He Shelved My Designs, Then Crashed Into My Bed novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Two Years

The kitchen on Cannon Street had been yellow for forty years, and Rett had never been able to make himself paint it.

He flipped the light on and stood with his back to the counter.

Ward stopped in the doorway with his hands at his sides.

He took in the enamel table and the pot rack and the fern in the window.

"Sit," Rett said.

"Where?"

"Anywhere that isn't mine."

Ward chose the chair by the wall, the plain ladder-back with the slightly crooked rail.

He sat down, and his big shoulders settled against it like they knew it.

Rett noticed that and did not know what to do with it.

"I made that when I was nineteen," he said. "It's the worst chair in the house."

"It's a good chair."

"It's crooked."

"It's honest," Ward said. "The rail's off by a quarter inch, and you left it."

"She liked it that way."

Ward said nothing.

Rett pulled out the chair across from him and did not sit.

"Two years ago I signed your contract," he said. "I walked a truck of chairs into your building."

He kept his voice level.

"A man in a lanyard took them and said the CEO would be in touch."

"Yes," Ward said.

"I called the office the next week. They said you were traveling. I called the week after. Same answer."

Ward's hands lay flat on his thighs.

"I wrote you a letter on paper, with a stamp," Rett said. "I sent drawings of the bench."

He breathed in.

"I sent an apology for the first letter, which was rude."

"I read it," Ward said.

"Did you? I'd have liked a postcard. I called forty-one times, Gibbes."

He had never said the number aloud, and it came out raw.

"Your lawyers answered," he said. "Every time. Very polite. Very busy. Rights are being evaluated."

"I know," Ward said.

"Don't say I know."

"I'm not sure what else I'm allowed to say," Ward said.

"Anything that isn't that."

Ward's grey eyes were steady on him, and there was a muscle jumping in his jaw.

"Fourteen months ago my grandmother died," Rett said. "I called your office that morning. I got the machine."

Something moved in Ward's face.

"I said her name into it," Rett said. "I said she was the reason the rocker existed."

He made himself finish.

"I said I wouldn't be drawing it now, and I wanted you to know what you'd taken."

"Bonneau," Ward said.

"Nobody called back. Not the lawyers. Not you."

The kitchen clock ticked.

"Say something," Rett said.

"I heard it," Ward said, very low.

"You heard it."

"I heard it every time."

It was the wrong answer, or it was too true, and Rett did not have the patience to untangle which.

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