Chapter Sixteen
R afe doesn’t return for the next few hours. I feel terrible about what I’ve done. I’m a complete asshole, and I owe him an apology. I shouldn’t have stolen his book, and I shouldn’t have threatened to throw it over the balcony. I also shouldn’t have given him such a hard time about his drawings, but I sort of lost my tenuous grip on reality when I found myself in those pages.
The rain falls heavily as I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, my blanket clutched to my chest. The remnants of the storm continue, though it’s not nearly as ferocious. Still, it’s enough to make me anxious. Thankfully, I have a lot on my mind to keep me distracted.
Why are there drawings of me in Rafe’s sketchbook? The one from Hawaii makes a modicum of sense, I suppose. We’re sharing a room and can’t seem to get away from each other. I’m an easily accessible subject. But the one at my desk. What is that about? Why did he draw that, and how did he get all the details so right?
What stood out the most was how beautiful I became under the strokes of his pencil. Is that how he sees me?
My breath hitches when I hear the door open and then close. I hear Rafe kicking off his shoes in the living room and entering the second bathroom.
A few minutes later, his shadowy outline fills the doorway. He proceeds across the room and slips into his side of the bed, saying nothing as he settles on the farthest edge of the mattress. Even if he’s angry with me, his presence is comforting.
We lie in silence for a few moments until I whisper into the dark, “Rafe, about before. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken your book. That was a shitty thing for me to do.”
He shifts, rolling towards me and propping a hand under his head. “It really was. You are the worst. I’m going to draw you with a tail and horns next time.” He smirks at my crestfallen expression. “I’m kidding. I forgive you. I shouldn’t have been drawing you without your permission.”
The knot in my chest eases. “Thanks,” I say. “I really am sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong. If I’m honest, it’s a little flattering.”
That earns me a grin, and I swear it’s bright enough to illuminate the entire room.
We look at each other in the dark, and I have no idea what to say. I’ve never been at a loss for words with Rafe.
“Are you okay?” he asks a moment later. “It’s raining pretty hard.”
“I’m okay,” I whisper. “Just a little nervous.”
I feel the mattress dip as Rafe shuffles closer.
“You can hang on to me if it helps,” he says softly.
Without thinking about it, I roll towards him, and he wraps his arms around me. It’s then I realize that he didn’t listen to me, and he’s shirtless. My nose presses into the hollow of his throat, where I inhale the clean smell of his skin.
My hands slide up his back, my fingertips exploring a velvety soft layer covering unyielding flesh. His chest heaves out a ragged sigh as his hand smooths over the curve of my hip and slides along my ribs. His thighs tangle with mine, and I (not so) briefly wonder how he’d feel on top of me.
“Better?” he asks, interrupting my wayward thoughts. I nod into his chest. This has to be wrong, but it feels so right.
All I can smell is him. All I can feel is him, and it’s doing stupid, erratic things to my body. I’m sure he must notice the skip of my pulse and how I’ve just grown a hundred degrees warmer.
He almost kissed me earlier, but then he didn’t, and bitter disappointment lingers on my tongue. There’s no use pretending anymore.
“Rafe, why did you draw me?” I whisper.
The silence drags on so long that I don’t think he’ll answer, but then he says, “Because I draw things that are beautiful to me.”
Inhaling a shaky breath, my hand slides to his chest, where I feel his heart beating in a steady, soothing rhythm.
“Thank you,” I reply. For the way he’s holding me. For calling me beautiful. For making me feel safe in this moment.
“Get some sleep,” he whispers, tucking me closer.
And that’s how I fall asleep cradled in Rafe Gallagher’s arms for the second time.
The next morning, we’re sitting through yet another session on leadership styles, only this time they’re being very clear on how it relates specifically to WMC culture.
I shift in my hard plastic seat, crossing and then uncrossing my legs. I can’t get comfortable. I’m bored and antsy, and I can’t stop thinking about how Rafe held me last night. I’m a pent-up comet of kinetic energy hurtling for the earth’s surface.
An older white man who heads up the HR division drones on about WMC’s commitment to diversity and inclusivity, and it’s all I can do to rein in a river of caustic laughter.
