“Honey, I know there’s something going on,” my mother said one day. We were sitting in the kitchen peeling potatoes for dinner – a rib roast – and I suddenly looked down at the potato in my hands, concentrating very hard on the rough brown skin and the eyes and the moist, white flesh in my fingers.
“It’s nothing,” I lied. “Work has just been really stressful, that’s all. I don’t think my boss is very happy with me as of late.”
My mom set down her potato and peeler and gently reached across the table for my hands.
“It’s more than that,” she said. “There’s something going on, I can tell. You’ve never been good at keeping secrets from me, Annie. Remember when I found out that you were pregnant with Lilah?”
“That’s different,” I said. With a sigh, I set down my potato and wiped my hands on my denim-clad thighs. “And besides, it’s not like I’m pregnant again.”
“Well, no, how could you be?” My mom asked slyly. She caught my eye and raised her brow. “It’s not like you’ve been dating, have you?”
I blushed bright red.
“Mom, I ...” I trailed off and sighed.
“If you’re going through a break-up, you can tell me, sweetheart,” my mom said in a softer tone. “I’ll be there for you. You know that.”
“It’s not that,” I said, swallowing hard. “It’s just ... um, I don’t know, exactly.”
“Annie,” my mother said. She looked me right in the eye and I suddenly felt like I was three years old again. “I know that your father and I were ... well, on the stricter side when we were raising you, but I don’t want you to feel that you can’t talk to me now.”
I bit my lip. “Mom, there’s something I have to tell you,” I said after a long pause. “Something big.”
“What is it?” My mom’s voice took on a note of concern as she looked at me. “Is something wrong? Did something happen to Lilah?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But it’s about her father.”
My mom gave me an expectant look.
“I can’t deal with the stress and the secrecy anymore,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “But I’ve been sleeping with Elliot for years, and Lilah is his daughter. And we’re in love, but we don’t know how to be together, and I don’t know what to do.”
My mom inhaled sharply.
“You mean Elliot as in, next door Elliot?”
I nodded.
My mom nodded, too. Slowly, but she did.
“I ... well, I can’t explain this, but I always had a feeling,” she said. “I want you to be happy. And I know he could take care of you and provide for you and Lilah. I’m not angry, Annie, but this is a bit of a shock.”
I swallowed. Now that the truth was out, I felt tears come to my eyes. I had finally done it: confessed to my mother, and gotten her grudging approval.
Suddenly, it was clear what I had to do. I had to see Elliot, had to apologize for trying to ice him out, tell him that I loved him, beg him to love me forever.
“Mom, can you watch Lilah for a little while?” I asked as I breathlessly leapt up from my chair. My mom was nodding and smiling by the time I was running out of the room, through the living room and out of the front door. I bolted across the yard to Elliot’s house and banged on his door with both hands, yelling his name and not caring who heard me.
But there was no answer, and it took me a moment to realize that his green Jaguar wasn’t in the driveway. Hope deflated inside of me as I exhaled sharply.
Where was he? It was late evening, had he gone into work? My chest tightened anxiously as I reached into my pocket for my phone and frantically dialed his number.
There was no answer – in fact, the call went straight to voicemail. My heart sank as the panic and anxiety grew inside of me and I felt my stomach cramp painfully. Suddenly, I knew it – there was something terribly, terribly wrong.
Without stopping to think about what I was doing, I dialed Parker, his assistant.
“Mr. Pritzker’s office,” she answered on the first ring.
“Parker, hi, it’s Annie, from the office. I, uh, Linda asked me to call and speak to Elliot about something for the TIME feature. Is he in?”
There was a moment of silence and I took the phone away from my ear and blinked down at it.
“Parker?” I asked hesitantly.
“Sorry,” she said after another long pause. “But no, Annie. He’s not in. I haven’t seen him all day. Want to leave a message for him?”
I hung up without responding to her. The feeling that something was drastically wrong only intensified with every passing second.
He’s getting fired, I thought. He’s getting fired, and it’s all because of me.
It was my fault. If I hadn’t given in to my lust for him, if I had been able to stay strong and professional and tough, this wouldn’t be happening. The tears that had come to my eyes in my mother’s kitchen returned with a vengeance, but they weren’t happy tears this time. They were tears of embarrassment, of shame, of humiliation that I had caused the exact thing Elliot feared to happen.
The walk back to my mother’s house felt far longer than it actually was, and when I let myself in the front door, my mom and Lilah were sitting on the couch. Mom noticed my expression but Lilah flung herself at me and hugged me.
“Grandma said you were gonna be gone for a long time! But you’re back!” Lilah chirped.
Forcing a smile onto my face, I scooped my daughter up into my arms and held her close.
“I sure am,” I said. “I sure am.”
