“Hey, I’m not you.”
She threw her napkin at him. “My wedding was not at a drive-through.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Justin said, returning with a tidy Toby.
“I make one little suggestion about wedding planning and he holds it over my head forever,” Shannon said, but she was planting a kiss on Justin’s hand as he squeezed her shoulder in passing.
Dillon watched them fondly. Shannon and Justin just plain fit together. Even as much as they’d had to go through when they first started dating, they’d always fit. Wanting what they had didn’t seem, to him, to be too much to look for in life.
Chapter Thirty
“You shaved!”
Dillon rubbed his jaw. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She kissed the smooth skin, nuzzled a little. “Hmm, no. It’s nice. I just wasn’t expecting it. Come in.”
“Wow. Speaking of nice,” Dillon snagged Serena’s waist and pulled her hips to him. “You wore my favorite skirt.”
And she was glad, seeing his reaction. “I thought it was your second-favorite now.”
“Changed my mind.”
“Fickle. Just when you think you know a guy.” She was having trouble moving her palms off his face. He must have shaved moments before coming over, it was that baby smooth. “So, where are you taking me?”
It was a new Italian place on Washington. “I can’t explain why that area is bustling in this economy, but as long as it is, we may as well enjoy,” he said, holding his car door open for her. “Plus, I looked at their website. They grow a lot of their own veggies. I thought you’d like that.”
Serena had taken her pills before he came over, in case he was out of new shirts, or the cat had shed more than she’d expected in his car. But he wore a crisp white button-down—not new, but fresh from the cleaners—and he’d put a cautionary towel down on the seat and foot well. If this kept up, she was going to rethink her reservations about his overeagerness thing.
They’d shared ‘how did it go today’ type stories in the car, and for a moment after they were seated at the window table Dillon had reserved, Serena was tense. It took her a moment to figure out why: she didn’t actually know what to talk about next. She’d been conversing with Dillon for months. They didn’t need to exchange any of that ‘just getting to know you’ chit-chat. She didn’t want to talk about the night—or morning—they’d just spent together. Too many pitfalls, and she wanted to stay a lot closer to the surface. They’d already covered the hours they’d been apart. The future was another danger zone she would only approach with caution. So basically she had no road map; just another transportation-themed analysis of what was bothering her about her relationship with Dillon.
She scanned the menu, and was saved.
“But this is awful!”
His head jerked up from the wine list. “What’s awful?”
“This,” she showed him her menu. “It’s got a dozen spelling and grammar errors in the About Us paragraph, and there are at least four—no, look, five—different fonts in the descriptions.”
He looked at his own menu, which was of course identical. “Only ten errors in the About Us. But they bury the lede and don’t say anything about that vegetable garden.” Dillon shrugged. “It’s a shame. They have a good backstory, but who’s going to read all that about the location to get to it?”
Serena was still counting typestyles. “They switch to Franklin Gothic, of all things, for the desserts. Did someone literally cut and paste this?”
The waitress knew all about the specials, but wasn’t expecting to be quizzed on the menu design. She offered to send a manager over after she got their order in. “If you’re ready to order?” she added, a little pointedly.
“Poor gal didn’t really expect to deal with the likes of us,” Serena said after they were alone again.
Dillon raised an eyebrow at her. “Us?”
“Okay, me. I know. But did you see their logo?” She pulled a small pad of paper and a couple of colored pens out of her bag. “Way off balance, and a stereotype, to boot. Not a good inspiration. This place is so nice, too.” She glanced up from her sketch to smile at him. “Thank you for inviting me out, for bringing me here.”
“Well, as long as you’re enjoying yourself,” said Dillon, and pulled out his phone to show here the restaurant’s website logo. “They do it differently here, see?”
Serena studied it and flipped to a new page of her notepad. “That’s better. But if they did this, see, but imagine it in a kind of saffron and basil color scheme? More Tuscany that way, and still Italian without being pizza parlor about it all.”
By the time the appetizers were out, she’d pressed her card and a couple of sketches into the manager’s hands. To give him credit, he agreed about the logo and just shook his head grimly when Dillon asked about the text. As so often was the case with these things, there was an owner’s relative somewhere in the works. The old ‘I can do it just as good but cheaper’ argument. Serena pointed out that she could create templates that would make for easy menu updating both in print and online, and their new buddy Dante was pulling up a chair before he realized that Serena and Dillon were out for romance, not business. He was very sweet about it, not that she in particular minded. The third wheel (more transportation!) actually smoothed the path to easy conversation, even after he left. Plus, they got free dessert and liqueur.
“Well, Eddie is going to be a pain in the ass,” Dillon told her.
“I know.” Serena was quite self-satisfied. “But I’m sure he’ll think of things to sell them on. Anyway, Dante’s boss may be harder to convince.”
“Still. Very boss-like there. You’re going to be great at this new job.”
She sighed. “Well, thanks. I sure wish Anica would make it official.”
“Then I can start ‘yes ma’am’-ing you in the hallway.”
“Just don’t do it in bed,” she laughed, then blushed. “Have you ever noticed my tendency to blurt out whatever’s in my head?”
