Chapter 11
My eyes flick to the studio door. Gwen?
Nope.
It’s Leo.
He closes the door behind him and walks to the table. He’s weighted down with the gym duffel and computer bag slung over his shoulder. The bags slap against his side. “Hey, don’t look so happy to see me.” He gives me a smirk. “What, you still sore about losing that basketball game?”
His thick neck, built shoulders, and brawny, powerhouse body reminds me of a bulldog. The same goes for his vigor and the sour mug face he gets when he’s giving me a hard time. Like now.
“I wasn’t even sore at the time, dude,” I say.
I can’t help but look over at the door again. It’s still closed.
When will Gwen get here?
I sent her a text asking her to come up ten minutes ago.
Will she pop her head in, or will she step all the way through the door?
I hope she comes into the studio.
I want to see her again.
I only half listen as Leo jokes with Jordan, who’s here at the table with me. Leo rambles about how I’m probably still salty about the last time he beat me at a one-on-one basketball game. Jordan, more brainy than Leo, tosses in a few wise-aleck comments.
Finally, Leo can’t stand my silence anymore. “Yo. You gonna sulk or get ready for the podcast?”
“I’m not sulking about that game,” I say, my eyes still pinned on the door. “I let you win, anyway.”
“Yeah, right.” He pulls one of the shiny silver microphones toward him and connects it to a cord from his bag. “I know you’re still crying about it. Your jump shot was weak. You knew it, too.”
Jordan leans his lanky, lithe form back against his leather seat and stretches his tattoo-covered arms up behind his head. He restlessly swivels his chair. “Nah. He’s not upset about losing that game or his jump shot, dude,” he says to Leo. “He’s all tense and quiet because he’s waiting for his cute new assistant. She’s on her way up here.”
“What?” Leo raises his eyebrows and chuckles. “That’s what’s up?”
Jordan chuckles, too, and keeps up his narration of my life. “He’s been waiting ten minutes on this girl. You should’ve heard him describe her. His temporary executive assistant is pretty in a girl-next-door kinda way, and we have to be nice to her. He’s protective of her already. That’s how I know she’s trouble. For the past ten minutes, he’s been checking the door like some lovesick puppy.”
“Hey,” I say before he can go on. “I’m right here. You gotta talk like I’m not around?”
“Jordan’s talking ‘cause you’re not,” Leo says. He drags his laptop out of his bag and sets it up. “So, another new assistant. And she’s pretty in, what, some modest, effortless way?”
“That’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“See?” Jordan jokes. He takes his black-rimmed glasses out of their case and fits them on. “Told you, dude,” he mutters to Leo. “He’s protective of her.”
“So, hot new assistant…” Leo mutters with a chuckle.
Now, he’s trying to get a rise out of me.
It works.
“Would you quit it, Leo? And, Jordan, dude—you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not watching the door like a lovesick dog. Not even close, man.”
But then—I can’t help it. My eyes flick over to the door again.
My buddies know me well. Too well. Right now, they’re probably reading the desire etched on my face.
Jordan laughs. “See?” he says to Leo.
“Oh, I see it,” Leo agrees.
“You’re both idiots,” I tell them.
That makes them both laugh harder.
Is the door handle moving?
It is.
I hold my breath with anticipation—which probably tips my hand even more, but here we are.
I can’t argue with my friends. Jordan’s correct. Right now, I feel lovesick as my eyes hang on the slowly opening door.
It’s Gwen.
It has to be Gwen.
It is.
She pokes her head in first. Her wavy, soft-looking auburn hair frames her face in wisps. The longer layers are up high on her head, still contained with the clip. She’s hugging a bundle of file folders and a tablet to her chest.
“Hey,” she says, in that soft-spoken way she has. Her eyes sweep the room, find mine, and lock on.
This feeling that courses through me—heating my blood and quickening my heart—is insanely pleasurable. It’s so good that I want to bottle it up to save some for later.
Jordan lets out a quick, low laugh… at me, I’m sure. I can feel Leo’s smirk, though I’m not looking his way.
