I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I did.”
“But how?” she demands. “You hate each other!”
“I know!” I cry, letting my head fall back against the seat. “But I threw a shoe at him and…”
She laughs. “Are you seriously going to tell me throwing a shoe at him led to sex?”
Someone behind me honks though the light just changed, so I give him the finger. “Well, no. He told me I had to beg to get it back and then he put it on my foot and…”
“Why was he putting it on your foot, Cinderella? Why didn’t you make him hand it to you like a normal person?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her, because I’m too embarrassed to admit the truth: I wanted to see what would happen. I wanted to see how far he would go, and—apparently—I was hoping he’d take it just as far as he did. And it was so fucking good, until he opened his big mouth.
“How did you leave things?” she asks.
I hiccup a sad laugh made of misery and self-loathing. “He said ‘I told you you’d beg.”
Her inhale tells me all I need to know. I didn’t overreact at all. “What. A. Dick.”
“He tried to say it was a joke, but…”
“Fuck that guy,” she says. “Freeze him out.”
“I know,” I reply. It’s the only thing I can do, under the circumstances.
After arriving at work, I stride into the office with purpose, a polite smile plastered on my face as I greet everyone. Because absolutely nothing is wrong.
There are roses on my desk. For a regrettable half-second I soften, before common sense prevails and I’m enraged by those too. If I hadn’t gotten in so early, half the office might have seen them in here and would have spent the day discussing it.
I put them into the trash, which I hide on my side of the desk, and am shredding the card without reading it just as Terri walks in and shuts the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” she demands.
I smile, folding my hands before me, as if this is the opening summit of the model UN. “Why would anything be wrong?”
She points at my face. “That. That is the weirdest, fakest smile I’ve ever seen. You look like you were possessed by an alien attempting to inhabit human form for the first time. One who’s not sure how the smiling thing works.”
My lips purse. “I’m just trying to be a model employee. Making partner and all that.”
“Oh-kay, boss,” she says. There’s a knock on my door, and when she sees Ben standing there, his ever-present smirk absent, she laughs out loud. “You’re telling me later,” she whispers.
He waits until she’s through the door before he walks in. He’s in a fresh suit, but he’s forgotten to shave, and his hair is even more fucked-up than normal. I hate how good guilt makes him look.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
I drag my eyes to his face. “It’s fine.”
“If it was fine,” he replies, carefully enunciating each word, “you wouldn’t be pissed.”
“I’m not pissed. Pissed would involve caring and I don’t. It’s forgotten.”
He takes a single step toward my desk and leans over it, his face two feet from mine. His eyes have gone black as night. “You are full of shit.”
He pushes away and walks out of the office, leaving me with my mouth ajar. What the hell was that? He’s mad? I’m the one who gets to be pissed, not him.
I didn’t expect anything from yesterday and I certainly didn’t expect him to act like it meant something—so why is he?
And why is my heart thumping, as if I wanted it to mean something too?
I manage to make it through the morning behaving like a reasonable human being and not, as Terri suggested, an alien inhabiting human form. The effort leaves me feeling like I want to sleep for a thousand years, like I’m incapable of faking even one more polite smile for as long as I live. And then the reminder pops up on my computer screen: partner/senior associates meeting, and my stomach drops. God, why today?
Terri’s mouth twitches when I exit my office. “Don’t think just because you buried me in work this morning that I’ve forgotten what I’m going to ask.”
I frown at her. “Why bother asking? You’ve clearly figured it out.”
“Yes,” she says with a wide grin. “But it’s the difference between reading Fifty Shades and having someone tell you ‘they had sex’. I need all the dirty details.”
I grimace. “I assure you, you won’t be getting anything close to Fifty Shades from me. It would be one shade that was thirty seconds long, and no one’s buying that book.”
It was way more than thirty seconds and a whole rainbow of shades, but this is the story I’m trying to tell myself.
I make a point of facing Fields’ position at the table’s head, but when Ben enters the room, the right side of my body tingles, as if his gaze is a physical thing. I turn and my eyes lock with his.
They always lock with his, though, don’t they? Every time I’ve ever sat at this table with him, every time for two freaking years, Ben’s been looking at me whenever I turned, and I’ve been looking right back. Every single time there’s been this same clench of want in my stomach, this same half second in which it’s impossible to look away.
I think of the hunger in his face as he watched mine last night, the strain. Him saying, “I’ve wanted to watch you come for so fucking long.” I swallow hard and turn my chair away from him, facing the front of the room, where Fields has already begun to drone on.
He talks about billables and the retreat, and then he asks us to each to give him a quick status on our clients.
When he gets to my nemesis, Ben glances at me before he speaks. “The Lawson suit against Fiducia is coming along. We’ve found plenty in the personnel files. Now we’re looking at expense reports.” He’s just summed up my work, and the only substantial thing I had to report. “We’re ready for the class-action in Charlotte, and I’m meeting with Brewer Campbell later. They’re sending a lot of work our way, so it’s going to be all-hands-on-deck soon.”
The point of my pencil snaps. Brewer Campbell is the client he stole from me, and now he’s bragging about it. And he didn’t say a thing about the cases he’s assigned to boring Craig, which means I’m the only one at the meeting left with nothing to report.
“Gemma?” Fields asks. “Anything?”
I grind my teeth. Having to follow up Ben’s coup with absolutely nothing fills me with loathing for him all over again. “I’ve been pretty buried with the Lawson case,” I tell him, sounding like a goddamned intern. “And Roberts was supposed to go to mediation but they postponed.”
Have you brought more work to the firm, Gemma? No.
Have you spearheaded something on your own? No.
Did you just let the worst person here fuck you on his desk? Yes. Yes, I did.
I wouldn’t make me partner either.
I march out of the meeting as fast as I can and head straight for the elevator with Ben at my heels.
My finger stabs at the button to go downstairs. “Are you following me?”