Chapter 63
Sixty-Three
ADDIE
Eli had a tight grip on my right arm, where it was draped over his waist. I kept trying to move, but he kept pulling me back in.
“Eli, it’s Monday, I have to go to work,” I said quietly against the skin of his bare chest.
“It is not Monday,” he grumbled.
“Yes, it is,” I laughed,
“That is not possible,” he said, pressing kisses to any bit of me his mouth could reach.
“I’m here to tell you that it is.”
We had left the room since we got home on Thursday night.
He still had to go to work, so we’d hours apart on Saturday.
And in those hours, I managed to smash through the wall that I had found myself against in my thesis.
While he was gone, I added another 5,000 words.
When he came back from his shift, he had triple-checked that I was at a good place to leave it and then dragged me back to bed.
We hadn’t left it since, except to eat, pee, or have the most inefficient shower I’d ever been a part of.
“No, it was just Saturday,” he said against me.
“And now it is Monday. I have to go to work, and so do you. So can I have my arm back?”
“No.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was pouting.
“If you give it back, I can do something fun with it,” I teased. The leg I had hooked over him brushed his erection. Eli huffed, but he let go of my arm. I rolled onto my back.
“You’re left-handed,” he said around a huff of a laugh.
I made a sound of mock shock. “Is my right hand that uncoordinated?”
He half-heartedly shrugged. “The difference is noticeable.”
“Huh, I guess that is good to know.”
“Don’t get a complex about it. I just meant that I knew you were tricking me into letting your arm go with the promise of fun, because you value your job or something weird like that.” He laced his fingers with mine over the duvet and kissed the back of my hand.
“Don’t act like you aren’t gagging to get back in the kitchen. You get angsty when you’ve been away from it for too long. I don’t think you’d make it another day without going in.”
“So tempted to make a gag joke right now.”
“Go ahead, make your jokes, see how much gagging that allows in your future.”
“Did you forget that I said I can live without that? You’re much better threatening to take these hands away from me.” He kissed my hand again before I gently extracted it from his hold and hid it under the duvet.
“You’re mean,” he pouted. Then he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think we might need to talk about Josh.”
That was the last thing I wanted to do, but he was right.
I sighed. “What about him?”
“He seems like the kind of guy who is going to keep coming back around. I know you said that you haven’t seen him all week, but that doesn’t mean that he’s going to leave you alone.”
“Are you worried that he’ll wear me down?” I tried to tease.
He pushed himself up to rest on his elbow, looking down at me. “No, I’m worried about you. He muscled his way into that Halloween party and took advantage in a room full of people. What’s to say he won’t try that again? In a place where there are significantly less people.”
Oh.
I pushed myself up on my elbow. “Becky gave me his schedule, so I know when he’s supposed to be around and when he isn’t. And if the times we are in our offices align, then my office door is locked. I’ve been careful about it. I will keep being careful about it,” I reassured him.
Eli was silent for a moment.
“I’m now worried that was incredibly overbearing and annoying.” Eli flopped back onto the bed. I shifted until I was straddling his thighs, the duvet discarded completely.
“It wasn’t. You had a valid concern, and you are well within your rights to express that. Do you feel better about it now?”
“I trust that you have it under control. And I still refuse to believe that it’s Monday.”
I smiled. “It’s probably a good thing. I don’t think I have anything left. Might need another week to recharge.”
“I don’t think you could last another week,” he said as he ran his hands up my outer thighs.
I mock gasped. “How dare you! I definitely could. You were for sure closer to breaking than me. Although I did have an interesting moment during a tutorial on Lady Macbeth on Tuesday. No, I will not be explaining; figure it out for yourself.”
Eli laughed loudly.
“Tell me what the seminar was on, so I have the context, and I will report back with my findings tonight.” He seemed lost in thought as his thumbs swept up and down my thigh crease.
“Why are you and Clara so obsessed with Macbeth, by the way? Don’t think I haven’t noticed the copious amounts of notes you have about it for your thesis, and I still don’t think I’ve found all the copies of Macbeth in Clara and Jesse’s flat. ”
I pinched his nipple. “I need you to not say that name again for the rest of the day.”
His mouth tipped up into a teasing smile. “Why? Is the Lady going to come and smite me if I do?”
I pinched again, although I noticed that he didn’t call her by her full name. “She might.”
“I thought that was just in theatres?”
“Yeah, it is. Unless you grew up a Henry, where it became this whole thing. A bit like Bloody Mary, and if you said it three times in a twenty-four-hour period, then Banquo’s ghost would haunt you.
I think Dad made up the story as a joke one Halloween because we stupidly said that we weren’t easily scared, and I went along with it because I didn’t want Clara to call me a chicken.
At the time, we thought it was bullshit, but then, a few years later, we fucked around and said it in front of a mirror, why I don’t know, and then it dropped on the floor out of nowhere.
From that point on, we believed the curse was real.
And look, logically we have always known that it was because this mirror was badly hung near a door that was banged shut one too many times, but also, the curse is real.
