Shortly after the first of the month, Dave got into the Malibu and headed for New York.

For all practical purposes, the Chevy was still new. It'd had twenty-six miles on the odometer when he bought it; it still had less than a hundred, and the longest trip he'd made in it was when he'd taken Shae and the boys to the cross country meet at Amherst.

Dave had very mixed emotions about the trip. The first was making it at all. It wasn't as if he hadn't made the drive before, for he had several times; the most recent with Shae back at the end of September, and a few times before with Julie and the boys. But this would be the first time he'd done it by himself. He was not a real good driver and he knew it -- mostly lack of practice -- so doing it alone seemed to be a major challenge.

It really seemed like too long since he'd been in the office. Though he'd been busy right through, he'd done very little editing -- just a little bit of Dithyran's Probe right after he first got to Bradford, and then messing with Swordsman of Atlantis without really getting into it. Everything else had been in the endless mound of slush. Though, he'd found a couple good pieces and some with potential given various amounts of input and work, he could hardly believe how tired he was of reading hopeless crap. Oh, he could do it for a while -- he'd done it before -- but it seemed to him it was getting it dumped on him more than ever before, and he'd gotten no sign he was getting anywhere with it. Despite Michelle's claims to the contrary, it seemed to him he was getting stuck with the very thing he'd worried about in the working out of the office idea ever since she first brought it up -- being out of the office meant he was out of the flow of office politics, helpless to avoid getting the shit jobs dumped on him. He'd complained to Michelle about it, but hadn't gotten anywhere -- another loss of being way out of New York; complaining by phone just wasn't as effective as complaining in person, which he fully intended to do. If it didn't help, he could go to Dick Steward, the editor in chief -- something else hard to do from Bradford.

There were other issues. The biggest one was Swordsman of Atlantis, where it seemed no real decision had been reached about what to do with it. Again, if he'd been in the office, it would have been fairly simple to informally find out what the holdup on a decision was and deal with it -- something again much more difficult to do from Bradford. Having Swordsman hanging over his head had been Michelle's main excuse for loading the slush pile on him, so he wouldn't be involved in a larger, harder-to-put-on-hold project if the Swordsman decision were actually made.

And who knew what the people in the office had for him? It was something to worry about.

Beyond that, there were several issues involving Julie and her death to be dealt with. While he'd put some perspective on the subject in the past month, there was still a big hole there, and he wasn't at all sure how he was going to be able to handle it. At least he would have Shae available to help him through the worst of it, although he hoped to get through it on his own.

Last of all, but looming the largest in his mind, was Shae herself. As much as he liked her -- and he liked her as a friend a lot -- something bothered him about her that he couldn't put his finger on. The closest he could come was to wonder if maybe she wasn't pushing a little hard, given the circumstances -- but he couldn't be sure if it was her fault or his. When she'd come to Bradford a couple weeks before it wouldn't have taken much of a hint on his part to be having sex with her. It was certainly clear she wanted it; he had every reason to think she'd be good at it. Sex with Shae would probably be quite a ride -- but in spite of the closeness of the relationship he'd built with Shae and the perspective he'd gained, it still seemed like it would be cheating on Julie. As much as he enjoyed the nights he and Shae had spent just cuddling, he couldn't shake himself of the guilt he felt for stepping out on the memory of his wife.

From what he knew of Shae's past relationships -- and he knew quite a bit, she hadn't been shy about them -- he knew none had been very successful, even with the basketball player she'd been sort of engaged to. So, he couldn't fault her with being eager once she'd found a guy she was pretty sure of, who had several qualities she'd been looking for. But sometimes it seemed like she was too eager, maybe a little obsessive. He'd talked to Eve on the phone a couple times in the past month, but they had been more just general updates on his situation, rather than getting down to the nitty gritty of talking things out, so he really hadn't put his concerns about it to the little blonde. Maybe he should.

All in all, it was plenty to think about as he guided the Chevy eastward up the Ohio Turnpike and Interstate 80 that Wednesday. The plan was for him to spend the night with Shae in her apartment, then meet with people at the office on Thursday and Friday. Hopefully there would be some extra time to deal with the Julie issues those days, and some could be dealt with on Saturday. He'd head back for Bradford on Sunday, or could stay over a day or two if things demanded his presence.

