6. Rebecca
Rebecca
Silk sheets. Who the hell owns silk sheets?
Not me, that’s for sure. I get paid reasonably well at Stone Enterprises, but not enough to keep me in five hundred dollar bedding. I wish.
Frowning, I slide out of bed and step onto the lush carpeted floor. The room I’m in is blank, empty, as though the owner of this place never bothered to fully move in. A single chair is against the wall next to me, pointed towards the bed.
Where the hell am I?
I wipe the sleep from my eyes and try to remember what happened last night.
My head is pounding. Everything is a fog.
The last thing I remember clearly is listening to some guy’s boring golf stories at the open bar, sipping on a glass of wine and watching the other women dancing on the dance floor, wishing I had their confidence.
And what else happened? There has to be more. Obviously there’s more if I went home with a guy last night.
But every time I try to remember anything further from last night, my head pounds even harder.
I don’t know how much I drank last night. But however much it was, it was far too much. Never again. Never, ever again. With everything else going on in my life, a drunken hookup with a guy from work is the last thing I need right now.
When I look down I realize I’m wearing an oversized white t-shirt that falls to my knees. It’s soft to the touch, the kind of softness that you only get from a t-shirt that’s truly “vintage” — worn and torn, having been through a thousand cycles in the washer and dryer.
The lettering across the front is faded and cracked. I tug the shirt out from my chest a little, trying to read the letters upside down.
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Wait.
Oh no.
No.
No no no no no no. This can’t be.
The bedroom door swings open. Eric Stone, my boss, walks in wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants. Nothing else. No shirt. And by the looks of the prominent bulge beneath the gray fabric of his sweatpants, no underwear either.
“You’re awake. Good.”
“What the fuck?” I shriek.
Ouch. The volume of my own voice sends a new wave of pain rebounding between my temples. I wince, closing my eyes and backing away to sit down on the bed.
“Yeah, you’re going to feel like that all morning,” Eric says, his deep voice quiet and stern. “You basically poisoned your organs last night.”
“And yet you still brought me back to your place,” I say, opening my eyes to glare at him. “Was I even coherent? Or does that not matter to you?”
“You think we slept together?” he asks, his voice hardening.
“Well, didn’t we?” I ask, waving a hand at myself, the bed, and him.
“No,” he replies. “We didn’t sleep together. Unlike your date last night, I’m not into taking advantage of vulnerable women. I brought you back here last night because you would have endangered yourself if I’d left you alone.”
I think about this.
“You could have called me an Uber,” I say, raising my gaze to look up at him.
“You think it would have been better to put you, blackout drunk, in a car with a complete stranger and trust them to get you home?” he asks. “Even if you made it home, last I checked, Uber drivers don’t walk you to your door, pour you a glass of water, and make sure you get to your bed.”
Taking a deep breath, I consider this. It all makes sense…I think.
“Why am I in different clothes?” I ask, pulling the bottom of the shirt lower on my thighs. “Where’s my dress?”
“In the garbage,” he answers. “You were very sick last night, Rebecca. I don’t think you’re going to want that dress back. I’ll just leave it at that.”
“So…so I changed my clothes,” I say hopefully, looking at him. “You gave me a shirt and I cleaned myself up and changed.
He shakes his head.
“No? You changed my clothes for me?” I ask weakly.
“You’d rather I let you sleep in a soiled dress?”
I fold my arms over my chest, conscious that without a bra my nipples must be clearly showing through the thin white shirt.
“Nothing sexual happened between you and me last night,” Eric continues. “I brought you home. I took care of you overnight. That’s it.”
Took care of me overnight.
I look at his face and see the shadows beneath his eyes.
“Did you sleep?”
“Very little.”
“And you slept…beside me?” I ask in a small voice. “In the bed?”
He shakes his head and points a finger at the wooden straight-backed chair next to the bed.
“You slept in that?” I ask, blinking at it.
“Like I said, very little,” he answers grimly. “I wanted to be alert in case you got sick again.”
I can’t look at him anymore. The shame of getting so drunk last night, of my boss witnessing me in a state like that, throwing up on myself…and then him changing my clothes and babysitting me all night long…
It's too much humiliation to bear.
“You didn’t need to do all of that,” I whisper.
“I don’t think you understand the seriousness of what happened last night,” Eric growls.
I sigh and look at him.