33
Elliot
“Mr. Pritzker!” Parker said, standing up from her desk as she watched me approach. “The board is meeting and they’ve called for you to join them.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I don’t remember seeing anything about that being scheduled,” I said. “Was it in my calendar?”
“No,” Parker said uncertainly. “It wasn’t, and they’ve called twice and said that it’s very urgent you meet with them.”
She wasn’t meeting my eyes, and immediately a sense of crushing anxiety came over me.
They found out about me and Annie, I thought as my heart sank and my throat clenched tightly shut. And now they’re going to fire me.
And possibly me.
I felt a huge swell of disappointment in myself and the way that I’d acted break over my head like a tidal wave. Everything that I had worked so hard for – my career, my status in the world, my relationship with Annie, was crumbling around my feet and I was powerless to stop it. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could tell myself that would make it better.
The worst thing was, I didn’t even care about my job anymore. I cared about Annie, but I had seemingly lost her. The cold way that she’d acted the last time we had seen each other had told me that she was well on her way to getting over me, to moving on from me.
I hated it. I could never have hated her, of course – if anything, I loved her more than ever. She didn’t deserve this. She deserved someone to treat her better, someone younger and closer to her own age who was capable of devoting all the time in the world to her.
In a way, it was ironic. This was the biggest concern that I’d had when Annie and I had first gotten together and now, it was coming back to haunt me. I had been out of my rational mind when I’d agreed to be with her. I’d been too taken in by her looks and her charm and my insatiable lust for her. It had been impossible not to be – anyone would have been. But I should have been able to hold my ground and stand firm and deny the fact that I wanted her as desperately as I did.
It wasn’t fair, but neither was life.
“Mr. Pritzker,” Parker said, clearing her throat and bringing me out of my head and crashing back down to the planet earth. “They’re waiting for me. Would you like me to show you to the conference room?”
“Parker, I’ve been working here for years,” I said drily.
She still wasn’t looking at me, and another crushing wa
ve of anxiety broke over my head. I swallowed hard and squared my shoulders before walking down the hall and taking the elevator down. Another cruel twist of irony – the board members were waiting for me in the very same conference room where I had first learned that Annie had become an Empire employee.
They were all sitting and when I walked in, they didn’t rise to meet me.
“Elliot, sit down,” a man named James said. “We have something urgent and confidential to discuss with you.”
It was funny, but in that moment I realized just how little I cared. It was almost like dating someone and mourning the end of the relationship long before it was actually over. I was so over the secrecy and hiding that had come along with dating Annie that I no longer cared who knew. I wanted to shout my relationship with her from the rooftops. I wanted everyone to know, I wanted everyone to understand and realize the depths of my feelings for her.
“That sounds pretty serious, no?” I joked as I lowered myself into a seat across from the board.
Predictably, no one laughed at my joke.
“Elliot, it’s come to our attention that you’ve embarked on an inappropriate ... shall we say, relationship, with a junior member of the staff here at Empire.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment.
“And if you’re willing to take the right steps to rectify the matter, we’d be more than happy to work with you and ensure your status here. You’ve done great things for Empire and you are a valued member of our team.”
I couldn’t help it – I snorted.
“What seems to be the problem?” James asked. “You understand the severity of the situation, correct?”
“I do,” I said. “But I’m not sure why it’s a problem. She isn’t my direct report, and everything we’ve done has been consensual.”
James raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “You say that,” he said. “But if the investors were to hear of this, that would be the end of Empire. We, collectively, would be finished. You do understand that, yes?”
“I do, or at least I understand that you understand,” I countered. “But I haven’t done anything wrong. Nothing is going to change; everything will remain the same. If I stay, that is.”
James shook his head. “No,” he said. “If you do stay, you’ll be placed on a performance improvement plan. And you’ll need to fire the girl involved, with a member of our in-house counsel present to witness and document.”
Fire Annie? They can’t be fucking serious, I thought. My eyebrows shot up at the same time as I got to my feet and crossed my arms over my chest.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s no way that’s going to happen. I wouldn’t do that – and why should I? She didn’t do anything wrong!”
James did a double-take at my angry words.
“It would be the best step when it comes to proving your remorse,” James said. The other board members nodded. “You’ll need to do that, at a bare minimum, if you even want to think about staying. Otherwise, we’ll be forced to fire you.”
I stared him down. “You can’t fire me if I quit first,” I said coldly. “She’s a wonderful human being, and you don’t deserve to have someone like her working at your company in the first place.”
James got to his feet and looked me dead in the eyes. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “You’d throw away your entire career, your entire life, for a silly little piece of ass?”
If I’d taken a lick of training in my life, I would have punched him.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Then, I turned on my heel and stalked out of the conference room, feeling strangely triumphant.
34
Annie
“Mommy, why do I have to take naps every day?”
Despite my rather bleak mood, the innocent question from my daughter made me laugh.
“What’s funny, Mommy?”
