Fast Friends: Reunion

  Fast Friends

  Reunion

  STACY TURNER

  Copyright © 2012 Stacy Turner

  All rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  *Buzz*

  Tara snatched her vibrating phone off the conference table and slipped it onto her lap. She glanced around the crowded conference room to see if anyone had noticed. A couple of junior associates from Impaction looked her way, but everyone else was focused on the sales presentation one of the other marketers was giving. Impaction was bidding to subcontract some work for her company. She didn't know how they had gotten this far in the selection process. Their name alone spoke volumes about their ability to manage image. What she hadn't picked up from the name was being made crystal clear by their presentation. They were nice people, but a bit amateurish. Even the skinflint VP of marketing that she reported in to was surreptitiously checking his watch.

  She leaned back slightly in her chair to get a better angle on the screen of her smartphone. Across the table her coworker Jack gave her the slightest wink and a chin raise. Apparently the incoming text hadn't gone entirely unnoticed. She didn't know why she had confided in Jack; he just had a way of weaseling secrets out of a person. She regretted it now.

  Under the table, she accessed the incoming text.

  Mark: What are you wearing?

  She suppressed a smile.

  Tara: The Blahniks

  Mark: :) Just shoes? I kind of wish I was in your office right now.

  It was 11:20 am on a Friday morning, so Mark knew very well what she was wearing – in the general sense, anyway. Today was black slacks, a coral summer-weight cashmere sweater and a blazer. A pastel floral scarf added a feminine touch. And of course her favorite pair of Manolo Blahnik pumps. Well, her only pair, actually. She wasn't made of money, after all.

  Tara: Just shoes. And pearls, of course. A girl is naked without her pearls.

  She wasn't wearing pearls. She hated them actually. They made her think of her grandmother, and as much as she loved Gammy, there was no way she wanted to dress like her.

  Mark: That's an image I won't get out of my head any time soon. Meeting?

  He must have noticed how long it was taking her to respond. It was a little bit difficult to type a text message under a conference table without being conspicuous. That, and she was actually trying to absorb what was going on. All the same it was fun to talk to Mark.

  Tara: Impaction.

  Mark: Ouch. Is it really horrible to say I hope it's a tooth?

  Again, she had to hold in a grin.

  Tara: Not a tooth.

  Mark: Ew!!

  Tara: That's right: marketing consultants.

  Mark: Marketing consultants called Impaction? Now that's what I call a shitty name.

  This time Tara had to fake a cough to cover up her laugh. Jack gave her a subtle head-shake and Tara had to remind herself that she was a marketing manager, not a giddy teenager. Heck, even giddy teens got in trouble for texting in class.

  Tara: GTG.

  Mark: Ok. TTYL.

  Sliding the phone into the pocket of her blazer, Tara turned her full attention to the presentation. The Impaction sales director was now showing a pie chart of their client breakdown by industry. It took Tara a moment to realize why it looked weird: the percentage labels didn't match the size of the wedges. The presenter must have noticed around the same time that she did because he blushed (which was cute, even if she didn't think he was), and mumbled something about the wrong slide.

  Mercifully, the presentation only lasted a few more minutes before the now flustered man asked for questions. A couple of her colleagues tossed some soft ball questions to be polite, but it wasn't worth grilling the vendor when it was clear they were out of consideration for the contract.

  After the meeting broke up, Tara went back to her office. Jack was only a few steps behind her, his mouthful of capped teeth on display.

  “You are too much, girl,” he said, following her into the tiny space. As a senior manager Tara was lucky to even have an office, so the size of it didn't bother her. It helped mitigate the resentment of people who were older than her but hadn't made it as far in their career. Tara was a bit of a rising star, but with the job title came responsibilities that could be a bit of a headache.

  “You are the last person I would expect to see goofing off in a meeting,” Jack continued, sitting in one of the chairs across her desk from her.

  “Sorry,” Tara said, to be polite. “Honestly, though, they didn't really make the cut.”

  “Yeah,” he said, tapping his fingers on her desk. “I agree.”

  He seemed to be mulling something over and Tara logged into her laptop to check her email, giving him space to think. Nothing too important had come in while she was in the meeting. She flagged a couple of emails for reply.

  “Tara?” he said, tentatively.

  “Yeah?” She turned away from her screen to let him know he had her full attention.

  “What if you knew something important but you weren't sure you could say anything without getting into hot water?”

  Tara frowned. He seemed very serious. No teeth. She gestured with her head for him to close the door. The room was small enough that all he had to do was lean back and push it gently.

  “What's going on, Jack?” she asked.

  “You know how Laurence asked me to help him with some reports the other day?” Laurence Tate was one of their marketing executives. He was a bit of a high flyer, pulling in big clients on a regular basis, even though he had the reputation of being more mouth than action.

  “I remember,” Tara said.

  “Well,” Jack said, “when I was grabbing some files from his office I saw some printouts of emails in his recycling bin with some names that looked vaguely familiar. I should have just ignored it, but I grabbed a couple of sheets and did a web search. I think he's been talking to some people at New Image.”

