by Hazel Kelly
I’d never done that before, and now I knew why. Cause it was fucked up.
It’s like she’d shown me more than she meant to, and I saw it all. I saw the pulsing pleasure bubble up in her dark eyes until she looked frightened by how good she felt.
But the scariest thing of all was that I came at the same time. Right along with her. Which meant she saw more of what she does to me than I ever meant to show her.
I should’ve looked away or taken her from behind. There were a hundred ways I could’ve had her that would have been fun and easy and simple. Instead, I did the one thing I absolutely shouldn’t have done. I let her look in my eyes when I was feeling something.
Which is exactly why she got confused and thought I felt something more than I was letting on. Cause she’d fucking seen it. Cause I’d been an idiot and shown it to her.
Now I looked like some kind of asshole that didn’t know what I wanted.
But I knew exactly what I wanted. I wanted to spoil her rotten and have her not ask for more. Was that really so crazy? Was I broken or something that I didn’t want to make things complicated by talking about them to death?
Why did women feel the need to do that? To label things and compartmentalize them? I thought things were plenty straightforward. In the boardroom, I was her boss, and in the bedroom, I was her lover.
I wasn’t her fucking boyfriend.
Is that what she wanted? Really? Cause I was too old to be someone’s boyfriend. That was for teenage boys who need labels so they don’t just stick it anywhere they can think of. And I was too young to be someone’s partner.
It was in her best interest that I continue to be her boss. Why couldn’t she see that? If this thing between us- this chemistry- was allowed to become anything else, it would jeopardize her job. And she’d openly admitted that her career was her first priority more times than I could count.
Meanwhile, my job was safe. My whole life would go on either way. She was the one that had so much to lose by making a big fuss.
So why did she do it? Why didn’t she just keep her pouty mouth shut and think back on the night fondly and quietly on her own time? Like I’d planned to do. She was supposed to enjoy breakfast and say thanks for last night and leave it alone. But she couldn’t.
And now we had a problem, a problem that only existed because she couldn’t just be happy with how things were going. Which was swimmingly and without flaw.
But oh no. She wanted more. And I couldn’t give it to her. It was a far way we’d come since the night before when everything between us had been a glorious, unplanned bonus. Now it wasn’t enough. That’s why relationships were horrible.
Everyone likes a Valentine’s day card from someone they don’t expect one from, but as soon as you label something, presents and chocolates and crap are just expected.
I wanted to romance Ella without obligatory commitments and cultural bullshit getting in the way. I wanted to woo her and wow her and have that be enough.
So why wasn’t it?
Why did the absence of a meaningless label or explanation undermine everything I’d done for her?
The whole thing was a fucking disaster. I thought I’d finally met a woman I cared about that could like me for me, but I was wrong. It was true that Ella didn’t like me for my money or my power. Initially, she liked me for my charm and the fact that I could turn her body into a hot spring.
But at some point, her affection for me had morphed into desire for the potential that I had to be something else to her, and that was the source of our troubles.
And it really pissed me off because as much as I wanted to write her off as a crazy, delusional bitch, she was fucking right about the whole goddamn thing. I did care about her. I wanted her body and her company more intensely than I ever meant to or was comfortable with.
I wanted her to be happy, and I wanted to be the guy that made her so.
But I had limits, too, and telling her how I really felt was one of them.
I couldn’t do it.
Even if it meant losing her.
Chapter 15: Ella
I realized I still had the earrings in just before I got home so I stopped on the landing outside the door and took them off. Then I put them in my wallet so they wouldn’t get misplaced. I didn’t want to lose them regardless of whether or not I decided to give them back.
I stuck the key in the door. The smell of popcorn hit me right away and made me happy to be home. There was nothing my Mom liked more on a Sunday than to eat too much popcorn and watch Lifetime Movies. Which I always liked, too, especially in the winter. It was too cold to do anything outside anyway.
“Hi honey,” she called from the kitchen.
“Hi Mom.”
“How was the party?”
I cringed at the memory of my lie. “Fine.”
She was standing in front of me when I turned around after hanging my coat. Her face twisted when she saw me. “Have you been crying?”
“Crying?” I shook my head. “No. My eyes just got watery because it’s so cold outside.”
“Was it a late night?”
“Yeah, but the hotel room the girls got was great. Everyone ended up staying over cause we all had too much wine.” I stopped myself before the lies got ridiculous.
“I’m glad you got out for some fun, especially considering how hard you’ve been working and how much you’ve been missing Jackie.”
“I have good news about that actually.”
She cocked her head. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Let me change really quick, and I’ll come tell you.”
She nodded and turned towards the sound of the beeping microwave.