As to why Clo and I love it so much, that is inherited from Dad, the same way we inherited his nose.
There are witches and ghosts in it too, so how could we not love it? ”
“Of course. Witches and ghosts.”
I pinched his nipple one more time. This time, he whimpered. “You doing lunch or dinner today?”
“I think dinner. Actually, no, I know it’s dinner. Can you come to Vivi’s later?”
“Sure. I need to eat anyway.”
One of Eli’s thumbs swept down from my hip to rest just above my clit. “Two more questions; how much time do you have before you one hundred per cent need to get ready, and when you said you had nothing left, what exactly were the parameters for that?”
I checked his phone. “Fifteen minutes max, and I cannot deal with any kind of penetration.”
Eli nodded his head once and then tapped my thigh to encourage me to shuffle up the bed until his face was exactly where he wanted it.
I had barely sat down in my chair after teaching my first lecture before a loud knock echoed in my office.
“Come in!” I called. The door creaked open slowly, and then unexpectedly, Josh’s head popped through the gap. He wasn’t supposed to be around now. He was supposed to be in a lecture.
“Morning. How was your lecture?” he asked as he stepped fully into my office and closed the door behind him. He looked tired. The blue-black under his eyes made his entire face look sallow.
“It was a nine a.m. Monday morning lecture about a white whale; it went as expected,” I replied. I tried to inject some humour into my voice, but it fell flat. I pulled my phone out of my jacket pocket and sent an SOS message to Becky. “How has your morning been?”
“Are we really doing this? Small talk about our mornings like the last week didn’t happen? You’ve been ignoring me.”
“I already told you that I wasn’t interested beyond the date we had and that weird exchange at my sister’s engagement party. I’m not ignoring you. We’re just colleagues who don’t really have much to say to one another beyond small talk about our mornings.”
“But we had a nice time on that date. I don’t—”
I cut him off. “I have a boyfriend.”
It felt oddly thrilling to say that out loud for the first time. I had never seen myself as someone who would one day have a boyfriend, but it felt right.
It felt comforting getting to call Eli that.
Josh seemed genuinely shocked by that information.
“When did that happen?”
“Last week. I had a conversation with a friend, and it became apparent that we had strong feelings for one another, and now here we are. A couple. I am sorry that you found yourself caught up in it. That wasn’t my intention.”
That was a calm, diplomatic response.
“But it happened anyway. You get to just run off into the sunset and leave me broken and having to pick up the pieces. I don’t put myself out there a lot, and I thought we could have something.” There was an almost pleading tone in his voice.
“I’m sorry that I don’t feel the same.”
Josh didn’t have the time to get as angry as he clearly wanted because Becky opened the door. She leant against the open door jamb and took in the scene before her. She looked at me cautiously, and I tipped my head to signal that I was okay.
“I thought you had a lecture now, Josh?” Becky asked, her tone measured and firm.
Josh looked down at his watch and swore quietly.
“We should revisit this conversation later, Adrienne,” he said. He didn’t wait for me to respond before he left my office.
“I know it’s a faff, but it might be worth you flagging him to the appropriate people. It might not amount to much, but at the very least, you could change the location of your office.” She sounded apologetic.
I sighed. “I know. I should. I will. Thanks for coming.”
“Always. I feel like I owe you an apology. I pushed you towards that, and now we have this whole disaster.” She gestured vaguely.
“Not your fault. We didn’t have a crystal ball.”
Becky nodded slowly as her eyes zeroed in on something. “Did you know you have a hickey on your collarbone?” she asked.
I reached for the spot and covered it with my hands. Eli had really done a number on the area because even though I was hardly touching it, I could feel how tender it was.
I made a mental note to return this particular favour.
“Yes, I do. I didn’t think it was that bad. By the time I realised, I didn’t have enough time to locate a roll neck jumper.”
I would have if I hadn’t drained Eli dry with a blow job and left myself with barely twenty minutes to get ready and out of the flat.
“So, date night with Eli went well then?” Becky waggled her eyebrows. I rolled my eyes.
“We had a lovely dinner that stretched into a lovely weekend, yes.”
“Did you know that Eli had a possessive side to him?”
A bark of a laugh escaped me. “Bex, we’ve been having sex for months. I for sure knew he had this in him.”
“You’ve what?” Becky exclaimed.
“Do you not know the whole story?” I asked, confused. I hadn’t requested it stay locked in the vault after I told Clara the whole story, so I assumed the twins would know by now.
“What the fuck is the whole story? How have I been kept so out of the loop? You know I like juicy details.”
“It was by no means intentional. I thought word would have gotten back to you by now. But, sure, I can give you the full story over lunch. Don’t you have somewhere to be in the next fifteen minutes?”
Becky checked her watch, and it was her turn to swear.
“Yes, I do. I have to give a lecture on the Roman Empire, which is ironic because I will be thinking about nothing else except the fact that you seemed to catch feelings for your former nemesis turned situationship.”
“We went with friends with benefits,” I said with a shrug.
“Say no more. Tell me everything all at once. You will spare no details.” She pointed a finger at me before she left.