"You're going to lose that money," I assured him.
"Yeah, you know," he said, lips curving up, "I don't think I will. Go home. I'll see you in a couple days."
With that, feeling a little better like I always did after having spoken to King, I left, making my way back to my apartment.
I liked having roots, but I hadn't put them down deep enough to buy a house. A part of me always knew that my tenure at Fee's business had a clock on it. For any number of reasons: the market and demand shifting, Fee changing direction to video which I already told her wasn't going to be my thing, or even if I eventually found a woman, wanted to settle down, save my dirty talk just for her.
And if you weren't sure about your career, you didn't do shit like take out a mortgage for thirty years.
If I went to work for King, though, it would become a possibility. Get a yard with a fence, have Savea find me some mangy mutt to play fetch with, eventually have a couple kids to play ball with, build clubhouses for.
It had taken a long time for me to start to consider things like a wife and kids. But after being around the Mallicks, and now my brothers as they started to settle down, it made me sure that was the future I wanted.
It wasn't wild and exciting.
But I had spent so much of my life with wild and exciting. I got my fill. I was ready for a different kind of adventure.
Not with Katie, though, as everyone seemed to think.
There was nothing wrong with her. She was sweet, cute, smart, interesting. And now that I knew it was her on the phone, yeah, there was no denying that there was something within me that felt pulled to her in a primal way.
It was just... too messy.
The phone calls, the lying about them. Or, if not lying, then omitting them.
Not a great start to anything.
After a drink or two, though, I came to the same conclusion as King.
I needed to apologize for my reaction, give her the chance to explain herself.
And I damn near brought the flowers too.
The only problem was, by the time I got to work for the next few days, she was already long gone, her desk left neatly organized.
Fee, too, was suspiciously gone. And not answering her texts.
And after a few days of working for King, and not working for Fee since my phone never rang, I made the decision.
It was time.
To move on.
It would be better for me.
In the end, it would be better for Katie too.
Fee accepted my email resignation.
I packed up my desk.
And I walked out of the office for the last time.
It was done.
Or so I thought.
NINE
Kate
"Oh God. Oh God. Ohmygod ohmygod," I whispered.
My heart was beating like hummingbird wings in my chest. My stomach felt like someone had suddenly tightened it in a vise, making the contents jiggle around ominously, threatening to travel back up her constricted throat.
"Hey, alright," Fee tried, voice soothing. "It's okay."
No, it wasn't.
My hands rose, covering my eyes, my thumbs rubbing my temples, trying to calm the panic that was working its way through my system.
This was not okay.
This would never be okay.
This was the worst-case scenario for me.
There was no possible way this could have gone any worse than it had.
Not only did Rush find out, but he found out without me coming clean about it, in a public setting, and confronted me about it.
God, he was so angry too.
I had never seen him like that, not in all the years we worked in the same building. I'd seen all the others in various moods. Life didn't stop ragging on you just because you walked into the office doors. I'd seen women crying in the break rooms, scolding their children in mom whispers over the phone, angrily texting paragraphs to their spouses.
I'd seen Rush in plenty of moods as well. Tired, frustrated, happy, a little delirious from lack of sleep, making him goofy. I'd seen him a little distracted, distant, maybe even a bit cold while he dealt with something I knew nothing about.
But angry?
No.
It had been unexpected and shocking to see a face that I so typically found happy and smiling with a tight jaw, with flaming eyes.
It had been even more shocking to hear a voice I was so accustomed to hearing say sexy, delicious things or fun, light things, saying harsh words in sharp tones.
I couldn't blame him.
If someone did to me what I had done to him, I would feel so foolish. Betrayed, even. He had a right to feel that way.
And me?
I was freaking... humiliated.
There was no other word to describe it.
It was worse than any of the bullying I'd experienced in school, any situation when anxiety made me act strange, run from a store gasping for air, or even that one time I had been foolish enough to think that a man was into me, so I found the courage—after weeks of hemming and hawing it—to lean up to kiss him, only to get pushed away then laughed at by his friends.
My life had no shortage of embarrassing moments.
But that one with Rush, that took the cake.
I wanted the earth to open up a portal to hell and suck me down. I would have preferred an eternity of hot pokers being stabbed through my vital organs than have to live in a world where Rush Rivers knew I had been secretly calling his phone sex line for months because I was lonely. As if that wasn't bad enough, he now knew I was so hard-up for male attention that I had touched myself while he said filthy things in my ear.
"Oh, God," I whimpered, folding forward, wishing I could shrink down into myself, and disappear entirely.
I was so caught up in my internal freakout that I didn't even care that I was in a public place, that others were likely watching my breakdown. And they weren't even strangers who I would never see again. These were women I'd known for years who would likely be concerned about me, ask me about what happened when they caught me alone.
But I couldn't seem to care.
It felt like everything was crashing around me.
Nothing else mattered.
"It was bound to happen," Fee reasoned, her hand pressing down on my shoulder.
I guess a part of me had deluded the other part that if I put enough distance between myself and the calls, as well as the man himself, then there was a chance I could go to my grave without Rush ever finding out about the whole situation.
"He was just surprised," Fiona insisted. "Rush doesn't really get angry like that. It was just the heat of the moment. The surprise. And he's likely putting together the parts about how I trapped you two in a cabin together, so some of that anger might actually be directed at me because I made him feel stupid," she told me. A whimpering sound escaped me, not reassured at all. "Okay. Alright. Go on. Head out," Fee said when I couldn't do anything but stand there, feeling queasy and breathless.
"I'm not done," I told her, waving a hand at the chaos on my desk. I was still trying to catch up after being out for a few days.
"You're done," she told me. "It's fine. Everything will work itself out. But go home. Take a bath. Have a glass of wine. Try to relax."
"Thanks," I said, not waiting for any further conversation, just shoving my phone and book into my purse, grabbing my keys, and rushing out.