I recall what Rafe said about the new board chair calling for changes, but this room is so vanilla that we comprise the most boring ice cream shop in existence. Maybe those efforts are genuine, but they have a very long way to go. It’s galling to listen to this ode to a company culture that has never existed before. What’s even more galling is the grim understanding that this is what I’ve given the last five years of my life to.
The lecture moves on to strategic planning and goals for the future as my attention wanders across the room to Rafe. I’m a cat to a sunbeam. A teenager to a reckless plan.
He’s wearing all black today. Dress pants and boots. A button-up shirt rolled to the elbows. He looks even more like the Rafe who might have a secret lair hidden underneath a mountain.
Finally, the lecture ends, and we move on to the next activity. They want us to get to know each other better. While our offices are scattered across the country, WMC breeds careers, not jobs. Apparently. Meaning we might work alongside one another for the next few decades.
Decades. Suddenly, I feel like an escaped prisoner surrounded by snarling police dogs.
The first exercise is to find your “match.” Everyone has a square of paper attached to their backs, and we wander the room seeking our other half. One woman has the words peanut butter taped to her shirt, while another has jelly on the other side of the room. Someone else has oil , and then I notice water pass me by.
Once we find our pairs, we’re supposed to converse using open-ended questions and find three nice things to say about the person.
This is absolute torture.
Three executive members, including Diane Hart and David Gallagher, sit on the edge of the room, observing us. I catch Rafe watching his father with eyes like knife points.
“Am I wet?” a voice asks.
“Excuse me?” A petite white woman with blond hair stands in front of me with an expectant gaze. I think her name is Natalie.
“Am I wet?” She twists so her back is towards me and points over her shoulder.
“Oh,” I say. The piece of paper taped to her shirt says Juliet .
“Um, that depends.”
“What does that mean?”
I squeeze my lips together, caught up in my immature joke. A nearby snort alerts me to Rafe listening to our conversation.
“Just what I said.” I open my hands in a helpless gesture. “When you find your other half, you probably are.”
Natalie narrows her eyes and storms off without another word. I look over to where Rafe is talking to someone, and our gazes meet in mutual amusement.
I continue my way through the room.
“Am I food?” I ask. Sort of.
I turn to someone else. “Do I go well with food?” Yes.
“Am I spicy?” A little.
“Am I white?” No.
“Am I black?” Yes.
“Am I pepper?” Yes.
Feeling proud of myself, I begin searching for my soulmate, salt.
I pass a Homer, a Tweedledee, and a Mac. I catch sight of Rafe also searching through the crowd. He ducks around someone, and then we come face-to-face.
“Turn around,” I say.
“You turn around.”
I cross my arms. “Fine.” I twist around and look over my shoulder, noticing that his eyes dip below the region of my back. “You’re salt, aren’t you?”
He bends at the waist. “At your service, my spicy companion. Though I really think I should have been pepper because I’m just so hot.”
I snort. He isn’t wrong. “I’m amazed your ego hasn’t sunk the island of Maui into the sea.”
He grins, not the least bit offended by my comment. “Okay, lay it on me, Malik. Three nice things about me.” He holds up his hands. “But try to limit yourself to only three. I don’t want anyone getting jealous when you can’t stop. We already know you think I smell nice.”
My nose flares at the reminder of what I mumbled in a half-coherent daze the other night. My cheeks flush, and I cross my arms, trying to ignore his smirk. “Excuse me, but you go first. Three nice things about me.”
“We’ll take turns,” he counters. “A compliment for a compliment.”
I huff out a breath. “I couldn’t have just matched with some random person and faked my way through this?”
“You’re stuck with me now, Trishara.”
There’s an implication in that statement, his words settling between us like a triangle squeezing itself into a circle.
I scan him from head to toe, searching for the most innocuous compliment I can deliver. I will not fluff up his ego any further. But wow, he looks good today. Then he runs a hand through his thick, shiny hair, and my brain turns to mush. “You have fantastic hair.” The words slip from me of their own volition, hanging in front of me and slapping me in the face.
Rafe’s eyes dance as he moves a little closer. The surrounding cacophony surges as everyone engages in animated conversation. But we have entered a bubble. All the noise and the distraction melt away until it feels like we are the only people left in the room.
