The Ashford Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

before.
    Clemmie murmured her thanks as he passed her a glass, resisting the urge to toss back the contents.
    She lifted her glass, trying for cool. “Aunt Anna said you got a job at Columbia. Congrats. I know how few and far between those are.”
    “Thanks.” Jon’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “How’s Dan?”
    Clemmie silently held up her left hand. “If you say ‘I told you so,’ I’ll punch you.”
    After a beat, Jonathan smiled a crooked smile. “If I get to say ‘I told you so,’ then so do you.”
    “Caitlin?” Caitlin was Jon’s wife of three years. They’d been grad students together at Stanford, Caitlin doing something to do with intellectual history, Jon focusing on modern Britain. By a miracle, they’d gotten jobs together at one of the UNCs. Not Chapel Hill, but one of the other ones. “Is she—I mean, are you…?”
    Jon clinked his glass against hers. “Got it in one.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. Well, sort of. She had never been a Caitlin fan. “Pretentious” didn’t even begin to cut it.
    “Yeah, so am I. She’s keeping the house.”
    “What do you get?”
    “Shame and rage?”
    “Oooh, fun.” For a moment, they grinned at each other, united in the land of the love lost. Clemmie dropped her gaze first. Playing with the condensation patterns on her G&T, she said, “Hey, Jon, if you want to talk about it…”
    He looked pointedly at her left hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”
    Fair point. They’d never had that kind of relationship. It was probably too late to start now. “So what do you think about those Jets?” she said heartily.
    Jon gave her a look. “You know who the Jets are.”
    They had been like this as teenagers, engaged in a constant game of one-upsmanship. “There’s no need to sound so skeptical. They’re a sports team,” said Clemmie briskly. “Duh.”
    A gleam lit in Jon’s eyes. “Which sport?”
    Oh, crap. This was what she got for not going on any of the firm’s sports outings. Clemmie took a stab. “Basketball?”
    The lines around Jon’s eyes crinkled. For the first time since she’d seen him, his shoulders relaxed. He braced a hand against the bar and looked down at her, which was pretty impressive, given that, thanks to her heels, they were roughly the same height. But, then, he must have had a lot of practice intimidating undergrads.
    “They play football,” he said, enunciating the word very clearly. “Foot. Ball. Which, in case you didn’t know, is not actually played with much ball to the foot. It’s the sport where the men in the big shoulder pads hurl an oblong object at each other. Just in case that helps.”
    “Oh, ha, ha. I knew it had to be something involving a projectile,” she said. “Cut me a little slack here.”
    Jon raised an eyebrow. “A projectile?”
    Clemmie lifted her nose in the air. “If I have to define the word for you, you shouldn’t be teaching at Columbia.”
    “Thanks, Clem,” he said. “I mean, really. Thanks. You’ve just made my life suck a little bit less.”
    High praise indeed. But she knew what he meant. “Hey, that’s what family’s for.” She could see her mother trying to catch her eye from across the room. “I should go say happy birthday to Granny Addie.”
    Clemmie had thought he would say something snarky, but he didn’t. “Yeah,” Jon agreed. “She’s a pretty special lady.”
    As accolades went, it might not have been the most poetic, but it was the more meaningful for clearly being meant.
    Clemmie got a firm grip on the slippery sides of her glass. “See you around?”
    Jon looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment before saying, “Take care of yourself, Clem.”
    It felt like a dismissal.
    It was stupid to feel rebuffed. But she did. Served her right for forgetting that Jon was still Jon. Served her right in general, for wandering around being all needy in public. Especially with Jon.
    “You, too,” she said lightly, and plunged back into