  New Image was one of their main competitors. That was odd, but not necessarily suspicious.

  “And?”

  “Well, the emails hinted that he'd given them something valuable. Information, maybe? I'm not sure and it's not much to go on, but it might be something. I'm wondering if I should talk to Phil about it.”

  Phil was the VP of Marketing. She could see Jack's dilemma. If Laurence was up to something unethical Jack had a responsibility to report it, but if there was nothing going on Jack would look like a sneak and a trouble-maker. In fact, even if there was something going on it could still blow back on Jack. Without more information it was hard to say whether telling Phil was a good idea.

  “Maybe you should hold off,” Tara said. “Do you still have the emails?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Could you make me a copy and let me take a look at them. I don't know everything that's happening in the company, but I might be able to give a second opinion, at least.”

  “I don't have them here,” Jack said. “I took them home, but I can give them to you on Monday.”

  “That should be fine,” Tara said.

  Jack thanked her and left her office. Maybe there was nothing to it, but if there was frau
d going on they couldn't just turn a blind eye.

  After a quick lunch, Tara spent the next couple of hours dialed into work, but in the back of her mind she kept thinking about Mark.

  The last time she'd seen Mark in the flesh was a few days after they graduated from high school. That whole time seemed like another universe now. High school for Tara had been about two things: popularity and getting her hair to fall in just the right way over her shoulders. It wasn't that she'd been shallow. Ok, she'd been shallow. She had been – still was – a very pretty girl. She was medium height, slim, with slightly wavy blond hair she wore just past her shoulders and bottle-green eyes. Her high cheekbones and wide mouth gave her the look of a 1940's movie star. She'd played that up in high school, wearing her hair in pin curls or a ratted up-do and walking in a artificial way that was really preposterous looking back. She'd done it once at an office party and pretty much brought down the house.

  Just went to show how stupid high school was. Then no one has laughed. She was a benevolent, if ruthless queen of the social scene. She used to make girls cry with just an up and down glance, and the only boys who were good enough for her were captains – of the right teams, of course. Quarterbacks made the cut, though they weren't captains; tennis and academic decathlon captains did not. Except...

  Except that Mark was the captain of academic decathlon and even if he wasn't dating material, he was still the one person she threw out her rules for. In a limited, not for public consumption way, sure, but still she always saw him as her friend.

  It had started back in kindergarten. Of all the kids he was the one who was always friendly to her – even when she came back to school after the chickenpox still covered in scabbed over bumps, he played with her. He had been this skinny, dark-haired kid with oversized glasses, and maybe he understood because he got picked on too. Whatever the reason, as they grew up their bond didn't break, though the transition to middle school and Tara's emergence as a teenaged hottie tested it.

  After grade school they didn't hang out together at school (she kind of ignored him), but they would talk on the phone or hang out doing kid stuff they would have been made fun of for doing around their other friends.

  Just one time when they were sixteen, they had done one not so kid that that had almost ended their friendship.

  Mark had been pestering her with questions about what it was like to get drunk ever since she started partying with older kids over the summer. She thought it was silly, since partying wasn't that big of a deal, but he was convinced it was some important rite of passage that he was missing out on. When his parents went out of town for a couple of days on the same weekend both the football team and cheer squad had their retreats, she'd thought “what the hell.” She got the older brother of one of her friends to buy them some liquor.

  She winced now when she thought of the ridiculous lengths she'd gone to to hide the fact that she was going to Mark's house, just so none of her friends finding out. Mark wasn't just not cool, he was really not cool. Her “cool” friends made fun of him all the time and she had to just bite her tongue. When kids played mean pranks on him she told him they were just assholes and let him vent, but she didn't step in to stop it. Being seen at Mark's house on a Saturday night would have been social suicide, even for a girl like her. It wasn't even that he was that weird of a kid, he was just super skinny and wore ugly glasses. Once the cool kids decided he was a weirdo back in middle school it had just stuck. Tara felt bad about it, but there wasn't really anything she could do.

  She parked her car a few blocks away near her friend Bailey's house and took a bit of an indirect route to his house. Thank goodness it was dark, so no one saw her slip around to the back. He let her in through the sliding glass doors off the family room.

  Mark's house was a pretty bland two-story suburban family home. There was a family room on the main floor with high ceilings and a fireplace. Towards the front of the house there was a formal living room and dining room. On the other side of the main staircase, behind the dining room, was a large eat-in kitchen. There were four bedrooms on the 2nd floor – the master, Mark's bedroom, a guestroom and the bedroom that used to be his older sister's that was now an office/junk room. Aside from some of the design details it was pretty much the same layout as her own house. She had a pool in the back yard instead of a garden and patio, and her basement was finished and used as a guest space/game room, but other than that it was the same house.

