Chapter 23 Power Shift
Power Shift
JAMIE
Ibanged my fist on Sarah’s door. I knew it was early. But it wasn’t that early, and today was her big day.
Bam! Bam! Bam! “Cooper!” I called.
I heard a sound on the other side of the door. I knocked again, a little less caveman-like this time.
“I’m coming!” she called. “Cool your jets!”
Cool my jets?
I frowned at the coffee in my hand. Was this a mistake?
Probably. But my behavior last night was worse.
I needed to apologize for crossing a line in discussing our personal lives.
For encouraging her to drink alcohol in my room.
For my fucking hard-on as she hugged me.
I winced at the memory. Even harder at the memory of what I’d done after.
But it had been the way she’d held onto me I needed to deal with. I’d encouraged her by not backing away right away. I knew she still mostly couldn’t feel the same way she once had about me, but I needed her to feel nothing.
And the way she’d tangled her fingers in my hair… the sound she made? Those weren’t nothing.
They were everything.
I shoved that thought down, banging on the door once more. “Cooper, open up, I—”
The door swung open, Sarah appearing, her eyes magnified through those sexy as fuck glasses. But the first time I think I’d ever seen, she had a scowl on her face that looked an awful lot like mine.
Well shit, maybe I’d read everything all wrong.
But then my eyes took in the rest of her. The bedhead hair. The pillow line on her cheek that touched that little mole I—
I dropped my eyes, but that was a big fucking mistake. Because fuck a fucking duck, Sarah Cooper was wearing my shirt. And it appeared… nothing else.
The shirt came halfway down her legs. Her bare legs, with just a hint of thickness at the thighs, and that sexy as hell dip running down the outside like an arrow. A line I’d seen at the pool the first day here and hadn’t realized I’d committed to memory.
The shirt was buttoned just above her breasts. There were those moles there, too, the ones I dreamed of. They were my private constellation. The ones I didn’t let myself think of ever. Ever.
Yet here I fucking was, staring at my employee in my shirt, losing my goddamned mind. I’d come here to apologize for getting a hard-on without actually saying the word hard-on, and instead I was working on another fucking hard-on.
My head was going to explode.
I thrust the coffee at her: an extra hot full fat flat white I knew she liked.
“Good morning,” she said, her scowl softening as she maybe realized I’d come with a peace offering. Not that we’d been fighting when we last left off.
“Good morning.” I cleared my throat. “I wanted to talk to you before the day started. Since we’ll both be busy.”
“That’s right. Your keynote is in an hour.”
She said it without any tone I could read. Except maybe ambivalence. Then she stifled a yawn.
I was suddenly irritated. Not about my keynote—I could not give a flying fuck about that. But she seemed entirely unaffected by what had happened last night. Did she not care?
The thought came to me then, bitter and ugly: you deserve this.
Maybe that’s all this was, my own desperate obsession with Sarah Cooper. Maybe that’s all this had ever been.
“Why aren’t you up yet?” I snapped. That was not the right thing to ask. But I was reeling, no matter how stiffly I stood.
Sarah narrowed her eyes again. “My alarm was set to go off in—”
A tinkling melody sounded from behind her. She looked pointedly at me. “Now.”
She turned, her hips swinging as she strode into her room. “Come in,” she said over her shoulder. “We can talk in here.”
I didn’t want to come in. It wasn’t appropriate and it wasn’t neutral ground.
Neither was my room last night though, and I’d fucked that up. But I couldn’t just walk away. Not without doing what I came here to do.
Sarah picked up her phone and turned off the alarm, then tossed it onto the bed. The bed still mussed from where she’d been sleeping. In my shirt.
My dick responded to that in a very bad way. Fucking focus, Jamie.
“Thank you for the coffee,” Sarah said, dropping into the chair in the far corner. She took a sip, but kept her eyes on me, as if waiting to see what I’d do.
This was not the Sarah I’d left at the door last night. The one I’d been lost to. My stomach bottomed out as I realized this was the woman who’d told me no names more than two years ago.
This was the Sarah I knew was hiding under the self-doubt I so often saw her succumb to. The same woman I’d fallen for like a lead fucking weight. But I was also gone for the woman I’d been expecting, who wore her vulnerability like a veil only I could see past.
This was also the version of Sarah who’d leave me in the dust—and I wouldn’t blame her one bit. In fact, it was this Sarah I was rooting for to come out all year. But I hadn’t anticipated what seeing her would feel like. How powerless I’d feel.
