Chapter 19
I slipped back into the bedroom and eased under the covers slow, barely breathing, making sure not to disturb anything.
Brendon was still on his side, out cold, breathing steady and deep the way he always slept.
Unbothered. Peaceful. No idea that I had just been in the other room whispering on the phone to a man who had his hands around my throat, then his dick deep inside of me in a parking lot less than two hours ago.
I laid there on my back staring up at the ceiling.
Griz had hung up in my face. Just laughed and disconnected the call like I hadn’t said anything worth staying on the phone for. And before that he had put me out his car in the middle of a park like I was being dismissed. Told me to go lay down with my lame ass fiancé and then ended the call.
And I was laying here bothered about it.
That right there was the problem.
I turned my head and looked at Brendon in the dark.
His face was completely relaxed in sleep, not a line of stress on it, just a man who had cooked dinner for his woman and gone to bed expecting her to be beside him the whole night.
He was a good man. I kept coming back to that because it kept being true no matter how inconvenient it was.
He had never given me a reason to do what I was doing.
Not once. He showed up every single day, consistent and present and real, and I had repaid him by sneaking out of our room at one in the morning to call another man.
I almost felt bad.
Almost.
Because underneath the guilt was something else that wouldn’t quiet down. The way Griz had said go lay down with that lame ass nigga. The easy confidence behind it, like he wasn’t threatened, like he already knew how this was going to end and was just waiting on me to arrive at the same conclusion.
That should have made me angry. It did make me angry. But it also did something else that I wasn’t going to think about too hard at one thirty in the morning lying next to my fiancé.
I made myself a promise right there in the dark.
I was done. No more calls, no more sneaking out of rooms, no more letting him pull me into his orbit every time he decided to show up.
I had been happy before I saw him at that bar.
My life had been clean and predictable..
maybe even boring, but it was mine. I had built something real and I wasn’t about to watch it fall apart behind a man I hadn’t seen in all these damn years who showed up out of nowhere and started treating my life like something he could just rearrange.
I closed my eyes and told myself to sleep.
It took a while but eventually I got there.
—
Morning came and Brendon was already up when I woke.
I could smell coffee from downstairs and hear him moving around in the kitchen the way he did when he was in a good mood, unhurried and at home in the space he called his peace.
I laid there for a few minutes before I got up, washed my face, pulled my hair back, and went down.
We ate breakfast together and talked about the day the way we always did.
He had a property walk-through in the morning and a client call in the afternoon.
I had training starting at the office, new hires for the tax prep that I needed to get up to speed before season hit.
He told me he might try to get home early and I said that would be nice and I meant it when I said it.
After he left for work, I clipped Goldie’s leash and took her out.
She was my dog, my sweet baby girl. Golden doodle, all curly fur and too much energy, my baby girl who had been with me since before the businesses took off, she was a gift from Brendon.
Walking her in the morning was the one part of my day that didn’t belong to anybody or anything else.
Just me and Goldie moving through the neighborhood while everything was still quiet enough to think.
I wasn’t thinking about Griz.
That’s what I told myself the entire walk.
Brendon’s allergies have been acting up a lot lately, and I know that he blamed my fur baby.
He told me that since we both had busy schedules, he wanted me to consider rehoming her.
That shit almost caused us to break up. He would leave before my dog would.
And that was probably the only problem that I ever had with him.
So, you see how small that is compared to things I have been doing lately. I vowed to get Griz out of my system.
—
I got to the office before Ashley and Savannah, which was rare. I had the coffee going and my training materials spread out on the conference table by the time they came through the door together, still talking about the other night.
“Okay so how long did you stay after we left the bar? You was fucking them shots up, we couldn’t hang with yo ass.” Ashley dropped her bag on her desk and looked at me. “Because you were giving us the wave goodbye a little too fast.”
“I had another drink and went home,” I said without looking up from the papers I was organizing.
“Mmhm.” That was Savannah. I could hear the skepticism without even seeing her face.
“What?”
“Nothing.” But she was smiling. I could hear that too.
I looked up and they were both watching me with that look. The one that meant they had already formed a theory and were just waiting for confirmation.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.
“You just smiled,” Ashley said.
“I’m just in a good mood.”
“You know that we have your location, right? Not to be in your business, but you have a whole house. How the fuck did you end up at the Hilton Hotel?” Ashley asked.
These two had been my girls since I first moved out here.
I brought them on with me at my tax company so that they can make the extra money during Tax season.
Although they were my best friends, they were also a big pain in my ass.
And I had to remember to stop sharing locations with their asses.
“Can we just set up for the class please,” I said and went back to my papers.
They exchanged a look and let it go. For now.
The training class got started and I got into it the way I always did when I was teaching something.
This was my business, my system, the thing I had built from studying and grinding and refusing to let anyone tell me that a girl from where I came from couldn’t run something real.
I knew this material inside and out and I was good at breaking it down for people who were coming in fresh.
The new hires were attentive and the questions they were asking were the right ones, which told me I had hired well.
About an hour in Ashley stepped out to answer the office phone. She came back in a few minutes later with a look on her face I couldn’t immediately read. She waited until there was a pause in the session and leaned over to me.
“Somebody called,” she said low. “A man. Asked how many employees we had on staff.”
I looked at her. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him. I didn’t think about it until after I hung up.” She made a face. “It was just a weird question. I don’t know why I answered it.”
I sat with that for a second. Strange call. Man asking about staff count. I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and kept moving because I had twelve people in front of me waiting on me to continue and I wasn’t about to let whatever that was derail my morning.
We broke for lunch right on schedule.
I was pulling my phone out of my bag to figure out what I wanted to order when the front door of the office opened.
I looked up.
And every promise I had made to myself in the dark last night evaporated in approximately three seconds.
Griz walked in like he had been there before and knew exactly where everything was.
Black jeans that were designer and distressed, clean sneakers, a fitted black shirt that did nothing to hide the fact that this man was built in a way that should have been illegal in a professional setting.
He was carrying food bags in one hand and three separate rose arrangements in the other, each one a different size.
He walked directly to me. Didn’t look around, didn’t acknowledge anyone else in the room, just moved straight to where I was standing like everything else in the space was background.
He held out two of the arrangements. “Give those to your girls that’s working.”
I took them slowly, still processing that this was actually happening.
Then he held up the food bags. “I brought Mexican. For lunch. I called and asked what time was lunch and how many workers y’all had.”
Ashley and Savannah were behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know exactly what their faces looked like right now. I could feel the energy radiating off of them from six feet away.
He looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something and when I didn’t he just stood there comfortable, completely unbothered by the audience, like showing up at a woman’s place of business in the middle of a workday with roses and takeout was something he did regularly.
I handed all the arrangements back to Ashley without turning around. “Put those in a cool spot til we can put them in water.”
She took them. I heard Savannah make a sound that she quickly converted into a cough.
“Come on,” I said to Griz and turned toward my office. This nigga was out of his mind, showing up here like this.
I closed the door behind us and locked it and turned around and looked at him.
He set the food down on the small table in the corner, straightened up and looked back at me, relaxed, like he hadn’t just walked into my business unannounced in the middle of my workday.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “You cannot just show up at my job.”
“I brought food. So, you not hungry or what? Rude ass.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Sit down and eat.”