Working Title

by Holley Trent

  Neither had a response.

  She really hadn’t expected that they would.

  She turned off the light over the workstation and headed to the table.

  It was late and the hour was catching up to her. Her body was slowing down and her brain certainly was. She needed to be more intentional in what she said and did. She didn’t get off on hurting people—even people who refused to take no for an answer, because they simply weren’t supposed to in some instances.

  For a few minutes, she concentrated on sealing up cheese and crackers. She corked what was left of the wine and put it away. She brushed a few crumbs off the table.

  Then she even found a few stray napkins to stack.

  With nothing left to do, she went to meet her fate.

  Or doom.

  She didn’t know which. Because she was involved, it was going to be messy.

  Hot pink left streaks wherever it went.

  Plopping onto the empty side of the sofa Finch was on, she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s just clear the air here so everyone knows what this is all about, okay? Maybe we can fill in some gaps for each other. I’ll start.”

  Joey left his phone on the charger and made his way to the other sofa. He sat in the middle, legs open, fingers twined between them. He stared at her in that “Well, I’m waiting” manner he sometimes did and that she generally ignored because that was just their way.

  “I’m not entirely certain at what point this thing with Joey and me went from casual hookups to an exclusive relationship, but it did, and for a long while it was pretty intense. Not in a bad way. Just in the expected way of when you mash two people together who are stubborn and set in their ways. Somehow, we figured out how to give each other what we needed.” She put her feet up on the coffee table and slouched against the sofa back. “Most of the time.”

  “And the rest of the time?” Finch asked.

  Joey rolled his eyes, but he kept his mouth shut. He really was smart when he wanted to be.

  Lisa shrugged. “I just don’t see him. It’s difficult for me to be in a long-distance relationship because as much as I love him, I know the kind of shit that can happen when absence becomes normal. I wasted years with my ex thinking I was his one and only. I lived with the motherfucker, do you understand me? I lived with him, and yet I never figured out that the entire time, I was the chick on the side.”

  Finch’s mouth fell open.

  Lisa waved off the pity.

  She was over it. Mostly.

  The shame would probably always linger. She was ashamed that with all the signs that had been right there in front of her, she hadn’t suspected a thing.

  “What hurt me so much wasn’t that I was expecting wedding bells from him and that opportunity vanished. What broke me is that he wasted my time. Those years that I thought I was happy, I was just being someone’s sucker. So it’s hard for me to accept that Joey and I will take the next step in this thing and that everything will be fine, knowing that I’m here most of the time and he’s in the city.”

  Finch’s lips closed in as though to shape some words, but Joey preempted with, “I’ll take you as you are, but you can’t do the same. I get that. But do you really think you’re ever going to find anything better than this?”

  “Than you, you mean?” Finch asked. And it was her turn to not let him get words out. She stilled his rebuttal with a raised hand and shook her head. “What’s stopping you from being here? You have the same remote working opportunity that I do, or an even better one, I’m sure. You’re what H.R. considers, like, platinum-level staff. I don’t go into Manhattan unless I absolutely have to. Why do you?”

  Lisa sat up straight, a sharp jolt of annoyance replacing the energy she’d lost to the day. “Wait.”

  He’d made the opportunity sound like…garbage. Like there was a trap in it somewhere, and she’d bought that. She’d been as understanding as she could be.

  Joey’s eyes narrowed to slits, but Finch wasn’t done yet.

  “You’re senior staff. I don’t mean to assert at all that I know how to do your job, but I suspect that much of it can be done without you staring at the faces of the collective publicity department, especially since your junior staff doesn’t live there the way you think. If they don’t need you breathing over their shoulders, then why are you there?”

  Why…is he?

  If Lisa were the impulsive type, she might have picked up that cheese rind on the table and hurled it at him. “You…could be here?”

  “I would be here,” Finch said gravely. “And I suppose that’s the difference between me and him.”

  “No, the difference between me and you,” Joey snapped, practically thrumming with a frequency of agitation that was so unusual for him, “is that you haven’t been laid off four fucking times in fifteen years and had to hold your breath through line closures and house mergers and executive changes. I don’t know if it’s obvious to you, but I’m over forty, I get paid well over entry-level income for what I do, and I’m not who publishing houses are looking to recruit when bottom lines are a concern. So, yeah, I’m in that office every day doing the Athena rah-rah thing, because the moment I’m not there and they decide everything can crank along just fine without me, I’m out. Do you understand me?”

  “What the fuck?” Lisa shouted. “Why didn’t you just say something? It wasn’t like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and can’t understand economic insecurity. For God’s sake!” She gestured wildly about her toward the lodge and the property at large. “This whole place is economically insecure. I haven’t made that a secret.”

  “No, you haven’t, but how does it look for me to beg you to marry me at the same time as feeding you my paranoia about getting fired in a week or two? I don’t want you to think I can’t support us. I don’t ever want you to have to worry about that.”

  “I…” Absolutely, thoroughly flabbergasted, Lisa didn’t know what to say.

