Breaking the Rules Read Free

with
Thanks for the package
, and
Dreamed about you again last night, wild woman …
But sometimes he wrote her long, intimate e-mails about his highly dysfunctional family, about adventures he’d had growing up, about his plans for the future, about the unjust oppression of women that he witnessed every day, about a myriad of things that mattered to him.
    And she e-mailed him back, also every day. She sent packages to him, too, sometimes as often as twice a week.
    And yes, the first and only time they’d met they’d shared some ridiculously excellent sex along with a whole lot of intimate pillow talk. That, too, worked with the standard boyfriend/girlfriend definition.
    But when Dan had suddenly gotten all
I love you
, after helping to save Jenn’s life, well …
    She’d needed to be certain that it wasn’t just a heady mix of adrenaline and hormones talking, because she knew that she wasn’t his usual type. So she’d sent him away, telling him that if he were serious about their relationship he could prove it by coming back.
    Of course, days later he’d called to tell her that he was heading overseas, into one of the war zones. He couldn’t tell her where and he couldn’t tell her when he’d be back, but she knew from what he didn’t say that he was going to Afghanistan.
    There was no time for her to fly to California, to see him off. He was leaving immediately.
    Jenn had cried for a week, torn between knowing that she’d donethe right thing, and regretting that she’d wasted the little time they might’ve spent together.
    But that still didn’t make Dan her boyfriend.
    So she said nothing to the store clerk. She just left, hoseless.
    There was another drugstore a mere three blocks away, but Jenn had no time to go there. She had a conference call that she had to take at 9:15, and another at 10, so she’d hidden her bare, winter-pale legs beneath her desk and hoped she wouldn’t be required to leave the office before her day ended at 8 p.m.
    It wasn’t an unrealistic hope. As New York State Assemblywoman Maria Bonavita’s chief of staff, Jenn spent most of her time in their New York City office using phone, e-mail, and fax to put out the little fires that sprang up in the course of a day.
    But unfortunately today’s fire wasn’t little, and it required a face-to-face with some rightfully frustrated and angry constituents. And since Maria was in Albany, Jenn’s had to be the face they put out there. Because although her title was chief of staff, she was also Maria’s
entire
staff, not counting the unpaid college interns. There was no one else to send.
    So Jenn took her larger-than-large unhosiered legs, and her bespectacled face that Dan claimed was “cute” despite her Amazonian size, and headed for the boarded-up building that had served as a homeless shelter for veterans before the grease fire in the restaurant next door had done its damage.
    It had happened months earlier, in the coldest part of the winter—which had been devastating for the men who filled the shelter to capacity every night.
    But there were problems with the insurance payout, as well as safety issues, that kept the place locked up tight. The shelter’s organizers, led by a Vietnam veteran named Jack Ventano, had come to Maria’s office for help after weeks of runaround.
    She was trying to get them the assistance they needed to get their facility up and running again. But it wasn’t happening fast enough. And now Jack had called, demanding that Maria come take a tour ofthe place, to see firsthand the mold that was starting to grow on the water-damaged walls.
    Jenn had just gone into a CVS that was halfway to the shelter, and was searching the overhead signs for the hosiery aisle when her cell phone rang.
    It was Mick Callahan, a detective with the NYPD, and a friend of Jenn’s.
    She answered as she continued to scan and finally just made a choice to go down the narrow aisle to the back of the store. “Hello?”
    “Maria