she said cheerily, “you’re good friends!”
“We’re friends.”
“What a lovely picture of Caroline,” Nance said, pointing at one Vic had taken of Caroline, tan legs and big smile, in front of the Grand Canyon, right after they’d graduated from college. With virtually no money, they’d taken the whole summer off to drive out West to places neither of them had ever been before.
Nance persisted. “Is Caroline a friend of Gigi’s, too?”
“Mrs. Archer.”
“Nance.”
“Maybe working on this project isn’t the best thing for you. You seem to be very unhappy with it.”
“Oh no! I love it so far. I’m so sorry I’ve offended you. I won’t say another word. I’ll just score my papers and leave you and Gigi alone.”
Vic reluctantly agreed to let her stay on, and Nance returned to the training room with her tail between her legs. She was just desperate for attention, Vic decided. For people to acknowledge that she was smart and knew her stuff. That put her into a category of people that Vic and Gigi could deal with.
* * *
That evening, after checking on Suzi and explaining to Caroline that he was dining with “some FTA people” he took Gigi out for dinner.
At one point, at the cozy corner table in Cyprus, surrounded by the elegance, candlelight, and fine wine they felt they deserved after such a hard day; when they were toasting each other with their wineglasses and imitating Nancy Archer and Gigi was looking at him eagerly, as in, Now what? he finally realized where he was headed. He kept hearing Nancy Archer’s insinuating voice saying, “You’re a team. You’re good friends.”
Vic, like any man his age, had done a few rounds with this problem. He knew full well that you couldn’t help who you were attracted to. Forget about willing it away! He’d thought about this problem over the years and had come up with some theories and options and a solution that he thought would keep him on the straight and narrow. He called it Vic Witherspoon’s Guide to Doing It and Not Doing It at the Same Time: The All-and-Nothing Approach to Marital Fidelity.
To begin with, attraction just springs up, that dizzying electrical field, and there it is. Attractions are often inappropriate. Usually inappropriate. If you’re married, always inappropriate. In said inappropriate situations, he’d come to see, one had a number of choices. The smartest choice, and the one that was often the hardest to make and carry out, was to remove yourself from the company of the attractive person as quickly as you could and never go near her ever again. This was often not possible because of the circumstances that placed you in the path of this person to begin with, for instance, an attraction between coworkers like him and Gigi.
If you can’t flee the attractive person, you can choose to hang close but not too close to this person, indulging in the glimmering edges of the force field, convinced that nothing’s going to happen and that it’s perfectly okay because: 1. Nobody else notices, including the person you’re attracted to. (Everyone notices.); 2. The feeling is probably only coming from you and so, since it isn’t reciprocated, you aren’t in any danger of actually acting on it. (If the other person allows you to hang around her, she is attracted to you, too.)
So scratch that option. Here’s the best solution he’d come up with, the one that seemed to make the most sense, the one he decided would work with Gigi: You hang around the attractive person as much as possible, bathing in the glow, waiting it out, telling yourself that even if the desire between the two of you is mutual and acknowledged, you’ll have the power to resist.
This, he thought, was the best solution for two reasons: 1. The more you’re around the object of such attraction, the more