“I do understand,” I say. “And I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again, you have my word. I don’t know what came over me…normally I’m fine after two or three glasses of wine…”
Eric tilts his head.
“You don’t remember much about last night, do you?”
“I guess not, if I had to ask you whether we slept together,” I sigh.
Eric walks to the wooden chair, taking a seat and leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, interlacing his fingers and bowing his head.
It’s a pose I’m very familiar with, having worked with the man for over seven years. It’s the pose that Eric strikes when he’s stuck on a difficult problem, deep in thought, and likely frustrated.
Over time, I’ve learned that it’s wise not to interrupt Eric when he’s in this mode, to leave him alone and wait for him to speak again—even if this takes hours.
So instead of speaking, I just watch him, gazing at the wide expanse of his muscular shoulders, his rounded biceps…and the raised veins that wind from his thick forearms all the way to the backs of his large hands.
Eric has nice hands. How have I never noticed this before?
Finally he looks up at me.
“Why are you taking fertility medication?” he asks.
I blink at him.
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t get drunk from alcohol alone last night,” he continues. “You mixed alcohol with your medicine.”
Shit. Of course.
An out of focus scene from last night comes back to me. Eric and I, upstairs by the elevator. He asked me which medication I had taken and I told him.
And obviously a man who has made medical technology his life’s work would know what that medication is for.
Eric knows about things beyond medicine too. Reciting the scientific names of every flower and tree in the garden outside of our office building. The names of foreign diplomats and leaders, the precise dates of every significant historical event to ever happen…
That’s Eric. A walking, talking encyclopedia. And a certified genius when it comes to medicine.
I glance down at the faded Johns Hopkins shirt I’m wearing, his alma mater. He could probably return to that university, walk into any classroom at random, and teach the subject matter with ease.
My boss is brilliant. He has his faults, one of them being interpersonal relationships. But what he lacks in social skill, he makes up for in nearly every other domain. Smart. Ambitious. Successful. And now—thanks to his shirtless entrance this morning—I also know that the guy obviously works out.
A lot.
Add “amazing body” to this growing checklist of positive traits, and I guess my mother was right. Eric Stone is a catch. An unconventional catch, but a catch nonetheless.
And now he’s witnessed me throwing up and blacking out. Great. Just great.
“Rebecca. Why are you taking fertility medicine?” He repeats the question quietly.
“That’s a very personal question.”
“I think we’re past that, don’t you?” he asks, gesturing to me on the bed.
I cross my arms again over my chest, feeling so naked beneath the thin shirt.
“Are you trying to get pregnant?” he asks.
“Not…not currently,” I say.
Not currently. Because I’d have to have, you know, a guy in my life in order to get pregnant. And I don’t have one of those.
“But you’re preparing for it,” Eric says. “You’re preparing to get pregnant in the future.”
I sigh.
“I have…a medical condition,” I say. “I don’t want to get into it, okay? Please?”
My voice is nearly a whimper by the end and I know I won’t be able to say more without breaking down.
I’ve already humiliated myself enough. Why add to that by crying to my boss about my problems? About how my odds of motherhood are lower with every passing year. About how I’ve been looking into sperm banks, just in case I never find a man to settle down with…
Spinster.
“I want you to help me understand,” Eric says. “Because none of this makes any sense to me, Rebecca. No sense at all.”
My face flushes and I blink back tears. This whole situation is surreal. Eric’s bedroom, his t-shirt, him sitting across the bed from me and interrogating me about my private life…
“It doesn’t matter if it makes sense to you,” I reply softly. “It isn’t any of your business.”
“It becomes my business when you put yourself in danger,” Eric shoots back, his jaw tensing. “You’re preparing to get pregnant. And you’re giving your phone number out to guys like Larry Welch.”
“Who?”
“Exactly,” he says darkly. “You don’t even remember, do you? He followed you upstairs. He attacked you. If I hadn’t gone up to my office when I did…”
His whole body is tense now, his eyes dangerous, boring into me with so much intensity that I think I could catch fire right now from his gaze alone.
Bits and pieces of the night before are coming back to me. Finishing my last glass of wine. Giving Larry — the man with the boring golf stories — my phone number. Going to the elevator and being surprised when he slid between the closing doors at the last minute, an unsettling smile on his face.
He wouldn’t leave me alone. He followed me all the way back to Eric’s office, where I was trying to escape behind his heavy, lockable door.