Catching Air Read Free

Peter’s footsteps approach.
    “So what’s in Vermont?” she asked.
    When he didn’t answer, she turned around to see him leaning against the doorframe, his tall, lanky body nearly filling the opening. His sandy blond eyebrows were tightly knit above his clear blue eyes.
    “Is everything okay with Rand?” she asked quickly. Rand had a magnetic attraction to risk—he rode motorcycles too fast, quit jobs before he had new ones lined up, and, until he’d met his wife, Alyssa, had chatted up pretty girls without checking to see if they had jealous boyfriends nearby. Somehow he always landed, catlike, on his feet.
    “He’s fine,” Peter said. He cleared his throat. “He and Alyssa are moving to Killington.”
    “Sounds nice,” Kira said. “Actually, it sounds a little menacing. What’s in Killington?” All she knew about the area was that it was a big draw for skiers.
    “Remember that lawsuit from when the moving truck rear-ended him?” Peter was saying. “Rand finally got a settlement.”
    Kira nodded. Rand’s luck, she thought. He’d been stopped at a red light when the brakes on the truck behind him had failed—brakes worn so thin that they should have been replaced months earlier. Rand’s Jeep was totaled, but when a fireman wielding the Jaws of Life cut him out of the crumpled metal, Rand had emerged with only a broken arm, two cracked ribs, and a bump on his forehead. He’d walked out of the hospital four hours later with a fiberglass cast and the card of a personal injury lawyer.
    “He wants to use the settlement to open a bed-and-breakfast near a ski slope,” Peter said.
    Of course he does , Kira thought, stifling a laugh.
    “Does he know anything about running a B-and-B?” she asked. “You have to keep books and do marketing and build a website and cook fancy breakfasts every day . . . I can’t see Rand and Alyssa doing all that stuff.”
    She glanced at Peter, whose eyebrows seemed to have inched even lower, which meant he was contemplating something. Peter, her tech-savvy husband, whose start-up company aimed at providing mobile technology services was faltering. She glanced down at the container of homemade puttanesca sauce she’d cooked the previous Sunday.
    “Oh, no,” she said involuntarily.
    “Hear me out,” he said. “Don’t say no yet.”
    I think I just did , Kira thought, but she nodded.
    “You hate your job—” he began.
    “I wouldn’t say I hate it,” she interjected. “It just . . . Well, it isn’t what I thought it would be. Whoever invented the concept of billable hours was a sadist. I work all the time, Peter, and it isn’t ever enough . . . They want me to pad my time, to—to lie to clients to make the firm even more money, and it’s disgusting—”
    Peter reached over and began massaging her neck with one hand. For such a thin guy, he had fingertips of steel. “Oh,” she sighed, feeling the tight cords along the sides of her neck yield. A headache she hadn’t even noticed began to ebb away.
    “My business hasn’t taken off the way we’d hoped,” Peter continued.
    “It hasn’t been that long . . . ,” she began loyally before her voice trailed off. Peter was a whiz with computers. The problem was, so were a million other people who were willing to work more cheaply, like college students.
    “We’d live in a beautiful home,” Peter said, his voice deep and soothing. His fingers kept digging into new spots of tension, and it was hard for Kira to remember why she’d been arguing. “No more crappy apartments. Rand is offering us a one-third share if we help get the B-and-B off the ground. And if things go well, we could hand it over to a professional innkeeper in a year and keep making money.”
    Kira tried to think of what to say next. “I’ve never even been to Vermont” was what she finally came up with.
    Peter let go of her neck and wrapped his arms around her waist. She could feel the heat coming off his body, and the steam