“So, what did you want to talk about?” Her tone held a note of challenge. But as she sipped the coffee again, she closed her eyes and moaned. “Oh my God. This is so good.”
“I also have this,” I said pathetically. I held up a bag. I was still hovering as far back as possible.
“What is it?”
“A chocolate zucchini muffin.”
Her face seemed to slip, a softening that was quickly tucked away under her neutral expression. Chocolate zucchini was her favorite, and not everyone carried it.
“I’m surprised you found it.”
So was I. But I guess it helped that I went to all the coffee shops in town. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an embellishment. Crestville, Maine is somehow the coffee fucking capital of the east.
I walked over and set the muffin on the table beside her.
But I made the mistake of looking over at her as I did.
I was nearly overwhelmed by how close she was.
And by how she appeared from this angle, looking up at me with those glasses, throat stretched.
What would she look like with my hands in her hair as she—
Jesus, Jamie.
Soon the stiffening in my pants would be impossible to hide.
“I should go,” I said abruptly. There was no way I could apologize now, when my mind was thinking of making worse mistakes. “I’ve got a packed schedule so… good luck today.”
“You said you had something to tell me.”
I cleared my throat, scrambling for a lie. “Don’t forget to avoid ums. Watch where you’re walking. And speak up.”
She set the coffee down. “Gee, Jamie, thanks for listing out all my poor speech habits.”
I knew she knew all these. We ironed them out last night.
But she seemed to settle something in herself, like she was at least acknowledging it was not my intention to insult her. “It’s fine. I’ll do my best. You’ll be there, right?”
A beat passed. “I can’t make it. I’ve got a conflict.”
Her expression fell.
My stomach twisted seeing that. But I didn’t want to promise to be there.
I couldn’t risk a repeat of last night, not in public.
I knew Sarah was going to kill it, and I would be unable to do what I wanted to, which was sweep her off her fucking feet and tell her I knew you’d do it, angel.
I never fucking doubted you. I’d stand there like an idiot, like I was doing right now, mooning over the woman who felt, no matter how wrong, so indisputably mine.
A tense silence passed. Then Sarah asked, “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“What you were thinking about right now.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Sarah rose to her feet. “Yes it does. And I don’t think you’re telling the truth about why you came here this morning. Were you really just giving me more pointers?”
“You’re wearing my shirt,” I snapped.
She blinked. Then heat flooded her cheeks. She looked down. She hadn’t realized she was wearing it. Or hadn’t remembered.
I clung to the foothold I’d found. “You told me you threw it out.”
But when Sarah looked back up at me, her embarrassment had shifted into something more like anger.
She clenched her hands at her sides. “I lied.”
“I guess that makes two of us,” I said.
“You want to know why I said that?” she asked, taking a step toward me.
This was dangerous. I should have walked away the moment she answered the door. Better yet, I should have never come here. Or I should have jumped into a fucking snowbank.
Still, my mouth betrayed me. “Please.” The word came out as a demand, when really, it was a desperate plea. The answer to which I wasn’t sure I could handle.
Sarah took a breath, then another step toward me. We were toe-to-toe now. She couldn’t come any closer without stepping right into my arms. The thought of that had heat exploding through me. Without wanting to, I dipped my chin to meet her eyes.
“I kept your shirt,” she said defiantly, “because you taking it off your back for me was the first time you hadn’t been an asshole to me in months. Keeping this shirt reminded me that somewhere in that stupid ogre of a man”—she pressed a finger to my chest—“was the kind man I met.”
Her eyes looked suddenly almost devastated. But the expression was gone as soon as I thought I saw it.
“The shirt reminded me of the man you somehow remembered to be last night. But who seems to have fucking vanished once again.”
I looked down at her finger.
She pulled it away, her tone dropping to ice. “But you know what, Jamie? The only thing worse than you being an absolute dick, is you being both the man I know you can be and the one you think I need to see. The asshole right here in front of me.”
Blood rushed in my ears.
“So yeah,” she said. “I kept your shirt. But you can have it back.”
I saw something pass across her face. Some internal dare. Her cheeks grew just the slightest bit pink. Finally, as if having made a decision, she lifted her chin, leaned in and smirked. “How about right now, in fact? Let’s see how you like that.”
Her hands went to the buttons on my shirt. She undid the top one, then the one right between her breasts.