“I prefer to think of it as your refreshing honesty. I like that you’re straight-forward.”
Then she blushed again, because although he didn’t say it, she heard the ‘usually’ at the end of that statement. Pitfalls! Veer away!
“I’m sorry I’m talking shop so much. And I didn’t mean to turn dinner into a sales pitch. You picked this lovely place, and it’s delicious, and I should have let the menu problems slide.”
“They were pretty egregious, though.”
“Right?”
He smiled and offered her the bread basket. “Well, we need to talk about it anyway.”
“About those fonts?”
“No, not about those fonts, funny girl. Work.”
Serena closed her eyes a second, swallowing. So much for avoiding pitfalls. “Okay,” she slowly, reluctantly asked, like she didn’t already know what he meant. “What about work?”
He assessed her for a minute, but gave in graciously enough to her faux-innocence. “So no saluting you in the hallways, we agreed about that. No matter how much authority you have over me.” He put on a thoughtful expression. “How does you being in authority at work go with my sex dungeon? Is it better, because we have a role reversal?”
“I always heard it’s actually the submissive one who has the power, because they’re the ones allowed to use the safe word and stop everything.”
“Okay, now I know you’re trying to change the subject, right? But just because I’m not going to let you distract me now doesn’t mean we’re not going to revisit that topic in a while. I have to find out what your sources are. And more interestingly, why you have sources.”
“Need to know, buddy, sorry.”
“Oh, I need to know. Don’t doubt that for a minute.” He squinted at her as if he had to put a whole new puzzle together. Serena tried to hide her ridiculous burst of giggles. “Right. We’ll get back to that. What we have to agree on is how we play the relationship at work. I don’t
want to hide it, just so you know.”
Of course he didn’t. Not that Serena did, exactly. But she didn’t want to send out an email to everyone in their domain, either. “Well,” she said, “from what I got from Emily after—well, that’s a different incident, nothing to do with us. Point being, I have recent info only third-hand from HR that there aren’t any rules against workplace relationships. There’s not even a disclosure requirement.”
“So everyone could be getting it on behind closed doors and no one would need to be told about it?”
“I’m getting concerned about the number of times you’ve mentioned having sex at Lanigan. We are not going to be having sex at Lanigan.”
He smoldered at her a little. God, he was charming. “I never thought we would. Doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it. And I’ll continue to think about it. Just so you know. Matter of fact, every time you’ve worn a skirt to work for the past, oh, ever?”
She nodded warily.
“I’ve made plans about the best place to get private with you so I could scootch it up. Inch by inch. Usually with my hands, mind you, but sometimes —”
“Dillon!”
He switched from devil to angel. “Serena?”
“You aren’t allowed to have fantasies about me at work.”
“Too bad.”
“But.” She didn’t know what to say.
“Every. Single. Skirt. For months. Did you think the favorite, second favorite thing was something I decided casually? I have a whole ranking system. Ease of access is just one of the primary considerations.”
Serena buried her face in her hands and peered at him between her fingers. Okay, yes, she’d had some serious, detailed workplace fantasies about him, too. But that was mostly research. And—months? Months? “Months?”
“Months.”
“Oh.”
Dillon reached across the table and moved her hands aside, stroking her cheek lightly for a moment. “Serena. You know I’ve been interested in you for a while. Well, I wanted you from day one, but it’s been about more than the sex, too. Especially the more I got to know you. For a long, long time I just set it aside and told myself it wasn’t right, because we had to work together. But it was never easy, setting it aside. And never felt right—not like this feels right.”
“Dillon, I’m not....”
“Let me finish? Because I waited, Serena. And then you sent me signals. And I knew I wasn’t alone in this, and I was really, really happy. Despite all of the cat stuff that drove me crazy there for a bit, I threw out the caution, the barriers I created, and I’m not putting them back. There’s something real between us, and I’m going to find out what it is.”
And he was quiet, and waited. And she didn’t know what to say.
Dillon held his breath, realized he was holding his breath, and forced himself to breathe. It probably wasn’t the years later that it felt before Serena picked his hand up and pressed her cheek into his palm. He expelled a quick lungful of air, relieved.
She kissed the base of his thumb, then the center of his hand. “I’m happy, too. You know I’m happy, right?”
That little half-smile of hers was Dillon's third favorite. He returned it. “I’d hoped so.”
“I am. And not just because of the sex, for the record. Are you keeping records? You seem to have a few too many lists and charts for my liking.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“That’s comforting.” She gave him a wry nose wrinkle. “But, Dillon, can we just go slow a little?”
And there it was. The payoff for his rash brunch invitation. His inward sigh fought with his inward wince and the battle made him clear his throat.
She rushed on, “I don’t mean we should stop, or anything, of course. I like being with you. I like this whole romantic dinner thing; this is really perfect to me. I’m just worried some. I don’t want to mess anything up with you, so I hope I can say this right. But the thing is, Dillon, I’m just—this is such a new thing for us. And we work together, we work great together. And I liked you so much, before.”
He smirked at that.
