He smiles, white teeth and smile lines on full display. “So you’re saying…maybe. Once you’ve filed.”
Shouldn’t I be charmed by his persistence, by his cockiness? Somehow, he leaves me cold.
“I’m sorry. I have no clue when I’ll be ready, if ever.”
Agreeing when you’re not sure is how you wind up with another Prince Sort of Charming, and I want the real thing or nothing at all.
“YOU SAID NO?” Molly shouts over a glass of wine on my deck. “Chris Hemsworth asks you out and you say no?”
I laugh. “I didn’t say he was Chris Hemsworth. And if you keep yelling, you’ll wake the twins.”
She wrinkles her nose. Her feelings about children are much like Caleb’s. “Why the hell didn’t you go for it?”
I hug my wine to the center of my chest. “I don’t know. I’ve told you this…I want the fairy tale the next time around.”
“You’re not being realistic.”
“That’s rich, coming from a woman who just told me she was going to disable her car so her boss would give her a ride home.”
She sighs. “Anyway, you’ve got to fuck a few frogs before you kiss your prince there, Cinderella, and you deserve a couple years of no-strings sex because I guarantee Jeremy sucked in bed. I know his type.”
Jeremy’s the only guy I’ve ever slept with, so I have no idea if she’s right. I’ve always been under the impression that sex is nowhere near as exciting as people make it out to be, while Jeremy insisted I was simply ‘broken.’ I wish I knew which of us was correct. Probably him.
“He just wasn’t the guy. I don’t know why.”
“I do. It’s because you’re obsessed with Caleb.”
“I’m not obsessed.”
“Of course you are. Every time you tell me about a conversation with him, you’re so…impressed. Every time he says something to you—not even something nice; simply something that isn’t horribly rude—you’re like, ‘He’s such a good guy.’”
“You’re making me sound like I’m twelve. And he’s married.”
“Yes, he is. And you have a crush on him anyway.”
“I don’t,” I argue. Because even if I do, I’m not admitting to a crush on someone who belongs to someone else. And I’d certainly never act on it.
It sure doesn’t help, though, that his wife is never around. If she was here, we’d be friends and we’d laugh together about what a jerk he is at the office and my crush would die a quick death.
“His wife’s been gone for nearly a year, though,” I say, refilling Molly’s glass. “That’s got to be hard.”
“Yeah,” she says, toying with her braid. “But that doesn’t make him any less married.”
She leaves, and the house is painfully quiet and lonely in her absence. Is that why Caleb works the way he does—to avoid the quiet of that big lonely house? Who was he before the personal stuff Kayleigh referenced led him to close the seventh floor?
I curl up on the couch under an ancient quilt and attempt to watch a movie I used to love, but my mind keeps going back to work. What TSG lacks is a place where employees can relax, unwind. A place where they can at least imagine they’re valued as human beings. And the seventh floor is the perfect location for it.
I throw off the quilt.
No matter what Caleb’s reasons were for shutting it down, if I can prove it won’t hurt his bottom line to reopen it…how could he possibly object?
I’m not going to ask for masseuses or saunas or free food. Just…couches. Coffee. Music and a few magazines.
I’ll need to prove to him that it won’t hurt productivity and that the costs are minimal, perhaps even offset by revenue generated elsewhere—an in-house café or vending machines—but I know I can convince him. I know it.
I work until the wee hours, casually watching the house next door, and his truck never returns.
Maybe I should worry a little less about him being lonely…only one of us, after all, is technically alone.
14
CALEB
I’m pulling into the driveway when my mother calls. “Are you busy?” she asks. She begins every call this way, because she knows I’m exactly like my father—always working, even when I’m not supposed to be.
I slam the door of my truck closed. “Your timing is perfect. I’m just getting home.”
“How’s the house?” There’s the same forced good cheer I always hear in her voice—it’s the sound of a parent trying to pretend she’s not scared shitless on her kid’s behalf.