This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown Read Free Book Online Page A

his hand. “I don’t know …. There’s all this junk mail that comes from the bank ….” His voice trailed off and he looked up at her, hopeful. “But we’ll just pay it all off now. So. Did Carter have the deal signed? How soon are you getting paid?”
    Claudia sat down heavily in a chair and stared up at the ceiling in supplication, noticing yet another new crack created there by the earthquake. The crack started at one corner, near the window, and darted diagonally across the room, ending just above the sliding glass door that led out to the deck. As Jeremy waited for an answer, Claudia lowered her gaze. She looked out the window past the tops of the eucalyptus trees. The wild grasses that grew up the hill across the way were the color of parchment paper, half dead from the sun, and the houses perched on the top of the hill looked like sentinels standing watch over a scorched earth. Farther out, the skyline of downtown shimmered in the summer heat. She stared long and hard at their view, as if waiting for the tectonic plates to shift once more, this time collapsing the world before her into rubble, once and for all.

Jeremy
    THEIR LOAN CONSULTANT WAS UNFORTUNATELY HOT. TAMRA Goldsmith wore a tight black skirt, a filmy white blouse that suggested transparency without quite offering a glimpse of bra, and shiny black stiletto heels with red soles that flashed up at Jeremy like an extended tongue when she crossed her legs. Tamra was slender and poised and not that much older than they were, and when they sank down in the overstuffed chairs in front of her desk, Claudia seemed visibly to shrink before her. Jeremy pushed his own chair slightly back and away to telegraph to Claudia that the pretty banker was of no interest to him, even as he couldn’t help noticing a hillock of tanned breast peeping from the top of Tamra’s blouse. The mental exertions required by this—vague lust, connubial reassurance, discomfort at the need to be there in the first place—prevented Jeremy from really focusing on the first few minutes of their meeting.
    Claudia sat next to him, a spiral notebook splayed open on her lap. Her pen hovered a scant millimeter over the paper, quivering with anticipation. She had dressed up for their meeting (“so she knows we’re taking this seriously,” she had said, a comment that Jeremy had found equal parts endearing and frightening) in a button-front blouse and a skirt of some sort of stretchy material that fit snugly across her thighs.
    Tamra was typing on her computer and nibbling on her red-glossed lower lip. Behind her, he could see a security guard standing by the bank’s double-doored vestibule, ushering customers in one by one. Red lights blinked on and off over the door, forbidding entry. A snaking line of customers stood waiting for their allotted time with a teller, sullenly facing forward, shifting as they read the news feed on the television monitor bolted to the wall. Real estate prices down 18% in LA County. Gunman kills four in Monrovia. Police arrest teens for beating homeless woman. Jobless rate climbs to 5.7% . Jeremy wondered if this was what it felt like to live in a maximum security prison.
    Claudia finally broke the silence. “So we were thinking we would restructure our loan,” she said, in what Jeremy recognized as her director’s voice: friendly, firm, slightly bossy. “We were interested in finding out what options were available to us.” To emphasize his wife’s words, Jeremy offered Tamra an easygoing grin, the one that had always seemed to get him what he wanted in the past: one part dimple, one part self-effacing charm, one part happy-go-lucky reassurance. This smile had seduced jaded audiences in eleven countries, allowed him to live in friends’ guest bedrooms for months at a time, earned him a free car upon arrival in Los Angeles; it even wooed his wife. Surely, it couldn’t hurt to employ it now.
    But Tamra sighed audibly. This was not a promising sound.