THE ACCOUNTING DEPARTMENT buzzed with excitement Thursday morning. Mr. Gleason looked grim. Everyone was expecting a delivery for Summer.
They were not to be disappointed. When an outrageously costumed clown strolled into the office at just after ten o’clock, a huge bouquet of helium balloons in one hand and a gaily wrapped package in the other, the entire department turned and looked at Summer with grins of pure joy.
“Oh, my God,” Summer breathed, burying her face in her hands.
“Oh, wow,” she heard from the desk behind her.
The clown delivered the balloons and the package without a word and left the office. Summer tied the balloons to the back of her chair, carefully avoiding Mr. Gleason’s eyes, and untied the ribbon on the package. No one in the room made any pretense of looking anywhere but at the package as Summer ripped into it. Inside the paper was a small cardboard box, about the size of a small square tissue box. Summer pulled off the tape that sealed it shut.
Squeals and laughter echoed around the room as the box seemed to explode in Summer’s hands. It had been filled with the leaping snakes that are normally found in trick peanut cans. Summer wondered for a moment if anyone in the room knew how to administer CPR and was greatly relieved when her heart started beating again on its own. Her fingers were shaking when she lifted out the card in the bottom of the box. Derek’s handwriting proclaimed:
Yes, love, I know how to have fun. I only needed you to remind me. I love you.
“Miss Reed.”
Summer dropped her hand from her still pounding heart. “Yes, Mr. Gleason?”
“For how much longer can we expect to be entertained by this continuous soap opera?”
Summer tried to ignore Connie’s muffled giggle. “I have a strong feeling that it will end tomorrow, Mr. Gleason.”
“Good. See that it does.”
“Yes, sir.”
Summer sat back down and dropped her forehead onto her desk, dislodging a paper snake from the top of a pile of invoices.
“Oh, wow.”
DEREK HOPED the clown hadn’t gotten Summer fired, though he was at the point where he honestly didn’t care. She didn’t much like the job, anyway. If she lost it, he’d find something else for her. She could work for him, for that matter. He’d like to see her go back to school. She was too good to waste her talent when she could be sharing it with aspiring young performers.
Instinct told him that his determined campaign was serving its intended purpose. Summer had looked so delightfully bemused when he had left her in her bedroom the night before. God knew that leaving her at that moment had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do. He allowed his mind to dwell for a moment on exactly what he’d have liked to have done with Summer last night, but that train of thought proved entirely too painful.
Instead, he concentrated on the future.
SUMMER SIPPED her coffee very slowly Friday morning, delaying the time when she would have to leave for work. She could not help but wonder what would make its way to her desk that morning.
Connie was so excited that she could hardly contain herself. “I love this, Summer. I really love this,” she told her friend. “This is the Derek I knew fifteen years ago, and then some. It’s amazing.”
“I think I’ve created a monster.”
“Yes, but don’t you love it? Really?”
“Fact?”
“Fact.”
“I adore it.”
Connie sighed deliriously. “Thank God.”
“It’s driving me crazy, but I do adore it,” Summer elaborated.
Connie giggled. “I knew you would keep him too busy to worry about me, but I had no idea he’d get this carried away. I should have introduced you to him six months ago.”
Summer thought rather wistfully of the six months that Derek had lived only a few miles away from her and she hadn’t even known him. “Yes,” she murmured. “Perhaps you should have.”
“It’s fate,” Connie decided abruptly. “Definitely. That you and I met and liked each other so much right away, and then that you met Derek and the two of you tumbled right into love. It must be fate.”