Chapter 20
TWENTY
MALLORY
FROM THE VANTAGE POINT OF the sofa, I watch Graham work in the kitchen. He moves so fluidly, completely at home as he makes us a drink.
On one hand, I feel like I know him so well. But when I think about it, I really know nothing at all. The fact I want to know more leaves me a little uneasy.
He looks over his shoulder, the muscles in his neck flexing as he pours a drink. The soft grey pants he’s changed into sit right below his navel and he’s shirtless and shoeless.
“What?” he grins, coming towards me with a wine glass and a tumbler.
“Do you cook?”
“That’s random,” he chuckles.
“No, it’s not. You were in the kitchen. Kitchens are where food is made. You are sexy. Men in kitchens are sexy.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
“Trust me,” I laugh. “So, do you?”
He hands me the glass and keeps the tumbler. Staying standing, he looks at me like I’m a touch crazy.
“Sometimes. I don’t cook much. Too much goes to waste. I do have a cedar plank I use to make salmon sometimes. It’s really good.”
“I don’t like fish.”
“You don’t like fish?”
“I think it’s because I’m a Pisces,” I wince.
“That makes no sense,” he chuckles. “I also make crepes. Do you have any strange aversions to eggs or gluten?”
“Nope,” I say. “I love all things butter, eggs, and gluten. It’s a part of my balance thing. I eat all the terrible things and then do yoga.”
“I thought you went to yoga for stress?”
I look at him blankly. “I do.”
He laughs, shaking his head, then taking a sip of his drink. “What about you? Do you cook?”
“I try,” I admit. “I like to bake. You know, with—”
“Butter, eggs, and gluten,” we say in unison before laughing.
Our voices meld together in the air between us. It’s a delicious feeling, warm and cozy and even better than I ever imagined it would be.
Pulling my legs up and under me, I watch him in the light of the fireplace.
“I bet your kitchen is a wreck,” he says. “I’ve seen your desk and there are no liquids. I can only imagine you in a kitchen.”
“Yeah, it gets a little wild. Want to cook with me sometime?”
“No. No, I do not. I would never survive that with how messy you are,” he jokes.
I’m staring. I know it. I know he knows it when he pulls his brows together and tosses me a questioning glance.
“I was just thinking I love looking at you like this.”
“In sleep pants?” he laughs. “Wow. I now officially have a complex about how I look in a suit.”
“You rock a suit like no one else,” I smile. “But this is so different. You look all cozy and casual. It shows that maybe there are more sides to you than the demanding CEO,” I wink.
He sits next to me, fresh from the shower we took together. Sinking into the leather, he lays one arm along the back of the sofa. “I think you know there is more to me than that.”
“I do. But I feel like you keep so much of yourself closed off and your nose to the grindstone. Why?”
His features wash in a look that tells me he was expecting this question or one similar. It also tells me two other things: he’s prepared to answer it but he doesn’t want to.
He doesn’t right away. Taking a sip from his tumbler, he watches me over the rim. I expect he’s giving me a chance to change the subject, to get antsy by the look in his eye, but I don’t. It’s time. Things between us keep building, and I don’t know to what end.
“I don’t trust a lot of people,” he says finally. His tone is smooth, but I hear the grit behind it from the force he’s using to make himself talk about a subject he doesn’t want to broach. “It’s hard for me to really open up beyond my family.”
“But you have friends, right? And, you know, probably girlfriends sometimes.”
He grins, letting his hand fall to my thigh in some kind of comforting motion.
I try not to blush. “I have more acquaintances than I do friends, I suppose. I mainly spend my time with one of my brothers or alone. I prefer it that way.” He pauses, smirking.
“And, yes, I have girlfriends sometimes. But those relationships are very particular.”
I gulp, imagining red rooms and contracts. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just . . .” He looks at the ceiling. “I don’t spend time with a woman with the expectation, or desire, if I’m honest, that it will become something routine.”
Each word is said crisply without eye contact. Every syllable stings my heart. With each rip against the fabric of my most precious organ, it’s obvious: I was hoping for more.
Maybe I didn’t realize it until now, but it’s impossible to ignore the feeling in my stomach. The grinding, tumultuous movement in my soul.
