Chapter 11
Avery
The security guard at the front desk looked up when I passed. I smiled too widely at him, and he just blinked at me.
Outside, the evening had gone cool and gray.
The last of the office crowd had already thinned into a scattered stream of people hurrying toward trains, ride shares, and whatever lives they had that did not involve being kissed behind locked doors by men who could ruin them with nothing more than a simple touch.
Rowe Tower rose behind me in black glass and hard angles.
I did not look up at the forty-seventh floor.
I stepped toward the curb and pulled out my phone to see that Jules had already sent six messages.
Jules: I need a cold shower??
Jules: Avery Melissa Hale.
Jules: Did he kiss you?
Jules: Did you kiss him?
Jules: Were there rolled-up sleeves?
Jules: I am putting on shoes.
I laughed once, shaky and alone on the sidewalk.
Then a feeling at the back of my neck came over me, the primitive awareness of being watched.
I looked up from my phone and glanced across the street.
A man in a gray coat stood near the corner, half turned away, one hand raised as if checking his phone.
A cyclist wove between traffic. Two women walked past him laughing, one with a gym bag over her shoulder.
There was nothing strange or out of place, but then I heard a faint click.
Maybe it was a car door or maybe it was someone locking a bike. Or maybe it was a camera.
My stomach clenched with nervous energy.
The man in the gray coat lowered his hand and turned away, blending into the movement near the intersection.
I stared after him, pulse still high from everything that had happened.
I told myself I was being ridiculous. I had just been kissed senseless and sent into the evening with instructions that would have made a calmer woman lose her mind.
Of course I felt watched. I felt exposed because I had exposed myself to a man who could probably wreck me in t-minus two seconds.
Still, I pulled my coat tighter around me and kept my face turned away from the street while I ordered a car. I didn’t want to take the train, at least not tonight.
In the back seat of the Uber, I sat with my knees pressed together and my bag on my lap, watching Rowe Tower disappear behind us through the rear window. My phone buzzed again.
Jules: I am either coming over or calling emergency services. Choose.
I typed with numb fingers.
Me: Come over.
Her reply arrived instantly.
Jules: Wine or weapons?
Me: Both.
Jules: That’s my girl.
I locked the phone and leaned my head back against the seat. I closed my eyes. Immediately, I saw his hand closing in my hair. I opened them again.
The driver, mercifully, did not speak. The city rolled past in long streaks of light and wet pavement. Somewhere, women were leaving work with nothing more complicated than a mild resentment toward their email inboxes. Somewhere, a person had a normal boss and a normal godfather.
I did not live in those somewheres.
I lived in the back of a quiet car with my lips tingling and my body still humming from a soul-searing kiss from my godfather-boss. That was the worst part. Callum had not crossed the line like a careless man. He had shown me the line and asked if I wanted to step over it instead.
Once I got home, I did not feel any less out of sorts. I locked the door behind me, then leaned back against it and touched my mouth.
Bad idea.
The memory of his kiss came with a vividness that nearly made my knees buckle.
His mouth over mine, firm and deep. His hand in my hair, not hurting, but not gentle either, holding me in a way that made every sensible part of me shut up and step back. His body against mine. The hard, undeniable proof that he wanted me too.
I pushed myself off the door, walked to my bedroom, and stripped out of my work clothes mechanically, folding nothing, and dropping everything in a heap on the floor.
In the bathroom, I turned the shower cold enough to qualify as a personal attack and stepped under it with a gasp that echoed off the tile.
It did not help. Or maybe it helped too much.
The cold made my skin tighten, made me aware of every place his hand had not touched.
My neck. The bare skin beneath my blouse.
The place between my thighs that still ached with a low, humiliating insistence.
“Normal evening,” I muttered through clenched teeth.
I shampooed and conditioned my hair. I washed my face. I got out, put on pajamas, and ordered Thai food because Callum had told me to eat something and it turns out that I was in an obedient mood.
Jules arrived twenty minutes later carrying a bottle of wine, a bag of gummy candy, and a black tote.
She took one look at me and dropped everything on the counter.
“Oh,” she said.
“What?”
“Oh, honey.”
“Do not ‘Oh, honey’ me.”
“You look like someone from the tenth century who just discovered electricity.”
“I hate that you’re always accurate.”
“I’m never always anything. Sit.”
“I ordered food.”