  Mark twisted his hands nervously as she came inside and sat down on the couch. The fire wasn't lit, but it was pretty warm inside after the chill of the fall night outside. The TV was on mute, set to a kids channel. An action hero cartoon was on. Mark was dressed in cargo pants and a superman T-shirt that hung loose on his skinny frame. He wasn't wearing any shoes.

  “What did you bring,” he asked, turning on one the table lamp near where she sat down and taking the nearest chair. He leaned forward expectantly.

  Dramatically, she pulled the bottle out of her backpack. He frowned.

  “Vodka? Won't that get us really drunk?”

  “Relax,” Tara said, “we'll mix it with something.”

  “I was expecting beer or something like that,” he replied, warily.

  “You really thought I was going to carry a twelve-pack of beer over here?”

  “It didn't have to be that much,” he said, “did it?”

  Tara rolled her eyes. “You said you wanted to get drunk, right, not just have a couple beers.”

  Mark bobbed his head. “Ok, what do we mix it with?”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Juice, soda?”

  “I have some Red Bull,” he said. “I hate juice and you know how my parents are about soda.”

  “Okay,” Tara said. She took off her coat and hung it up while she waited for him to come back. She fiddled with the stereo till she found a station she liked. The room had great acoustics. Too bad no one would ever have a party in here to take advantage of it.

  Mark came back a few minutes later with a couple of juice glasses full of ice and a couple cans of the energy drink. She'd never really made drinks herself before, but how hard could it be to mix two ingredients? The two drinks she made were a bit stronger than she had intended, but not too bad. She knew drunk was the stated goal, but she definitely didn't want to get plastered. She kinda liked being tipsy but still sober enough to make fun of the drunk people.

  “So do we just sit here and drink?” Mark asked, grimacing from the first sip of vodka and energy drink.

  “Well,” Tara said, “we could find some other music and dance.”

  “Next idea,” Mark said, pushing his ugly black-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. His nose wasn't big, necessarily, but it was definitely too big for his thin face. Braces and a light smattering of acne didn't help the picture. Mark used to like to dance when they were younger, but now that they were teenagers he pretended he didn't, since guys weren't supposed to like to dance. Men.

  “How about a drinking game?” Tara suggested. “Do you have a deck of cards?”

  “Sure.”

  “You remember how to play war right?”

  He nodded.

  “Cool. It makes a great drinking game. It's pretty simple. Every time you lose a hand you drink.”

  “The whole cup?” Mark asked, looking a little alarmed.

  “No, boozehound,” she replied, teasingly. “You take a sip.”

  “Okay.”

  He found the cards and they sat on the floor in front of the living room couch and started playing. It took a while, as the hands went back and forth, but finally Tara had all the cards. By this point they had emptied their cups twice and were both a little bit drunk.

  “Let's watch a movie,” Mark slurred after making them a fresh set of drinks. Tara tasted hers and found it kind of weak, but didn't mind. It was still early, but she didn't want to get wasted. Her parents thought she was at Bailey's house and the last thing she wanted was for them to call Bailey's paren
ts to find out why she had come home hung over.

  “Toy Story,” Tara said, bouncing on her butt. She felt oddly energized.

  “A kid movie?” Mark replied. “Are we six?”

  “I like that movie.” Tara pouted. Pouting usually got her what she wanted.

  “You've only seen it like 20,000 times.”

  “Okay.” She scrunched her forehead. “Beauty and the Beast.”

  “No!” Mark said. “First off, I don't own that movie. Second, no!”

  “So it's Toy Story, then,” Tara said, walking a little unsteadily to the drawer of DVDs at the bottom of the entertainment center and rummaging till she found it. The case was a little dusty, but whatever.

  Flopping down on the couch, Mark sighed. “Why don't we ever watch grown up movies?”

  “Because that's what we do with our boring friends,” she said, popping the disc into the player. “Speaking of grown up movies, I saw Last Tango in Paris the other day. Oh my god! It's so dirty and wrong.”

  She sat down next to him and rested her head on his shoulder. She wouldn't normally have done that, but in the moment it seemed perfectly natural. She did notice that it was less bony than she'd expected. Maybe Mark was finally starting to fill out.

  “Where'd you see it?” Mark asked.

  “At Teddy's house. A bunch of us were in the room and it was kind of embarrassing because there was a lot of nakedness and sexing in it.” She expected him to make fun of her for using the word “sexing”, but he was more interested in something else.

  “Teddy,” Mark scoffed. “A pile of rocks is smarter than that guy.”

  “He's nice,” Tara said. “Don't be a jerk. Not everybody can be as smart as you are.”

  “Yeah? And what does this paragon have to say about me?”

  “He doesn't...He doesn't really talk about you.” That was actually one of the reasons she thought Teddy was nice. Unlike some of the other jocks, he had too much class to make fun of the less popular kids.

  “Why would he? It's not like any of your friends know we hang out.”

  “Don't be like that,” Tara said, snuggling up to him. That usually got guys in a better mood. “Press play, ok. Let's just watch the movie.