My spirits fall, the wine glass shaking in my hand so I steady it with the other. I smile at him. I don’t want him to see me looking dejected.
“That being said, I really like spending time with you, Mallory. You really make this difficult for me.”
“Since we are being honest and all,” I say, looking at the darkness through the window and thinking, briefly, how it feels like my heart, “that makes things really difficult for me too.”
Before he lifts his hand off my leg, he squeezes it. The spot he’d taken right above my knee feels utterly vacant as soon as his palm is gone.
“Mallory, if I have—”
“No,” I cut him off. “You have never indicated you wanted anything more from me than professional performance from seven fifty-nine to five o’clock. The rest of this was just a bonus. I don’t expect anything from you.”
I say the words and I mean them, but they still hurt like a motherfucker. My butt scoots away from him just a bit and his eyebrows shoot to the ceiling, but he doesn’t comment.
“You say I make things difficult, but I don’t want that, Graham. I’d never want to interfere with your work, with your family.”
“Mallory—”
“No. We aren’t at work, so I can put my foot down and make you hear me out.”
“Oh, like that matters,” he mumbles.
I shrug. “If this gets too difficult or hard or weird, I want to stop it before it gets out of control. I like this, but—”
“You don’t like this more than I do,” he whispers. “I just keep things in boxes for a reason. Right now, they’re a mess and I can’t handle messes.”
“I hate this for you,” I say honestly. “You must be so lonely.”
“Being alone is better than being in a relationship and making sacrifices you don’t want to make. Or having pressure put on you to choose between the other person and what drives you.”
“Who did that to you, Graham?”
The lines in his face move, and I see his surprise that I came out and just asked. Frankly, I’m surprised I came out and just asked too, but I want to know.
He sighs and gets up and heads back in the kitchen. His shoulders are stiff as he fills his tumbler again, keeping his back to me as he quickly downs a good portion of the liquid.
A ripple of panic bubbles up and I’m not sure what to do. My purse is in his car, with my phone, so I can’t even call Joy to come and get me, but I feel like I should leave. That I’ve overstepped my boundary by asking.
My mouth opens to issue an apology and an offer to just go when he turns back around. This time, I see that he’s made up his mind.
My wine glass rattles as I place it on a coaster on the table in front of the sofa. My breathing gets ragged as he gets closer. I’m unsure what he’s going to do or say.
“When I was in college,” he says, sitting on the edge of the sofa, “I wanted to go to law school. I thought it was the best way to help my dad’s company, which was the only thing I ever wanted.
Growing up, Barrett would go to the movies on the weekends or to a friend’s house, and I would go with Dad to the office and just soak it up.
I loved the excitement, the power I felt sitting at the spare table and listening to his conversations. ”
He takes a deep breath, refusing to look at me.
“I had everything laid out in front of me. I knew from eighth grade what I wanted to do and how I was going to get there. We had career day in middle school. We had to pick four professionals to go talk to. The other kids were picking the deejay and television guy and whatever. I picked the attorney four times,” he laughs, his voice a touch shaky.
With a trembling hand, I let my palm rest against his knee. The corner of his mouth quivers, but doesn’t quite turn up.
“My freshman year of college, I met this guy. We had similar interests and started hanging out. We got an apartment together our sophomore year. It was the first time in my life I’d really kind of loosened up some, you know?
It was fun,” he shrugs. “Second half of my junior year, I had a philosophy class. The first day, this woman walks in. She was a grad student filling in as a teaching assistant.”
“You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” I say softly. The somberness on his face hurts my heart. “Let’s talk about something else.”
“No.” He clears his throat and looks at me, the greens of his eyes clear. “Her name was Vanessa. I fell in love with her that first day.”
His admission is a shock to my heart, my hand slipping off his knee.
He continues on, despite registering my reaction.
“I made a few passes and within three weeks, we were together. We’d meet after class at her apartment across town or we’d spend the weekend at mine.
We’d talk philosophy and politics, staying up all night debating free will and morality.
It was the first time in my life I met someone that I thought really understood me.
Appreciated my, well, my brothers would say geekiness. ”
He forces a swallow, pain written all over his face. Gazing off in the distance, like he’s replaying the time in his mind, I sit back and struggle to contain my own emotions—emotions I can’t pinpoint, but am acutely aware exist close to the surface.