  Of course, there were a lot of things she could say, but honest though they might be, they didn’t feel right. She didn’t have the answers.

  What Joey must have been feeling was nearly too heavy for Lisa to digest, even if consumed one tiny bite at a time.

  Maybe there were no answers.

  She just went to him, sat at his side, and looked at him until he looked back.

  They didn’t say anything, but they didn’t always need to talk to be understood.

  “I wish you had said something, Joey. All this time, I—”

  “Yeah.” Scoffing, he dragged his hand through his mussed hair and then rubbed the eyes that had gone a bit red. “I just want to take care of you, Lis. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Wow.” Finch’s voice was a barely audible whisper. “I guess I… I’m sorry. I put my foot in my mouth. I just…”

  She closed her mouth.

  Then she opened it again, and Lisa turned to her, wanting to gather up her precious words and needing to correct the misfires they’d been launching all evening. Her heart said that was the fair cost of forging a vulnerable connection with someone. But Finch shook her head and closed her mouth once more.

  She stood and jerkily tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “Thanks for the snack. I… I guess I won’t wake up now with my belly aching. I…”

  She shook her head once more and left, closing the door softly behind her.

  Something in Lisa was compelling her to follow her, to wrap her up in her arms, and say, “Okay, okay, it’s fine. You tried. I know what you were doing. Thank you for trying.” Had circumstances been different, Lisa would have kept that chameleon with the gray shell on the outside that hid all the red and orange so no one could see it.

  Try as she might, Lisa couldn’t split herself in two and follow her when the person who’d had his fist around her heart for more than a year was sitting there expecting wise words from her.

  She didn’t have any wisdom. She had empathy and sadness. And she had tha
t ineffable love for him because he was a mess and so was she and the chemistry was somehow just right.

  She put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, whispering, “What the fuck.”

  “I don’t know,” Joey said softly. “That’s most of the problem right there. I just don’t know.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Joey woke the next morning with a sore neck, a stiff cock, and utter confusion about what he’d done to acquire either.

  His eyes sprang open as he tried to move his neck. His focus cleared on the office ceiling just before his brain relayed that the hard protuberance against his spine was the sofa arm. The cause of the other hard protuberance was the welcome weight of the woman he loved atop him, and apparently, she’d fallen asleep warming her hands in his pants.

  He chuckled but quickly stopped because the movement made his neck ache. “Lis.”

  “Mmmph,” she murmured against his chest.

  “I’m in a lot of pain right now, sweetheart.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. My phone’s still over there. If you take your hand out of my pants, you could look at your watch.”

  She sighed.

  “I’m not exactly inviting you to remove your hands, just so you know. Feel around all you want. I’m a solutions-oriented guy and just wanted to let you know that you have options.”

  “I don’t need to know precisely. Is it dark or light out?”

  “Light enough for me to see that your hair is brown and not black.”

  “Ugh. Probably need to go see to breakfast.”

  “I think you can hold off for a while. Breakfast is scheduled for nine. Looks like you have a little time to wake up.”

  “Did my phone alarm go off?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.” She settled more snugly against him and smacked her lips a few times. “Okay. So not six yet, maybe.”

  She seemed perfectly amenable to returning to her pre-wakeful state.

  If not for the ache of his erection, Joey wouldn’t have minded so much. It wasn’t going to deflate simply because she was ignoring it.

  He groaned. “You know me. Generally, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to ask this, but could you maybe award my cock clemency for good behavior?”

  “Comfortable.”

  “Yes, you seem to be, precious—and I hate to be selfish about this—but I need a little mercy.”

  Short of that, he was going to take off like a rocket the second her hands skimmed too close to his inner thighs. No one else had ever had that sort of effect on him. He’d been embarrassed by his new hair trigger at first, but he eventually decided that if she didn’t care, neither would he.

  “Fine,” she grumbled.

  Slowly, she extracted her hands from his pants and sat back so she was straddling his thighs.

  In the dim light, she looked like a phantom in a dream he never wanted to wake up from. There’d been too many nights already where he’d woken up thinking that she was there beside him, but she wasn’t, because he was in the city and she was out in the middle of nowhere and that was really no one’s fault, and yet somehow mostly his.

  As she trailed her fingertips up his throat, his groan came out, hoarse and strained. “Are we…okay?” he asked.

  She kept skating a finger up until she found his lips. The soft pad of her thumb slid along the slit and crept into his parted mouth.

  “No,” she whispered.

  He gave the fingertip a suck since that seemed to be what she wanted, and she withdrew it.

  She delved beneath the waistband of his sweatpants, unerringly finding the end of his erection.

  His hips bucked before she’d even tightened her hand around him.

  “No, we’re not okay,” she said. That wet fingertip teased across the aroused skin at his cock head. “I don’t know how to make it okay. I want you. That won’t change. But can I do what Everley did? She went a week at a time without seeing one of her partners.”

