13. Loren
13
LOREN
I didn’t let my stomach disrupt me from concentrating at work. It would pass soon enough, and some days, I felt fine. If it persisted another week, I’d have to sacrifice the work time to make an appointment and make sure I was taking care of myself the best I could. I hated to think of asking for any time off despite the more-than-fair allotment of sick leave and PTO. It was a people-pleasing habit I doubted I’d ever break.
Always be on time, and always show up no matter what.
One more week, and I’ll make an appointment.
The team was busier than normal, anyway. We had tons of input from the Gammon people. Emily, one of the reps I met at that first meeting, had asked for my email and wasn’t shy or procrastinating about inundating my inbox with further questions and ideas they might like to see implemented.
Having a project to focus on was good. It kept my mind busy. I was too preoccupied to dwell on my stomach feeling off and this hot-and-cold thing with Matt.
I had a plan for my stomach issues. One week, and I’d cave to make an appointment.
I didn’t have a plan for dealing with Matt and turning off my lingering desire for him. The best I could do was continue to stay strong and not let him get to me.
Easier said than done…
I had yet to see him smile in the office. And I was more convinced than ever that he was deliberately zeroing in on me and pushing my buttons just to get a rise out of me.
Today, though, he was too in the zone to be motivated for any such bickering or act of annoying me. I was focused too, poring over materials to get a better grasp on a layout for the more in-depth presentation for specific branches of their baby line.
We had been revising our pitch for two weeks, complete with butting heads and sometimes arguing over the simplest little things that left me walking away and wondering why we’d wasted so much time bickering about a trivial thing. Then I realized that maybe he enjoyed this back-and-forth nature of our work relationship as much as I did.
Tom, however, was preventing us from a moment of concentration. He had yet to take a hint that I wasn’t interested. Resorting to not replying at all, I treated him as though he was invisible. Not there. Not talking to me and listing the best places he could take me to get a better feel for the city. It sounded too much like a lame attempt at asking me if he could feel me up.
Matt spoke up first. He slapped his pen down and narrowed his eyes at him. “Have you read any of those reports?” He gestured at the documents splayed out in front of him, all of them untouched.
“Um. I will…”
“No. Not here.” Matt pointed at the door as he lowered his gaze to his tablet once more, sliding his paper over to take notes again. “Leave. Please.”
“What?” Tom huffed, frowning at me.
I averted my gaze, not wanting to get in the middle of it.
“We’ve got to go over these specs and?—”
“No.” Matt scowled, still not facing Tom again. “All you’re doing is talking. Go ahead and take this home. Or work in your office.”
“Dude. Matt…”
“Now, Tom. I can’t fucking think with you blabbing on.”
I bit my lip to refrain from smiling wide. I wasn’t sure that I could count this as Matt saving me again. It seemed more like his quota for patience was simply shot and he couldn’t take the noise anymore.
“Geez. Well, come on, short stuff.” He stood, gathering his things. “We can?—”
“I said for you to leave. She’s working fine here. With me.” Now he lifted his face toward Tom.
Through my peripheral vision, I noted his stern don’t make me repeat myself glower.
I could complain left and right about Matt sometimes being the consummate grouch. I could hold his hot-and-cold grudge attitude against him. But the one thing I couldn’t get away with saying about him was that he didn’t contribute to the team’s efforts. He was always in here, in the “trenches” with us, working alongside us and not acting superior. Not once had he let us do the dirty work or slog through the busywork for him while he sat back and managed.
Tom muttered something under his breath as he left, but I didn’t catch what he said.
The second he was gone, I exhaled a long breath of relief.
“I hate when he calls me that,” I mumbled.
“Short stuff?”
I nodded, too aggravated to stop there. “As if I need another reminder that I’m vertically challenged.”
He grunted. Or maybe it was a laugh. “Then why don’t you tell him to stop?”
“I’m a firm believer in letting problems solve themselves.”
“What the hell does that mean?” He narrowed his blue eyes at me, but not because he was perturbed with me. Just intrigued.
“If I don’t give him attention, then he’ll have to give up one day, right?”
“Light years away,” he quipped.
I smiled, focusing on the images of the Gammon baby products. They were all starting to look so similar, yet not? I was young, but I didn’t consider myself “woke”, nor was I old-fashioned. Neutral things were trendy, but when everything was made of recycled plastic and looked gray or beige, it was hard to distinguish one thing from another.
“Sort of like this?” Matt held up a printout of a baby mobile.
Or is it a… mirrored apparatus for décor? I couldn’t tell, but based on the product description, I was ninety percent certain that it was supposed to be suspended or hung over a crib.
“If a baby needs attention and cries until they see their parent, this mirrored thing can give them a distant reflection and then calm them down?”
I squinted, tilting my head to the side. “I think it might actually be a toy.”
He frowned, looking at the photo and turning it. “ Oh .”
I laughed. “Just like I think you’re wrong that this tube thing is a straw.”
“It has to be a straw!”
“Babies don’t drink out of straws,” I chided.
“Ever?” He scowled. “Do you remember when you first used a straw in a cup?”
“No.” I shrugged. “But I think infants use bottles or boobs.”
He groaned. “Which brings me back to this thing.” He held up another photo of a product to categorize. “What is it?”
“Either a wayward sex toy-slash-nipple clamp or some new version of a confusing breast pump?”
He did that grunt again, the one that seemed most like a laugh. I missed hearing his. He’d chuckled that dirty, sexy rasp when we had sex that one night almost two months ago now.
But this time, I was almost confident I saw him smile. Just barely, but it might have been there.