I did my best to stifle my giggles by covering my mouth with one hand.
“It’s not funny,” I said, tucking Lilah into her bed and covering her with her The Little Mermaid blanket. “But you do have to take naps, if you want to grow up big and strong.”
“I want to grow up like you, Mommy,” Lilah said earnestly. The tender tone of her voice touched my heart, and I smiled.
Well, I’m certainly big, I thought as I glanced down at my curves. But I’m not very strong.
It had been two days since I’d gone over to Elliot’s house and knocked to find that he wasn’t home. Two days since I’d called Parker and heard that he hadn’t been in the office all day.
Two days since I’d come to terms with the fact that I’d probably pushed him away for good, simply because I couldn’t manage to articulate that I felt Elliot was taking too long to bring us all together as a family.
I was hurting inside. A lot. In a way, I was disappointed because it felt like I had finally come to the end of my rope. I knew that Elliot and I had had a second chance together.
I also knew that even though I would love him forever, I didn’t believe in third chances. Elliot was the love of my life, and perhaps I had been foolish to think that I was the love of his.
Or perhaps, I had just been foolish enough to believe that just because we loved each other, that would be enough to make things work between us. I should have known better, but even though I had grown up a lot in the last few years, I was still young. Elliot was old enough to be my father, wise enough to know that maybe we weren’t right for each other after all.
I just wished that it didn’t have to hurt so much. I wished that I could close my eyes and blink and forget about him.
What hurt even more was thinking about Lilah and how I’d made the careless mistake of introducing my daughter to her father and made it seem like we would be a forever family. I knew that I’d have to interact with Elliot for the rest of my life, because he was her real father and would no doubt want to be involved with raising her.
But that still didn’t feel great.
“Mommy?”
“Sorry, honey,” I said, shaking my head as if to clear all thoughts of Elliot, which of course, I knew I would never be able to actually do. “Mommy was spacing out for a minute.”
Now, it was Lilah’s turn to giggle. The pure sound of her laughter lifted my spirits, as it always did, and I smiled down at her.
“Now, you were asking why you have to take naps ...” I trailed off. “Because if you don’t, you’ll be cranky later. Trust me, all adults wish that they could take naps during the day. It would go a long way towards our mental health.”
Lilah giggled again. I could tell that she was getting a little punchy and more than a little tired, so I tucked her in and planted a kiss on her forehead.
“Sleep well for Mommy, okay?”
Lilah nodded. She yawned and closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. She squinted in the semi-darkness of the room and focused on me.
“Mommy, where’s Daddy?”
Her question hit me like an arrow straight to the heart and I nearly burst into tears on the spot.
“He’s ... working, honey,” I said. It was a bad lie, but it was the best that I could come up with on the spot. “He loves you very much.”
Lilah snuggled deeper under the covers and nestled her head on the pillow.
“Does he?”
“Yes,” I said. Even though he doesn’t love me nearly as much, he’ll always love you.
“Good,” Lilah murmured. She was so out of it that she was practically slurring and it was only a few more seconds before her lids closed and she began to snore softly. I kissed her forehead once more, then gingerly got to my feet so as not to disturb her. I walked to the door and turned once, just once, to make sure that my sweet girl was still sleeping safely and soundly. After watching her for just a few moments, I snuck out of the room and pulled the door most of the way closed behind me.
The house was quiet. My mother was in her room, taking a nap of her own, and I knew that I should do similar. I hadn’t
been sleeping well lately, and I could have used the extra rest. I knew that I looked terrible – I was bloated from depression-eating too many chips the night before and my skin was greasy, but I couldn’t motivate myself to take a shower.
I should really get out of the house, I told myself as I crept quietly down the stairs. Take a walk. Or call Beth, and ask if she wants to have a girls’ night out.
Halfway down the stairs, there was a knock on the door. It was loud but almost hesitant.
Definitely not the knock of a postman.
I swallowed hard and my palms grew damp as I skittered down the stairs as quickly and quietly as I could. Yanking open the door, I nearly gasped when I saw who was standing on the other side.
It was Elliot, holding a bouquet of beautiful purple roses nearly as big as me.
“Annie,” Elliot said. “Please, let me in. I need to talk to you.”
My heart was thudding like a jackhammer as I stepped back and let Elliot inside, holding a finger to my lips.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. And then, without giving him a chance to answer, I added: “My mother is home! Lilah’s napping!”
Elliot pushed the flowers into my arms and put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me close. When our lips met, I melted against him and moaned softly, unable to resist. A spark leapt from his body to mine and suddenly, instantly, just like that, I knew things were going to be okay between us. Somehow, Elliot had known that I did love him, that I did want him – and not just now, but for forever and always – and pushed through my stubbornness, pushed through my icy behavior and come to my rescue.
Forbidden First Times: A Contemporary Romance Collection Page 101