I sank onto my bed and put my head in my hands for a second. Then I reminded myself that I needed to pull it together just long enough to tell my Mom the good news. If I needed to unravel, I could spend the rest of my day in my room if I wanted.
I slipped on some sweats and went out to the kitchen. There was a tea on the table for me.
“So what’s the good news?” She turned the bag of popcorn upside down and emptied it into a glass bowl.
“I got a raise.”
She turned around. “My God, already? That’s fantastic.”
I nodded. “I’m really pleased.”
“You should be.”
“I wasn’t expecting it or anything. It’s because I impressed an important client.”
My Mom pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down beside me. “That’s wonderful news.”
“I guess they were so impressed with the event I put together for them that they booked back in for the next ten years. It’s a pretty big deal.”
“It sounds like it.”
“And they were really demanding, too. Like they wanted a specific kind of water and I had to put all these welcome baskets together. It was crazy. I was just glad I didn’t screw it up.”
“It sounds like you have a real knack for what you’re doing.”
I shrugged. “I hope so.”
She put her hand on mine. “I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Your father would be proud, too.”
I swallowed. The mention of my Dad was bittersweet. I thought of him all the time, especially when I was trying to make good business decisions. But unlike my Mom, I didn’t believe he was looking down on me from Heaven. I didn’t think he would ever know about my hard work or any good fortune I enjoyed. It had to be enough to think he would’ve been proud of me if he were still alive.
We never talked about him, though. His death was so hard on us that after a while, we realized that we would never be able to move on if we kept bringing him back to life with stories and anecdotes all the time. So we talked about him less and less until he almost became a taboo subject.
I pulled my hand back and wrapped it around my warm mug. “Anyway, the raise means I can afford to move into that building I liked with Jackie soon.”
“I guess it was silly to hope you wo
uld stay here with me forever.”
“Hopefully you won’t be here forever either. I’m going to move you somewhere nicer as soon as I can afford it.”
“I’m fine here. That won’t be necessary.”
“I want to.” Dad would want me to.
“Seeing how well you’re doing is more than enough for me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tell yourself whatever you want. I know you’d rather live somewhere that had a bathtub you would actually feel clean after soaking in.”
She laughed. “The one here is a bit manky.”
“Leave it with me, Mom. You’ll be out of here soon enough.”
“You know sometimes I feel like you’ve done a better job of taking care of me than I have of taking care of you.”
I stood up and kissed her on the forehead. “You must have done something right then.”
“Do you want to watch the twelve o’clock movie with me?”
“What’s it about?”
“I can’t remember if the stalker one is on first or whether it’s the one with the teen pregnancy.”
I laughed. “How deliciously predictable.”
“I know, right? I can’t wait.”
“I’ll join you after I call Jackie. She made me promise I would fill her in on last night.”
“Do you want me to wait for you?”
“No. You go ahead. I’m sure you can catch me up on the plot later.”
“Suit yourself.” She stood and picked up her jumbo bowl of popcorn. “But don’t be too long or there won’t be any popcorn left.”
“Fair enough.”
I shut myself in my bedroom and dialed Jackie’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Is this Ella Abbott speaking?”
My heart sank in my chest. “No. It is most definitely not.”
“What’s wrong with you? You sound like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
I collapsed onto my bed. “Actually I’m calling because I have good news.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I got a raise. We can move into that nice building now.”
“The one with the balcony?”
“Well, that particular unit might be gone, but I can definitely afford the ones without balconies now, and they still have a decent view.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I can’t go on without you like this anymore. Besides, you said you trusted me with the decision.”
“It doesn’t seem fair.”
“If it makes you feel better, I’ll take the bigger room.”
“It would.”
“And don’t worry, all the closets are the same size.”
“Yay! I’m excited.”
“Me too.”
“And a little surprised, I guess.”
“Why?”
“I kind of thought with the way things were going, you might move in with Romeo and forget about me.”
“That’s not happening.”
“Oh?”
“In fact, it looks like it’s never going to happen.”
“What are you talking about? I thought things were going well?”
“They were.”
“So what happened?”
“I fucked everything up.”
“How?”
“By thinking too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that after last night, I mean, I don’t think it’s all my fault exactly I just-”
“Take a deep breath.”
I did as she said.
“Start again. What happened last night?”
“We went out to dinner.” I decided not to tell her about the earrings just yet even though I was dying to ask her what the fuck that was about. “And then back to his place.”
“And?”
“It was amazing. Dinner. Him. The whole thing.”
“The sex?”
“There are no words, Jackie. It was the most transcendent experience of my life.”