“I think you smell good, too,” Rafe says, his voice low, his mouth close to my ear. “Last night in bed, it felt like drowning in strawberries and creamy vanilla frosting.”
His voice drops to a rough growl on the last three words, causing a pulse to throb low in my stomach. We both look around the room, making sure no one heard. I’m pretty sure this isn’t what the HR department had in mind when they set us on this exercise.
It’s my turn again, and I swallow. Hesitating. But caution is for suckers, and I take a running leap off this cliff. “I love your forearms,” I say, my voice breathy as I steal a glance down. “They’re beautiful.”
He follows my gaze and raises that soul-destroying eyebrow. “Is that your kink, Trishara? I would never have guessed.”
My throat is so tight that I have to suck air through my nose. He makes a fist, and my breath explodes—the dusting of hair and the way his veins pop against the golden color of his skin. I hate how much I think about those arms.
Only a few inches separate us as we cast more guilty looks about the room. Everyone has found their pair and are chatting like long-lost friends.
But Rafe and I don’t need to get to know one another. We’ve spent years in orbit moving like planets, parallel but never crossing. I already know what I like about Rafe. Until a few days ago, I swore it was nothing, but now I’m not so sure.
“I love the way you charge through life as though you don’t give a shit what anyone thinks,” Rafe says, and those words find a secret place where all my fears and insecurities fester.
Rafe moves closer, his lips so close to my ear that I can feel his heat and smell his skin. I reciprocate, standing up on my toes as I take my turn. “I think your drawings are the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, and I had no idea you were capable of such… depth. You are bold and confident and have this way with people that makes them feel important, and I think someone must have told you that your art wasn’t special because how could you think it was anything but extraordinary?”
My thoughts surface unbidden, but as I stand there with the recollection of those pages, I’m struck with certainty that’s what I saw in his art. They were pencil sketches rendered from yearning and desire. All these years, I’ve been entirely misjudging some fundamental facet of Rafe. He is deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon. I might make fun of his ego, but the truth is that I’m drawn to his self-assurance. I admire the way he can charm a room.
He goes completely still, and I feel his breath catch.
Then his gaze finds mine, and the corner of his mouth turns up into yet another new smile I memorize for safekeeping. A smile that tells me the next words from his mouth have been carefully, painstakingly designed to destroy me.
Soft lips brush the shell of my ear. “Your ass is so fucking hot in that skirt, I want to fall to my knees and worship it.”
My heart stops. Literally stops. I hold my own funeral on the floor of a hotel ballroom covered in threadbare carpet, hideously patterned to hide a decade of coffee stains.
Rafe Gallagher just told me my ass is hot. I know it is. I bought this skirt expressly for how hot it made my ass look. But he just said it out loud, and the result is an exhale on the tightly knotted bow we’ve been keeping on this wrapped package.
We are so far over the line of the rules I set for myself that I have to squint to see them stretching in the distance. But maybe I don’t mind.
His hand lands on my hip, gentle but firm, fingers digging in with the barest pressure. He turns his head ever so slightly. His mouth brushes my cheek, and I stand perfectly still like I’ve been turned into marble through a spell cast by a meddling fairy godmother.
Screeeeeee!
Whistle Mouth blasts through our suspension of time, and I have never wanted to take that plastic whistle and shove it down her throat more. Rafe and I snap apart, turning to face the front of the room with everyone else. I feel like a lighthouse, my face so flushed and hot I could signal ships in the night.
I feel Rafe standing behind me. My elbow and shoulder brush his chest and his stomach, and then there is the barest touch of the edge of his hand. It ghosts over the curve of my ass, and every cell in my body is dedicated to the relentless pursuit of imagining his large palm cupping and kneading and… I want it so badly that it becomes the first tier on my hierarchy of needs. If I can have this, I’ll never need food or water again.
Whistle Mouth is saying something, but I can’t hear anything over the roar in my ears and the pounding in my heart and the ache between my thighs. I’m going to faint here in front of everyone.
She claps her hands and blows her whistle again. “Okay, everyone move!”
The room breaks apart, and I look behind me to find Rafe looking at me with the whisper of a knowing smile.
It takes all my willpower to turn away and proceed to the next activity.