She laughed. “I still like you. A lot. So much,” she said softly, tilting her head and taking hold of his forearm. “So I want to preserve all of that. These things are really important to me. And I want to move on with you, with us, and I want to have lot of time together. In your dungeon, and out.”
Dillon grinned back at her. “Sounds good so far.”
“Right, to me, too. So that’s why I want us to be careful. Cautious. Not to hide anything at work, not from Janice and Jorge, nothing like that. But for us, for you and for me, to just go a little slowly with all this. Make sure that we don’t lose what we have already, that Dillon and Serena the friends, Dillon and Serena the coworkers, don’t get buried under Dillon and Serena the,” she searched for a moment, “the King and Queen of the Attic of Whips.”
“I don’t care what your friend Natalie says, it’s a dungeon not an attic.”
“Well, garage, maybe. But no basements, she’s very firm on that point. Poor Natalie.”
“Why is Natalie poor?”
“Long story short, she got dumped yesterday.”
“Poor Natalie.”
“And she’s so upset. Not that I blame her. But it was a blow, and she lost her equilibrium. And I don’t want to get so caught up in us that if something happens I’ll fall apart like that.”
Dillon's eyes narrowed and he almost had to physically restrain himself from retorting with any number of unhelpful things. While he wasn’t enamored of the idea of starting a relationship with contingency plans about when it ended, he recognized that Serena was speaking from an honest place. No matter how badly she put everything. Natalie's ex probably wasn’t helping her frame of mind. He reminded himself, too, that he’d never gotten into a relationship with someone he was friends with before—not since the usual low-stakes high school stuff, where everyone dated in a big circle, so your girlfriend one season was your friend’s friend’s girlfriend the next, while you were paired up with your buddy’s sister. He’d never worked with a girlfriend, either, and trying to entice her into sex on the conference table while they were on deadline was a sure was to add stress to their fledgling relationship. So Serena had a point, however ill phrased.
Just so long as she didn’t think going slow entailed him spending the night under his own roof, was all.
“Okay, so we don’t have to start by planning for disasters, you know that, right?” He was channeling all of those Communications Major skills to say the things he wanted in a way she would hear. “Right. Good. But you’re right that we’ve got...complications that other couples don’t have from the start. And we’ll be careful about those.”
Serena was with him so far. He squeezed her hand. She squeezed back.
“You’re way too fun to hang out with and our group is way too solid to endanger any of that,” he said. And now that she was reassured that they were on the same page, time to poke some holes in her theories. “But the truth is, Serena, that I really, really like you. Really. And last night.... Well. Last night, this morning, that was all worlds above my fantasies. Yes, I’ve had fantasies. Long, detailed fantasies. And you, Serena, surpassed them all. It’s possible that you’ve ruined me for all other women,” he added as lightly as he could, because there was no need to make her run screaming from the restaurant.
“Dillon,” she breathed, but didn’t go on.
“So I’ll be careful, yes. We’ll put off moving in together at least for a week or two, and we won’t crawl under desks to service each other when we should be in meetings.” He surprised a laugh out of her with that one. Good. His voice leveled out as he finished. “But I won’t hide from you, and I don’t want you to hide from me. I’ve always admired your honesty, so I want to give the same to you. As far as I’m concerned, this is the start of something. Something that might end up big. And going slow is bearable. I can go slow. I can’t just stop, though. No
t even if it meant countless nights like last night. And,” he wiggled his eyebrows at her, “like tonight will be.”
She was smiling silently at him, quiet but visibly relaxed, when Dante descended with tiramisu and gelato. Even better, she raised not a single objection to his coming in (and in, and coming) when they got back to her house.
Chapter Thirty-One
For a week, they went at Serena’s speed.
Slow.
Dillon discovered he had almost enough Texan in him to lasso his impatience and pen it in while they avoided eye contact, much less physical contact, at Lanigan. Only because, mid-week, she visited his place, where they cautiously tested the air. His cleaning crew had done a stellar job, and once he had her naked and writhing on the sofa where Maisy once napped, he didn’t begrudge a cent of the expense.
She made fun of his spaceship posters, though, so he had to teach her a lesson or two about interstellar exploration up against his wall. Undeterred, she moved on to making fun of the solar system place mats on his kitchen table and his bookcase full of second-hand sci-fi. And of his pod-shaped swivel chair, but that didn’t work out so well, so she settled for learning her next lesson in his bed.
They came up with separate excuses about skipping Eddie and Magnolia’s third Friday cookout, slipping away from Lanigan and meeting at her place, only leaving for a foray to the farmers market the whole weekend.
And then his patience was really rewarded, because Serena suggested an off-schedule Monday happy hour to let their friends in on their relationship. He’d picked up on her nonverbal cues pretty thoroughly by then, so Dillon knew this was her way of telling him she was ready to dive in to their relationship.
He was too distracted to shave properly, so he let the stubble alone, and spent the time instead debating whether to bring a bag with his toothbrush and razor and a change of clothes to the office. But she might want to spend the night at his place instead, so in the end he left it. He could always swing by when their plans were firm.
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