  Joey ground his teeth because there couldn’t possibly be a good enough answer for that. He’d always thought Everley’s relationship setup was ridiculous, but of course, he wasn’t in it with her and really couldn’t care so much. Now that the tables had turned, he’d wished he’d paid closer attention to how she’d made it work.

  “She always paints me as being the one who has my shit together,” Lisa said, “but I’m the one who needs to be seen and noticed all the time. I get anxious without attention. I don’t want to be forgotten about.”

  “You think that I could forget anything about you?”

  Joey slung his arm around her back to draw her down to him because he was done with being deprived of her mouth and her kisses.

  Air escaped her lips in a sound resembling relief as he pulled her against him.

  He forced his tongue into her mouth as her grip around his shaft tightened, her wet thumb probing against the opening at the tip.

  Before her, he hadn’t had the patience for kissing. It was just a messy thing some people needed to get turned on, but too often, it was awkward and lacking in finesse, and he just didn’t want it.

  He’d always wanted to kiss Lisa, though, from the very first time he saw her.

  Perhaps he’d wanted to shut her up and that was the best way to go about it at the time.

  Or perhaps because he’d guessed that she wouldn’t let him do all the steering. He wouldn’t have to be the one trying to hold the other’s attention captive the whole time.

  She gave as much as she took, and sometimes he needed to be on the receiving end.

  She tugged his pants down as much as she could, which wasn’t far.

  Breathless, he broke the lock on their lips and tilted his hips up to give her what she wanted.

  “Sorry. Sorry,” she panted, urging his hands up the inside of her shirt as she fumbled with the button of her jeans. “With so much up in the air, I shouldn’t expect it, but—”

  “Take it. Fuck, just take it.”

  She should have known better than anyone that at times, fucking was the only way people could communicate. Perhaps it wasn’t articulate, but it was still expressive, and he had a lot of things he could say to her with his body.

  As he tugged down the cups of her bra, murmuring pretty endearments about the way her nipples had saluted him when he last saw them and about how he wanted to suck all the fire out of her, she wriggled out of her pants.

  Usually, there was some teasing, or at least a call to action, but without wasting time, she climbed onto him and renewed her grip, standing him up proud. As she angled herself, her breath was ragged as a torn hem.

  “Go. Go,” he urged.

  He could send her chasing condoms or whatever else, but they’d both made their peace with risk ages ago.

  If something happened—if he couldn’t pull out—so be it.

  The potentials didn’t frighten them. Never had.

  They actually had never had a discussion as to why that might be.

  She eased onto him and just like always, he grabbed her hips and closed his eyes.

  After so long away from her, she felt like the sweetest torture.

  His entire body had gone rigid from fear and arousal all mixed together. He needed her so fucking bad, and yet he was afraid that soon, he’d be all done, and then what?

  Would he have to chase her for weeks again, or months, just to reenter her orbit?

  He refused. He had to figure out a way to sort out their mess, even if it meant he’d cast his lot to the Fates and let his work situation unfold however it would.

  An odd peace suddenly unfurled in him upon thinking that.

  Maybe that’s it, then?

  Maybe that was all anyone could hope for, but the decision had seemed so much more critical because she was involved—their future together was involved.

  It appeared to be an answer, but he’d have to give the surrendering some thought when his blood wasn’t so hot and when his brain hadn’t te
mporarily headquartered in his groin.

  “Lean down so I can taste you.” He was already rolling up her shirt and tilting his mouth toward her chest when she clenched hard around him, making him wonder yet again if more sensation was truly what he needed when he was already so close to spilling. “Christ.”

  “I think that’s supposed to be my line,” she whimpered.

  Drawing one sweet nipple into his mouth, he moaned at the familiar taste of her. He loved that feeling of desperate staggering, of coming home gracelessly to her whenever their bodies rejoined.

  He thrust harder and she dug her nails into his shoulders, hissing, although he was the one who’d be wearing scars.

  “More of that.” Lisa pressed her breast harder against his mouth and rolled her hips, letting him fall a bit out of her warmth before drawing him back in again and again.

  Already, that heat stirred in his core, tightening and demanding and stiffening him.

  He was going to explode in her and probably wouldn’t stop fucking even after because she’d turned him into an addict and made the mistake of offering him another taste.

  “I’m…I’m going to come.”

  He informed her more out of politeness than anything else. She always knew. She recognized his gasps and twitches, and how his thrusts became shallower when he was near.

  She lowered herself flat against him, probing her tongue into his mouth and twisting her hands through his hair.

  Each sharp tug ignited an answering jolt from his loins. It was like marionette strings: tug, thrust.

  Yank, fuck deeper and revel at the sound of moist skin slapping.

  “Put your fingers in me,” he groaned.

  Without hesitation she reached beneath him, seeking that hotspot that made him so wild.

  He let his knees fall open and yanked her body up higher atop his, slowing her grinding torture as she probed his rim.

  When she tentatively notched a fingertip into him, he was ready for relief and could apologize for it later on his knees or with her on his face or wherever she wanted to be, but the sound of the door creaking open seemed to put his body in a sort of agitated stasis.