“Good. Trauma likes food.”
I sat on the couch because she pointed at it. Jules opened cabinets until she found glasses, poured wine for both of us, then sat cross-legged beside me and waited.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m letting you begin.”
“That’s horrifying.”
“I’m growing.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I. Talk.”
So I told her everything. The story came out in fragments, heat and humiliation tangled together until I had to get up twice and pace the length of my apartment because sitting felt wrong somehow.
I told her about the training, and about Callum calling me into his office at the end of the day.
About rolling my eyes. About how he’d called me young lady and how my whole body had betrayed me so visibly that if there had been subtitles, they would have simply read: doomed.
Jules sat with her wine untouched, eyes enormous.
“He said young lady?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “I need a minute.”
“I lived it.”
“I respect that, but I am also a secondary victim of hotness.”
“You are not the victim here.”
“None of us are safe.”
I groaned and kept going. Him locking the door. His hand on my shoulder. Jules went very still when I got to that part, not in the gleeful way, but in the serious one.
“He locked the door?” she asked.
“He asked if I wanted him to unlock it.”
Her face changed. “Before he kissed you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you feel trapped?”
“No.” The answer came so quickly it surprised both of us.
I sat back down on the couch, wrapping my hands around my wineglass without drinking.
“No. That’s the thing. He made it very clear there was a door.
He offered the door. I could have said yes.
I could have nodded. I could have stepped around him. He would have opened it.”
Jules watched me carefully. “And you didn’t want him to.”
I looked down at the wine.
“No.”
Her shoulders relaxed by one inch, but not entirely. “Okay.”
Then I told her about the kiss, or I tried to. Language, as a system, failed me immediately.
“It was…” I began, then stopped.
Jules leaned forward. “Don’t you dare become poetic and vague now.”
“It was thorough.”
She made a strangled sound. “Thorough?”
“Very.”
“Like dental cleaning thorough or ruin-your-life thorough?”
“Jules.”
“Scale, please.”
“Ruin-your-life thorough.”
She stood up and walked three circles around my coffee table. I just stared at her.
“I am overwhelmed.” She stopped and pointed at me. “Did he use tongue?”
I covered my face. “Yes.”
Jules made a noise so high-pitched my neighbor’s dog must have heard it through the wall.
“He pulled me in by my hair,” I squeaked into my hands.
Jules sat down very slowly, as if her bones had left the building. “Say that again for the women in the back.”
“No.”
“Coward.”
“He pulled me in by my hair, kissed me until I forgot my own zip code, then gave me an employee ethics speech.”
Jules closed her eyes. “That is so on-brand it’s medically concerning.”
“He said if I don’t come back tomorrow, he’ll pretend it never happened and give me a year’s severance.”
Her eyes opened sharply. “A year?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
“That is either extremely responsible or billionaire insane.”
“Both, probably.”
“And if you come back and want the job but not the kissing?”
“He said that was fine too.”
“And if you want more?”
I could not look at her.
Jules set her glass down. “Avery.”
I stared at the rug, at the threadbare little pattern where the path between the coffee table and the couch had rubbed flat.
“He told me if I wanted more that I was to wear a black pencil skirt tomorrow.”
Silence.
Then Jules whispered, “Oh. My. God.”
“And…” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “And he said to wear nothing underneath.”
Jules did not speak and that was how I knew the situation was catastrophic.
I peeked at her. She sat frozen, lips parted, eyes bright with horror, delight, concern, and a level of intrigue that belonged in a congressional hearing.
Finally, she said, “I am going to need the wine after all.”
She picked up her glass and drank half of it.
I laughed despite myself, and the laugh broke something open.
It was not funny, not really. It was too big for funny, but over the few minutes we sat there on my couch with wine and gummy candy and the Thai food in a paper bag that smelled like basil and garlic, I let the impossible thing become a story told out loud instead of a secret burning a hole through me.
Over noodles, she asked the questions I knew she had to ask.
“Do you feel pressured because of the job?”
“No.”
“Do you feel like you have to go along with this because he helped you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked at her then, really looked. “Yes.”
She nodded once. Then, softer, “Do you trust him?”
“I trust him not to punish me if I say no,” I said. “I trust him to mean what he says. I trust him to try to do the right thing, even if…” I trailed off, pushing noodles around with my fork.
“Even if?”