11. Addy #2
“Yes,” I say. “Because to me, this feels wildly personal.”
His gaze flicks down to the card, then back up to me. “To me, it means I trust your judgment.”
And there it is again.
That disorienting, impossible thing he does sometimes, where he says something so direct and stripped down it knocks the sarcasm right out of me.
I look at the card again.
Then slowly pick it up.
“Okay,” I say, wrapping my fingers around it. “I’ll use it responsibly.”
“I assumed you would.”
“Don’t sound so confident,” I mutter. “I could buy Oliver six hundred dollars’ worth of novelty fruit snacks.”
“If you can justify the purchase.”
I look up sharply. He’s absolutely serious, and somehow that’s the funniest part.
I laugh, and this time, he actually smiles. Suddenly, he doesn’t look like my terrifying, controlled, billionaire boss anymore.
He just looks like a man.
A tired one. A warm one, underneath all that steel, and that’s dangerous in ways I don't have the emotional infrastructure to manage.
“Right,” I say briskly. “Well. Great. Budget crisis averted. Love that for us.”
His smile fades into quietness, but he doesn’t look away. “Was there anything else?”
I look away first, busying myself with the entirely unnecessary task of straightening a napkin on the island.
“I was going to make dinner,” I say.
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“With what?”
I gesture helplessly toward the fridge. “That was going to be the adventure.”
He considers this for exactly one second. “No.”
I blink. “No?”
“No,” he repeats. “You’ve had a long day. I’ve had a long day. We’re not forcing a dinner experiment out of principle.”
There’s something absurdly intimate about the we in that sentence. I pretend not to notice.
“So what’s the alternative?” I ask.
He pulls out his phone. “Takeout.”
I laugh. “That was fast.”
“It’s efficient.”
“Sure. Not at all because you don’t trust me in your kitchen unsupervised.”
He doesn’t even look up from the screen. “That too.”
I narrow my eyes. “Rude.”
He glances up briefly. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I open my mouth.
Then close it.
Because honestly? Fair. I can cook, but he doesn’t know that yet.
“What are we ordering?” I ask instead.
He starts listing options with the ease of a man who clearly has this system down. A local Italian place. Thai. A steakhouse that apparently delivers, because of course it does. Something Mediterranean. Then Japanese.
Every option sounds expensive enough to make my bank account start crying.
“Pick one,” he says.
“This feels like a trap.”
“It isn’t.”
I hesitate. “Italian?”
He nods once and starts typing.
There’s a strangely domestic feel about it.
About standing in the kitchen while he orders dinner like this is normal, like we’ve done it a hundred times, like I haven’t spent most of the day mentally rehearsing how to remain appropriately detached from a man whose entire existence seems designed to test that plan.
“Do you drink wine?” he asks without looking up.
I stare at him. “That feels like another trap.”
His mouth shifts. “It’s a simple question.”
“Yes,” I say carefully. “Sometimes.”
“Red or white?”
“Red.”
He nods and adds something to the order.
I should object.
I should say I don’t need him buying me wine on top of literally handing me a credit card like I’m a trusted member of his inner circle and not the woman he had a wildly unprofessional encounter with at thirty thousand feet.
Instead, I say, “You know this is dangerously close to hospitality.”
“You live here.”
Oliver appears in the doorway then, saving me from having to respond. “Are we eating?”
“Yes,” Ethan says.
“What are we having?”
“Italian.”
Oliver thinks this over. “With pizza?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Then he disappears again, satisfied.
I watch him go, then glance back at Ethan. “He’s very direct.”
“He gets that from me.”
“I was going to say from the sky gods, but sure.”
This time the smile's easier, and I like it.
I like him like this.
At home, slightly tired, less polished. Still controlled, yes, but not in the hard, boardroom way.
The food arrives forty minutes later, by which point Oliver has been wrangled into pajamas.
He demolishes his pizza, yawns halfway through explaining why he isn't tired, and is asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.
By the time I come back downstairs, Ethan is in the kitchen unpacking our food onto plates because, apparently, even his takeout gets plated like it’s auditioning for an Architectural Digest spread.
I pull out a stool at the island and sit. The food smells amazing. The wine is already poured.
This is fine. This is so fine.
He sets a plate in front of me. “Eat.”
I stare at the pasta, then at him. “Do you issue all domestic instructions like a command?”
“Yes.”
“That must be exhausting for everyone.”
“Not for me.”
I laugh and take a bite. Then close my eyes for half a second because wow.
“Okay,” I say. “That’s offensive.”
His brow lifts. “The food?”