The boys were going to be staying with JoAnne for the next few days. She left for work at General before the boys had to go to school, so Kayla had agreed to show up before she left and walk the boys to school on time, then bring them back after school and stay with them until his mother got home. By most reckoning Kayla was probably a little young to be doing it, but Dave had been impressed with her maturity and clear thinking, so knowing Emily and Vicky would be on immediate call for backup made him decide the risk was reasonable.

Since he'd left late to see the boys off to school, it was well after dark before he got to Shae's apartment in Staten Island. The apartment seemed different from what it had been the last time he'd been there a little over a month before. It took him a few minutes to figure out why: it was just Shae and him. There were no boys, his mother wasn't there, and all the other people who had been in and out of the apartment using it as a crash pad during most of his stay were elsewhere.

They had a long kiss as soon as the door was closed. It had only been a week and a half since he'd seen Shae, but it seemed like months. The taste of her lips on his, the warmth of his arms around him was welcome indeed. It was difficult to break away to go sit down and have the late dinner she'd been holding for him. They sat around the table long after they'd finished eating and talked about one thing and another -- most of it Dave's expectations and concerns about the office, but to a degree about hers. There was gossip going around the studio that this would be the last season for Avalon, but Shae shrugged it off, saying those rumors cropped up every year, and it was probably months away from a decision if it happened at all.

By then it was getting late, and Dave was stiff and tired from the long drive. When he mentioned it to Shae, she offered to return the favor from a couple weeks before and give him a nice massage. He wasn't going to turn her down on the offer, so shortly he was spread out on her bed, wearing only his jockey shorts, while she went to work on him with some aromatic oil. She had big, strong hands, almost disproportionately large, and she knew how to give a great massage. A lot of the concerns bugging him all day faded away under her touch.

And of course they wound up spending the night together again -- once again, it was just cuddled up next to each other, with some kissing and some exploratory caressing being about as far as they went. Shae had told him in the past that she usually slept nude. To help keep things at least a little innocent, she'd bought a set of satin pajamas with a camisole top and boy-leg shorts, and the sleek feel of the satin was at least as arousing to him as her bare skin would have been.

In the end Dave had a great night's sleep and woke up refreshed and ready to face the day. Shae had to go to work and was on a tighter schedule, so this time he was the one who caught her getting out of the shower in the nude.

Visions of Shae nude kept bouncing through his mind as he drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and into Brooklyn. Though he'd been told order had been largely restored in lower Manhattan, he knew driving to the Dunlap and Fyre office in the Ford building wasn't a good idea, so he reverted to the tactics he'd used in the last part of September. He drove to the studio where Avalon was shot, and parked the Chevy there -- one of the studios in the building was currently unoccupied and there was plenty of parking. It was still a walk of several blocks to the subway station, not pleasant on a blustery gray November day; he then took the subway from there.

A little after nine he was in the Dunlap and Fyre office. He had been to the new office once before, back in September, but things were much changed, as Michelle had told him. People and desks were crammed in pretty tight; there were no cubicles like there had been in the old, abandoned office since there just wasn't room for them. Files and boxes were stacked all over the place, and desks were nearly overflowing. Even division chiefs like Michelle had their desks out in the mob scene of the main office; only a handful of people had separate offices and they were tiny. As often as Dave had wished he were still working in the office in New York he doubted he would have been as effective in this madhouse as he had been in his quiet front room in Bradford.

"Boy, I don't know how you get anything done in here," Dave commented to Michelle.

"I sometimes wonder myself," she said. "It has some compensations. You don't have to get up and walk down through the cubicles to see if someone is busy or not. All you have to do is look up and yell. Pull up that chair and let's get down to business."

"You want the short version or the long version of how tired I am of going through the slush pile?" he asked as he sat down.

"Dave, I know you're tired of it . . ." she started as the phone on her desk rang. "Excuse me," she said and reached for the phone.

Dave soon figured out the call was over a dispute with some author over the amount of an advance, and tuned it out. Just as well, because Dick Steward, the fiction chief, came by and asked how he was doing. "Just fine," really wouldn't suffice, so he spent a little time talking about what things were like in Bradford and getting some news about what things were like in the office.

Their conversation went on for a while, and finally Dick said, "I guess I better let you two get back to work."

Dave looked up to see Michelle's phone conversation was over, and she was patiently waiting for him to end his discussion with her boss. "Sorry about that," he said.

"Yeah, sorry about that too," she replied. "I sure as hell wish we were back in the old office, because all you get is interruptions."

"That's one nice thing about working at home; I don't get many."

