After stumbling into my room, I let the door fall closed behind me then grab my phone and open Tinder. Maybe no one in LA is straight out of a Hallmark movie, but I can no longer deny I’m deeply in lust with Ben Tate, and no one knows better than I do that’s a recipe for disaster.
11
Nothing about Kyle and I worked, on paper. He was getting out of a ten-year marriage after his wife went back to her high school boyfriend. I was twenty-two, and had been scraping by to survive ever since I left for college at sixteen.
But we did work, and it was perfect and thrilling and terrifying all at once. I went to my job and school, but everything else in my life fell to the wayside for him. I just wished we didn’t have to keep it a secret.
We should have reported it to HR, but I was scared I might mess up my job offer from Stadler, and he was worried Josie, his ex, would use it to slow down the divorce…which she would. Increasingly, the things she said and did implied she wasn’t sure she wanted to let him go.
The decision was as much mine as it was Kyle’s, but I hated that it meant I couldn’t tell Meg and Kirsten. When I was with them, every word out of my mouth felt like a lie. I told them I was busy with school at night when I was actually with him. When they’d text about Kyle, I’d text back, as if I knew nothing, as if I wasn’t basically living out of his apartment. I’d laugh along as they whispered about him: someone forgot to shave, Meg would say as he walked into the office. Wonder who he was busy doing this morning?
I wanted to shout about him from the rooftops. I wanted to tell someone about the flowers he sent to my apartment, the sweet things he said, the way he’d tuck a blanket around me when we watched TV at night. Sometimes I thought I’d burst with the desire to share just how good it was.
“I hate keeping this a secret,” I told Kyle one afternoon, watching the dying sun land across his bare chest in stripes of muted gold.
His arm slid beneath my pillow as he pulled me closer, pressing a sweet kiss to my forehead.
“Next summer it will all be behind us,” he said. “I’ll be divorced, you’ll be full-time, and no one will ever be able to imply you slept your way into a job.”
The funny thing is I never got the job and they wound up saying it anyway.
12
By the time Ben and I leave to catch our flight, I have a date lined up with a chef named Thomas. I picture him bringing me breakfast in bed, garnished with fresh herbs he’s grown himself. I don’t actually eat breakfast, nor do I lay around in the morning, but I see myself becoming someone who does both, eventually.
Thomas will probably need to teach me to slow down and enjoy my life before he starts up with all the cooking.
Ben is strangely tense on the way to the airport and agitated as we go through security. I lean over to remove my shoes and he makes an irritated noise, probably because he had pre-check and I did not.
“Sorry for the extra two seconds this is taking,” I say, with my fakest smile, going more slowly than is necessary. “I did tell you to go through the pre-check line, though.”
“Take all the time you want,” he replies. “There might be one man left here who hasn’t looked down your shirt at this point.”
“I just hope the one man was you.”
“Unfortunately for us both, it was not.” His voice is an irritated growl, but I spy a hint of a flush along his cheekbones. “I could see straight down your shirt half the ride here.”
I glance down the front of my blouse. My bra is La Perla—pale peach, indecently sheer. I’m not sure why the idea of him glimpsing it is more titillating than embarrassing. Maybe I just like how much it seems to bother him.
Our flight boards late, and once we’re in our seats they announce the plane is grounded until the storm overhead has passed.
“Shit,” says Ben, looking at his watch.
“Not going to make it back before your girlfriend’s curfew?” I ask.
He raises a brow. “You’re pretty mouthy for someone who appears to never date.”
“I date,” I reply nonchalantly. “In fact, I have one tonight.”
“With who?” he asks, as if what I’ve said is too incredible to be believed.
My patience starts to fray. His penis didn’t seem to find me undatable a few hours ago, and the air has grown warm and way too humid in the stuffy plane. Anyone’s patience would fray.
“Is it really so implausible that someone might want to take me out?” I demand.
“I never said it was implausible. I just wondered if it was, you know, a fully functioning individual. A human individual.”
I pinch my eyes shut and take a few quick breaths through my nose. My second shirt of the day is now sticking to me and I’m officially miserable. If I respond, it’s likely to be in a way that alarms the staff and gets me kicked off this flight.
“So,” he says after a moment, when he realizes I’m ignoring him, “it’s not someone from work?”
I roll my eyes. “The last thing in the world I want is to date another lawyer. I want the opposite.”
“Wouldn’t the opposite be a criminal?”
“Hardly.” I attempt to peel off my jacket. I don’t know why the hell they had us all get on board if they knew we weren’t going to leave.
“Fine,” he says. “What’s the opposite of a lawyer?”
“A guy in a Hallmark movie,” I reply, one arm now half trapped in my jacket sleeve. “Someone with an honest job. Someone rigorously ethical.”
He laughs. “Ah, rigorously ethical like you?”
“I’m ethical enough.” Yes, I’m aware that by qualifying how ethical I am, I may have proven his point.
He sighs, helping me pull the jacket off before handing it to me. “So what does this guy do? Your date tonight?”
I glance over at him. I imagine he’s hoping to ridicule Thomas somehow. In this one instance, I’m glad the guy does not own a Christmas tree farm. “He’s a chef.”
“Guess you’ll be paying for dinner. Good thing you’re so liberated.”
Heat, fatigue, frustration…they’re rapidly eroding my ability to put up with this situation, and even more rapidly eroding my ability to be around Ben. “Lots of chefs do really well, and I don’t care how much he earns anyway.”
“Spoken like someone who’s never had a broke day in her life.”
“Right,” I reply. “I forgot you’re from the mean streets of Newport.”
He raises a brow, and his mouth curves upward, as if to say, Gemma, how do you know so much about me? It’s a question I should probably be asking of myself.
“So tell me about this guy,” he continues, turning his head my way. “I mean, aside from the things I can already deduce: that he shares a two-bedroom with four other men, and still drives his mom’s 2005 Honda.”
“You’ve clearly never watched a Hallmark movie. Chefs live in cute cottages, either on the beach or in the mountains, with a small herb garden in front. Everyone knows this.”
He rises from his seat and moves into the aisle. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say you don’t know a lot of real-life chefs.” He reaches up, pulls off his tie, and then begins unbuttoning his shirt.