He holds his hands out, palms toward me. “To talk. I promise that’s all I had in mind. Well, except I do plan on snogging the hell out of you,” he says, the corner of his mouth pulling up again.
“I think I can agree to those terms,” I say, my lips pulling up as well.
“Do you want to do the honors?” He holds out a hand toward the door.
I take a breath, rubbing the back of my hand over my lips. “Do I look okay?”
“Beautiful,” he says. “Always.”
I open the door and float out of the room.
Chapter 20
Henry: I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes off you.
Me: I like your eyes on me.
I add one of those heart-eyes emojis to my text. It’s the weekly meeting, and he’s at one end of the room, and I’m sitting next to Jerry on the other end holding my phone under the table so wandering eyes can’t see it. I’m also having a hard time keeping the huge smile that wants to spread across my face at bay.
Secret texting is the new sexy.
Henry and I are a thing. Or at least, we’re going to give this thing a try.
“I’d like to give this a go, if you would,” he said last night, as we were snuggled up on his plush dark-leather couch in his high-rise apartment not all that far from mine. He’d also made good on his promise to snog the heck out of me, and I’m pretty sure our lips were meant to be together. My brain was coming up with all sorts of ideas. A destination wedding in Hawaii, extended honeymoon in Europe . . . The two-story craftsman-style house with the blue door was back on.
“I’d definitely like that,” I said, relishing the feeling of his arms around me. I’d dreamed up moments like this in my head for so long, I never thought it would actually happen.
“Okay,” he said, removing his arms and repositioning so he was able to look at me. “We need a few . . . ground rules, I s’pose.”
“Ground rules?”
“Yeah . . . to protect our jobs.” He looked at me with something akin to worry in his eyes. “We can’t let work know,” he said. “Not yet, at least.”
“Okay . . . but secrets like this only last so long.” I understood where Henry was coming from there, I did. Something had happened to him at his last job. But still, a ripple of unease ran through me at the thought of keeping it a secret. “Besides, the dating policy is only being enforced because of you.”
Henry then grabbed my hand with his, rubbing circles with his thumb. The unease dissipated. “I know, I did that. I promise, I’d rather have us out in the open. I’d rather us be real at work and everywhere else, but I . . . everything is new here. I can’t . . . I can’t risk it.”
“So what are we supposed to do? I mean, what if we get caught out to dinner or something?”
“Maybe . . . maybe we just hang out at our places for now. Just”—he held out a hand to stop the protest I was about to make—“just for a bit. I know it’s not right of me to ask. But can you be okay with that?”
Could I? I wasn’t so sure. Except that in this scenario, I got to be with Henry. But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted to scream from the rooftops and also take him home to show off to my mom.
“Maybe it would help me if you explained what happened back in London,” I said. I needed to know. It was this invisible one-sided barrier between us.
Henry stared at our connected hands for a beat and then grabbed my other one. His gaze moved to mine.
He let out a slow breath. “I was hired as an editor when I first met Claire. She’d been at the station for about a year before I started. We clicked straight-away. She was funny, and attractive, and we worked well together. We were friends at first, but then one night after work, some of us from the station met up at a pub, and things . . . changed.”
I felt a little tinge of jealousy hit me in the gut, and I internally rolled my eyes. How could I feel something like that for someone I didn’t know and who was part of the past? I also instantly pictured this Claire person as Moriarty, which was unfounded, but it made her even worse in my head.
“Things were great, for a while, actually,” Henry continued. “We were . . . happy, I s’pose. Everyone at work thought we were so great together. They cheered us on, thought the whole thing was ‘cute.’ I took her home to meet my mum and dad, my sister and my sister’s family. I thought . . . well, I thought she might be someone I could see a life with, that I could have a life with. Looking back, there were signs, of course. She could lose her temper sometimes and could be cruel to people occasionally. But I thought myself in love, so I would talk myself out of the uneasy feelings I’d get when that would happen.”
I already hated this Claire girl so much, and he hadn’t even gotten to the meat of the story, the real reason for me to dislike her.
“We’d been together for about five months, and we were both up for promotion, and . . . I got the job. Associate producer. I was chuffed, and . . . so was my dad. For the first time in a long time. It felt good, you know, to make him proud.”
I rubbed circles on the tops of his hands with my thumbs. I remembered the conversation we’d had on our last date. When we were sharing our secrets. I remembered what he’d said about being a disappointment to his dad.
“Claire . . . she wasn’t happy about the promotion; it caused some tension between us. I didn’t know what to do—we’d both applied for the job, but in the end even though I was new at the station, I’d started in the industry before her and had more experience. What made it most awkward was that I was now her boss. The lines between our working relationship and our romantic relationship started to blur. And not just for me. Rumors started at work about how I was too hard on her, or too soft. I didn’t think I was soft; in fact, I think I was a little overcritical about things at work because of our relationship. Looking back, I can see I got a lot of things wrong.”
Henry paused to take a deep breath. “Things between Claire and me went downhill from there. I started to feel like maybe we needed to break up to save our working relationship. Again, not the best reasoning on my part. I should have been able to compartmentalize better, I should have been able to separate the two. But I couldn’t. And I honestly thought—because things had gotten so bad between us—that when I told her we had to end things, she’d say that she was feeling the same way. But instead she was incredibly angry. She told me that the promotion had made me a different person.” Henry looked down at our intertwined hands. “Maybe she was right. I . . . I’ve thought a lot about that since then.”
Henry’s jaw ticked, and a vein in his neck popped out. He closed his eyes briefly as if he were picturing it all in his mind. I squeezed his hand to let him know I was there and I was listening.
“So after we broke up, everyone at work—at least the people who knew, which at this point was a lot of people—started talking about us, about the breakup. It was a he said/she said sort of scenario. Although I never said anything. But Claire,”—he paused to let out a shaky breath—“she seemed to talk to anyone who’d listen. At first it was just about the job, but then she started telling people things I’d said about them—things I’m not proud of—that were said in confidence while we were dating. Things that were said to someone I thought I could trust. Some people complained about me to HR. I was brought in and reprimanded. It wasn’t long after that, a mate of mine who worked at the station I was at previously told me he’d gotten wind of how ‘difficult’ I was to work with. You understand how word travels fast in this industry.”