“I have to admit I’m clueless about a lot of this stuff,” I said, not wanting us to lose this sort of easy companionship. “About babies,” I clarified. “Not breasts.”
“Well, sure. You’ve got them.”
“As you recall,” I teased.
He jerked his face up, stunned that I was… that I had…
Oh, my God. What the hell am I doing? What was I thinking? I hadn’t been thinking when I blurted that. Now I’d walked into it!
He stared at me long enough that a flicker of need shone in his eyes. Blowing out a hard breath through his nose, he lowered his gaze to my chest.
Oh, God. There it went, my cheeks heating up and the tips of my ears burning with a furious blush.
“Right.” He cleared his throat and lowered his gaze to the papers. “I’m clueless too.”
“About my breasts?” I slapped my hand over my face.
He chuckled, actually laughed, but I was too shocked and mortified to lower my hand and look at him. “No. I, um, I think I mastered quite a bit of, well, knowledge that one time…”
Several times, I mentally corrected. It had been one night but so many orgasms,until he admitted that he was out of condoms and didn’t want to risk relying on the good, ol’ pull-out method after we said we were both clean for him to enter me bare.
“I’m clueless about baby stuff too,” he admitted.
I breathed easier, grateful he wasn’t twisting this already wacky conversation. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me. I’d worked alone with him before, and I could keep a lid on my mouth and censor my thoughts.
Tonight was an off night, I supposed. I latched on to the topic, though, determined not to say something about my boobs, his expertise about them, or anything about our short, limited past that I wanted a repeat of.
“I don’t have any babies in my family,” I admitted. “No nieces or nephews. Not even a neighbor with a kid.”
“Me neither. I’m an only child and that’s it.” He glanced at me. “Are you an only child too?”
Holy shit. He’s asking me a question about myself? He could probably find out everything about me from my employee file, but he wasn’t. I told him that one night that we wouldn’t share details about ourselves, and here he was trying to break that rule, two months later at the damn office.
“No. I have an older sister.”
“Hmm. Are you close?”
I peered at him, wondering if he wanted to know for the sake of learning about me or if he was up to something. If this could be a trick. I hated to be that guarded. I usually trusted people better, but Matt was in a league of his own as the enemy I lusted for and the boss I busted my ass for.
“No. Not at all.” I decided to test the waters and share a little more. “She’s two years older than me, and it’s always been crystal clear that she’s the favorite.”
“Nah. I doubt parents actually do that.” He glanced at me again, almost as if he wanted to face me and have a real conversation but couldn’t risk it. “Before my parents died?—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” Without thinking, I put my hand over his.
We both stared at them stacked like that, mine on top of his. I wanted him to roll his over and hold my hand, and he seemed to suffer under the urge to…
Well, I couldn’t tell how he was reacting. If he didn’t feel this spark of electricity from the awareness that we were touching, I was definitely reading him wrong.
“Thanks,” he said finally.
Move your hand! I snatched it back and put it in my lap, marveling that the heat of his contact could still warm me up inside out.
“They passed away thirty-five years ago last Monday.”
“Wow.” I blinked. “I didn’t realize you were that old.”
He smirked. “Thanks?”
I smiled. “You were saying?” I would beg him to keep talking.
“Oh, yeah. My parents had these little yapping dogs. I vaguely remember them, but I saw tons of pictures. Corgis. According to my grandmother and house staff, they didn’t treat one dog as a favorite over another.”
“I think it’s a little different, dogs to kids. And my parents are the exception. They’ve told me that Becca was the ‘perfect’ one. They asked me why I couldn’t be more like her. Why she was so much better at everything. She was the golden child. The favorite.”
“Ah.” He furrowed his brow, not making eye contact again.
“And most of my life, I’ve been trying my hardest to measure up to her. To find my niche, to see where I could belong. It’s tiring, always debating whether you're good enough when you’re constantly pitted against the paradigm.”
“I know what you mean.”
“How?” He just said he was an only child.
“With my grandmother. If you’re not aware, she’s the CEO of the company.”
I laughed once. “Yeah, I heard.” I hadn’t met her, nor did I think I ever would, but I was at least familiar with who she was around here.
“She’s always held high expectations for me, and I consistently struggle to convince myself that I measure up, that she approves.”
“It’s a hell of a way to live, huh?” I slid more papers aside, freezing when he did the same and our hands brushed against each other.
“Whoops,” he admitted dryly. He reached around me, leaning in front of me. “But you put the medieval tit torture devices in the toy pile.”
I laughed, tormented with breaking my held-in breath with him so close.
That smell. It was the same as I remembered. Spicy and clean. Tempting.
“And I doubt you want to confuse actual sex toys with breastfeeding endeavors.”
I bit back a smile, enjoying that we could ever do this. Talk. Joke. Be sarcastic without any intention of offense.
I couldn’t help but feel like this was bringing us closer together. It wasn’t bridging the gap between us. I doubted he’d even remember this moment, but it messed with my mind. It blew fuel into the high hopes.
That this could be us . Instead of fighting and never in agreement, we could get along.
Yeah, right, Loren.
I shook off the whimsical and silly thoughts that this conversation could be a first step to me and Matt being together as more than boss and employee.
The future CEO of a billion-dollar company with someone like me ? That wasn’t Becca’s negativity making that little voice so loud in my mind. I owned this doubt. It was all mine, borne from a place of reality where I couldn’t change the fact that we were from two totally different worlds. Ones that would never collide and not end up in disaster.
Forget about it.
I wished I could. But this chance to just be with him seemed too good to pass up.