In Bed With The Boss Page 0,46
apartment. Sometimes he’d stay late at the office and work on campaigns. Sometimes he’d walk through the park and eat hot dogs for dinner until it was time to go home. And sometimes he just sat on a park bench and shivered, wondering where on earth Brad Lindsay found the stamina to keep up such an arduous pace with these men.
Toby never asked any questions; he had no idea who Brad was bringing up to his apartment and he didn’t want to know. Toby figured what he was doing was bad enough: covering up Brad’s secret, dysfunctional life; the less Toby knew the better off he was. At least Brad was neat and he respected Toby’s things. The first week Brad started using the apartment he bought Toby ten new sets of white cotton sheets and stacked them in the linen closet. Brad lined a shelf in the medicine cabinet with jars of petroleum jelly. By the time Toby returned to his home, there were always clean sheets on his bed and the apartment always looked the same way Toby had left it in the morning. And sometimes, though not always, there was a nice little bouquet of flowers in a small vase on the coffee table. Though it was a small gesture, and Toby wasn’t sure who was responsible for the flowers, it brightened an otherwise dismal situation and made it more tolerable.
With this new arrangement, Toby didn’t usually get home until nine o’clock at night. And thanks to these new hours, he got to know his neighbor in number forty-four. At first they just nodded and said hello in passing. Toby was used to coming home between six and seven and the hallway was always empty. The person who lived in number forty-four was a middle aged woman with a full figure and short curly blond hair. She reminded him of Ethel Mertz on the oldI Love Lucy Showfrom a distance and she sounded like Burl Ives up close. He figured they didn’t have much in common and it wasn’t worth getting too friendly. Besides that, he wondered if she ever ran into Brad coming or going. This was something Toby wanted to avoid talking about at all cost.
But one night in early November he ran into the woman in number forty-four in the hall and she introduced herself. “I’m Rosemary Stanford. Since we keep running into each other this way I figured we may as well get to know each other a little better.” She spoke in a voice so deep and husky it sounded as if she needed to cough up a gob of phlegm.
Toby smiled and extended his hand. He couldn’t avoid her now. “I’m Toby MacFarlane. It’s nice to meet you.” He wanted to keep this casual; he didn’t want to get to know her better.
“You seem to keep very long hours,” Rosemary said. “Even longer than mine.” She laughed with a deep bellow and sent him a comforting look at the same time.
“Ah well,” he said. He couldn’t tell her the truth. “I work in advertising and I stay late most nights.”
“I’m a doctor at St. Vincent’s in The Village. I know all about working long hours, trust me.”
This was interesting. A woman doctor. Though he’d heard there were women doctors he’d never actually met one in person. The women Toby knew in the medical profession were always nurses. He had two female cousins who were nurses in New Jersey. “I feel guilty now,” he said. “You’re saving lives all day and I’m working on ad campaigns to get people to drink more soda so they can ruin their teeth.”
Rosemary shrugged. “It’s all relative, honey,” she said. “As long as you love what you do, nothing else matters much.”
A week later, they ran into each other in the hallway again and Rosemary asked if he wanted to meet one night after work and have dinner. Toby agreed and they met at a little restaurant not far from St. Vincent’s on Saturday night. When they sat down and ordered drinks, Rosemary made a comment about the noises she sometimes heard coming from Toby’s apartment. But she also made of point of letting him know it didn’t bother her. She laughed and said, “Don’t worry, honey. You’re young and you should be having all the fun you can get. It sounds like you’re knocking them off like flies in there. Ha.”
Toby knew she was referring to what she’d heard when Brad used the apartment, because