"We're learning that," she replied. "The heck of it is that we're finding that almost every one of the editors working at home is getting way more done at home than they would have at the office. It's not just you. Rob has been talking about having us find more people we can move to home offices."

"Be that as it may, I still feel like I'm out of the loop," Dave told her. "I mean, I don't think I would have been buried under the slush pile if I'd been in the office."

"Dave, I sympathize," she replied. "I know you're tired of dealing with it, but . . ." she looked up to see Rayme Haynes, the head of the general fiction section. "Sorry, Dave. Rayme, what can I do for you?"

"Can you meet with us about this Johnson issue at ten today?" the tall, thin, bearded man asked.

"No can do," Michelle told him. "I've already got a meeting with Rob scheduled."

"How about eleven?"

"Maybe. It depends on how my ten o'clock goes. I've got Dave in town for the first time in over a month, and there's some stuff I need to go over with him, too. I've got a staff meeting at one, could we maybe do it about three?"

"Guess that'll have to do," Haynes grunted and walked away.

"Now you see why I can't seem to get a goddamn thing done around here," Michelle snorted. "Anyway, as I was saying, I know you're tired of dealing with all the slush, and I can't blame you in the slightest. But the end of it . . ." the phone rang again ". . . is in sight," she continued, letting it ring. "Dave, I know you feel like you've been out of the loop, but like both Dick and I said back when we dreamed this up, we're going to have to learn how to do this, and we're going to make some mistakes." The phone quit ringing as she finished her statement.

"We've certainly had some communication problems over the past . . ." he got that far before the phone started ringing again.

"Shit," she snarled and grabbed the phone. "Michelle. Yes . . . yes . . . no . . . hell, I don't know, I'll try to find a minute to come over and look at it sometime . . . yeah, I know . . . OK, later." She hung the phone up and turned back to Dave. "Sorry about that, it isn't usually quite this much of a zoo. You're right, there have been some communications issues . . . " she managed to say before the phone started ringing again.

"Shit," she snarled again. "Dave, we are going to fix the slush-pile issue, I promise." She grabbed the phone and in a very snappy voice said, "Michelle . . . boy, he sure didn't waste any time coming and whining to you, did he Dick? If I thought he was going to actually do anything but restate his position without making any concessions, I might even be interested . . . Remember, we've got a meeting at ten; it's been set up for days; this is our best chance to settle it now that Dave's in town, and that asshole Haynes drops this out of midair and expects us all to jump up and shout . . . yeah, I can do it in maybe five or ten minutes if I leave Dave marooned here at my desk, but I'll tell you what, at five minutes to ten I'm getting up and walking out of there, no matter what . . . Okay . . . Five minutes. See you at ten."

"That asshole Haynes," she snorted approximately one millisecond after she slammed the phone down. "Sorry, Dave, I can't seem to put him off. Look, the brief version of what's coming down is this: something was goofy with the contract on Swordsman of Atlantis." The phone started to ring again; Michelle gave it a look that should have melted it down, then reached around behind the instrument and unplugged it.

"There," she said. "That ought to hold the goddamn thing for a minute or two. Apparently Pittman was up to something, no one is sure what. The contract is valid but we're not sure how he got it approved or a check cut. What's more, no one seems to know what was promised to the Hamilton kid. So, what Rob and I decided was you, me, Dick, and him get together with her. She's in town, a college kid, goes to NYU or something. Rob agrees the money has been paid, nothing we can do about it, but we don't know what she was promised beyond the contract, and it may have a bearing on whether we actually go to press with it, or what. Anyway, we're going to settle the goddamn thing one way or another today, and that'll let me do something about your slush-pile problem. Like I told you, we are going to get you out of the slush pile; you've done more than your fair share."

"Good," Dave replied when Michelle stopped to take a breath. "The slush pile and Swordsman are the main two things on my agenda."

"We have a few things for you," she told him. "Maybe we can get a few minutes after the meeting. If not, let's plan on going to lunch someplace, and I'll forget my cell phone and leave it here. Look, I hate to run off on you, but I've got to get to this meeting that was just rammed down my throat. I'll see you in Rob's office at ten. Go get yourself some coffee; it's in the break room out back. It really sucks but it has caffeine."

There wasn't much Dave could say as he watched Michelle grab a couple files from her desk drawer and hustle off across the crowded room. Things had never been this bad in the old office although there were times it could get a little busy. The combination of the tight quarters and the number of people working outside the office had obviously raised the tension level. Once again, his quiet little front room office in Bradford looked pretty good to him right then.

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