“Okay, I’d really like you to elaborate on that, but I have to leave for my nephew’s birthday party soon, so get to the part where everything went wrong because so far it sounds like a fairytale.”
“This morning he made me breakfast in bed.”
“He can cook?”
“It was basic, but it’s the-”
“thought that counts, sure. Go on.”
“And I asked him what we were?”
“What you were?”
“Yeah. Like I asked him to tell me what we were doing with each other?”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I have a right to know if he’s sleeping with anyone else.”
“Well that depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether he has a right to know about your personal life outside your relationship.”
“There’s nothing to know!”
“Do you suspect he’s seeing someone else or-”
“No. I don’t know. I just wanted to ask. I couldn’t help it. It felt like more than sex and-”
“You decided to spoil that nice feeling by trying to pin him down and make him put a label on it?”
“Are you kidding me right now? You think I was out of line?”
“I don’t know if you were out of line. What did he say?”
“He said it was all fun and that it would never be serious.”
Jackie blew air out between her lips.
“Well?”
“You sound really hurt.”
Then it hit me. I was hurt. I wasn’t mad at all. I felt- for lack of a better word- heartbroken.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was he mean about it?”
I shrugged. “No. He was just sort of matter of fact. Like it should’ve been obvious to me from the start that it was only about sex.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You feel the same way, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter how I feel. All I know is that it was supposed to be fun for you and you don’t sound like you’re having fun right now.”
“It was only this morning that wasn’t fun, though. Because we had an argument.”
“That you started?”
“Yeah.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I have no idea.”
“Do you want to keep hooking up with him if that’s all it will ever be?”
I rolled onto my side.
“You’ve really fallen for this guy, haven’t you?”
“How could I not? He’s been incredible to me.”
“Look, I know you must feel really vulnerable right now because it’s a complicated situation.”
“Yeah.”
“So maybe you should just take a few days to think about your feelings- think not share- before you decide what you want to do.”
I nodded.
“Because you have to work with this guy and your hormones are totally fucked right now.”
“I know.”
“So just lay low, and don’t do anything rash. It sounds like you’re both just trying to protect yourselves, but the ways you’re doing it are clashing.”
“That makes sense.”
But it didn’t make me feel better.
Chapter 16: Will
I was in a bad mood. I strained my groin in the gym and every time I tweaked it funny I was angry with Ella all over again.
I felt completely backed into a corner. She accused me of wanting options, but as a result of her little outburst, I no longer had any good ones. Since our argument, I’d only come up with two ideas and I hated both of them.
The first one was to tell her what she wanted to hear. That I cared about her. That she was special to me. That we were exclusive and I wouldn’t sleep with anyone else. Not that I wanted to sleep with anyone else. I was completely obsessed with her. I don’t know how that wasn’t obvious.
I thought it was men that were supposed to be dense and incapable of picking up on subtlety. Clearly, that wasn’t true in all cases.
Anyway, the problem with this option wasn’t so much telling her how I felt and that there was no one else. All of those things were true. However, I didn’t want to admit that stuff to anyone but myself because there wasn’t a bone in my body that believed that would fix things.
Maybe it would for a while, but eventually, we would have to have the same goddamn argument again. She would get it in her head that her belief in my feelings wasn’t enough. She would want my words to mean something in conversation with others. It wouldn’t be only what happened when we were alone together that mattered anymore but also the impression other people had of me when I wasn’t with her. And fuck that. I didn’t owe her that.
And I wasn’t doing her any favors if I allowed her to refer to me as her boyfriend and stop tiptoeing around.
Even if I carried on normally, it would affect our reputations at work. I didn’t want her becoming the butt of corporate jokes, lumped in with the other women who behaved unprofessionally. That wasn’t fair to her at this stage of her career. She deserved more than that. She was better than those women who took advantage.
Plus, I was the one that took advantage. I pushed her and pushed her until she couldn’t resist me, and while I wasn’t sorry for any of it, gossip is always kinder to men than it is to women.
Honestly, there were so many obvious reasons why we shouldn’t squeeze more out of this thing than each other’s pleasure, I couldn’t understand why it would even appeal to her on any level.
The second option I came up with was to say nothing and hope she got over whatever her problem was and embraced the current status and terms of our relationship. That’s what I really wanted. I didn’t want her to withdraw. Not when I craved her more than ever.
Unfortunately, there would be no way for me to know if she was being genuine. If she kept sleeping with me because she enjoyed it and that was enough for her, it would be one thing. But if she wanted more and felt like I was denying her that, it would be awful. For her at least. And pretty unsettling for me as well.
No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t see how demanding more from our relationship wouldn’t end up with her getting hurt. Which was the last thing I wanted.