“That people can just casually order things this good on a random day.”
He sits opposite me, one forearm resting on the counter, glass of wine within reach. “You’ll adjust.”
“That feels ominous.”
“Probably.”
We eat.
At first, it’s easy, practical, the kind of conversation two adults who live under the same roof should be able to have without issue.
I tell him about our day and the fun we’ve had. He tells me, reluctantly, and only after I pry, that his day was mostly gala problem solving, investor annoyances, and “preventing people from turning technology into theater.”
“That sounds very specific,” I say.
“It is.”
“So you hate the gala.”
He looks at me over the rim of his glass. “I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
His fingers tighten slightly around the stem.
“People always say they hate events like that,” I go on, twirling pasta around my fork. “But usually they mean they hate small talk or tuxedos or standing near shrimp while pretending they’re interested in supply chain reform.”
“You notice a lot.”
“I can’t help that.”
He sets his glass down. “I dislike being on display.”
The honesty of that lands quietly. I look at the tiredness in his face. The precision he never fully turns off. The way he sits like a man who’s always expecting to be needed.
And suddenly I understand something I hadn’t before.
It’s not the event.
It’s the exposure.
The performance of being fine in public.
“Because of your wife,” I say softly before I can stop myself.
Silence.
I immediately want to throw myself into the lake, because wow, Addy, beautiful. Delicate. Subtle. Truly a master of gentle conversation.
But Ethan doesn’t flinch, doesn’t shut down.
He just goes still, gaze dropping to the counter before lifting back to mine.
“Yes,” he says calmly.
I can feel the instinct to back off, to joke, to soften the moment with something ridiculous, but I don’t.
Instead, I say, “You don’t have to talk about it.”
He studies me for a long beat.
Then, surprising both of us, maybe, he says, “I know.”
The room feels smaller all of a sudden. Like the whole apartment has narrowed down to the island, the wine, the city lights beyond the glass, and this strange, fragile honesty stretching between us.
I take a sip of wine because my hands need a job.
“It’s okay if you hate it,” I say eventually. “The gala, I mean.”
A faint exhale leaves him. “I don’t hate the purpose of it.”
“Just the part where people look at you?”
“Yes.”
“That makes sense.”
I shift slightly on the stool, suddenly too aware of the space between us. Or rather, how little of it there really is.
The forced proximity of this job had seemed theoretical before. A concept. A trope in a romance novel Luci would absolutely force into my hands with wine and bad commentary.
Now it feels real.
The lights are low.
The kitchen is warm.
His tie's gone somewhere.
He’s looking at me like I’m not just temporary in his house but someone whose opinion he actually wants.
And I…
I hate how much I want to stay in this moment because there are so many reasons I shouldn’t.
He’s older than me. A lot older, if I'm being honest. He's my boss. He has a son, a life, a whole history I can feel around him even when he's not talking. And I’m still, whether I like it or not, a woman who got dumped in an airport and ended up here half by grit and half by disaster.
This doesn't feel like safe ground.
“Addy.”
I realize too late that I’ve gone quiet.
“Hm?”
“You’re elsewhere.”
I laugh softly. “That obvious?”
“Yes.”
“That’s annoying.”
He doesn’t smile, but there’s warmth in his eyes now. “Where did you go?”
That's a deeply unfair question. Especially in that voice. Especially now, so of course I deflect.
“Nowhere dramatic,” I say. “Just thinking.”
“About?”
“How weird this is.”
His gaze doesn’t move from mine. “Because I’m your employer.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
I set my glass down carefully. “And because we already crossed a line before there even was one.”
There. It's out, sitting between us like a lit match.
He doesn’t look away. He keeps that same still, assessing focus that made me lose all common sense on a plane.
“Yes,” he says.
Everything in me tightens. I should stop this, should absolutely stop this, but some reckless, traitorous part of me wants to know if he’s thinking what I’m thinking. If he feels this too. If the room has gotten smaller for him as well.
I can’t ask that.
So instead I say, “It can’t happen again.”
His jaw tightens.
“Why?” he asks.
I stare at him. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
I let out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh. “Ethan.”
“Addy.”
I hate that he uses my name like that.
Like it’s meaningful.
“Because this is my job,” I shoot back. “Because you’re my boss. Because Oliver is involved now. Because there’s an age gap large enough to make some people write think pieces.”
A flicker of irritation moves across his face at that. “You’re concerned about my age.”
I immediately regret saying it like that.
“No, I’m… that’s not—”
“It was a statement.”
“It was context.”
He leans back slightly on the stool, still watching me. “And what context does it provide?”
This man is impossible.