I want to hit my friends. First, Jordan for guffawing. Then, Leo, for the snicker he adds in. They keep this up, Gwen will know we were talking about her.
“Come on in,” I tell her.
I’m up now. Crossing the studio. Walking to her.
I can’t help it.
She enters the room, hesitation slowing her steps. Her green sweater complements her auburn hair. I didn’t notice that before, but it’s very clear right now. She comes to a stop at my side. It feels so right to stand here with her.
Her eyes break from mine and survey my friends. “Hey, guys. Leo and Jordan, right? I’ve been listening to the podcast for six years.”
They each stand and shake her hand.
“How’s your wife doing, Leo?” she asks in her quiet, gentle, warm way. “I heard on an episode a few weeks ago that the due date is mid-November. What a beautiful time of year to have a baby. She’ll get to settle in and get so cozy over the winter.”
He smiles at her. Thankfully, it’s not a smirk. This talk about his wife has shifted him from a sarcastic buffoon to a mature father figure. “Yeah, hey, thanks. Sweet of you to remember that. She’s doing great.”
“Good.” Gwen beams. She looks up at me. “Hey, remember what I said about the onesies for newborns?”
“Ahem.” I clear my throat into my fist. Talking about babies has never been hard to do before this instant.
But for some reason, talking about babies with Gwen makes my throat feel as dry as a chalkboard.
“You… ah hem. You said that there are some cute ones these days. With print on demand.”
“Yep. Exactly.” With her blue-green eyes resting on mine, she tilts her head over toward Leo, like she’s trying to convey a silent message.
Then I get it. She’s sending me a message about how I should get a onesie for Leo. As a gift, for the baby. I nod.
She smiles, pleased. “Want me to order?” she whispers to me.
I nod again.
This is new to me—this way of communicating without even using words. However, we just did it.
I’ve known Gwen Temple for little over twenty-four hours, and now we’re reading each other’s body language.
I’ve never had this happen with an assistant before.
“I’ll pick out a cute one, I promise,” she adds in a whisper.
It’s another first—talking about baby clothes with an assistant.
A pretty, single assistant who makes my head spin and my blood rush.
Her wide-eyed look travels to Jordan. “Oh, wow. You’re Jordan Stafford. You were so funny two weeks ago with the bit about seeing your daughter’s play.”
Now he softens, too, just like Bulldog Leo did. They’re falling under her spell, like I have. “Ha. Thanks. That was my favorite part of that episode, sharing that story. Julia is really something else.”
“I love how she made up her lines right there on stage. Creative kid.”
“Yeah, she’s got spunk,” Jordan agrees. He adjusts his glasses as if to take a closer look at Gwen. “What’s your name again? Don’t know if I caught it.”
“Gwen,” she offers. She looks angelic as she patiently asks him a couple of questions about the play.
I tune out the words and just watch her.
How is it that she seems so genuinely interested?
I’ve never seen someone really care as much as she does.
As I watch her, I feel everything else fall away from me, piece by piece. The room disappears. The guys fade away. The computers, the microphones, my schedule… it all drops away into some void. All that’s left in my world is Gwen.
My body feels strange, too. Lighter, more alive. There’s a buzzing feeling in my veins, and my stomach feels tight, but not in a bad way.
It’s like a drug, having her in here.
Then I feel the falling sensation again when she turns her attention back to me. “So, Boss. You must have called me up here for a reason.”
“Yeah…” Because I wanted to see you again. I clear my throat. “A quick thing came up.”
She grins at me. “Yeah?” she asks softly.
“Yep.” I close the gap between us slightly. Now I’m only a few feet from her, and I realize this was all I wanted all along.
“And you couldn’t text me or call?” she asks, with a lively glint in her eyes.
She’s giving me a hard time. Flirting again. This is what I wanted, too.
“Was it that hard to take the elevator up?” I ask as my eyes dance against hers.
“I took the stairs.”
“Ah. I see.” What I see, really, are her beautiful eyes smiling at me. She’s happy to be here with me.
This makes no sense. None of this makes sense.
“Something I can do for you?” she asks. “I’m about to run up to your house and see the pups.”
“Great. I was hoping I’d catch you before then. Grab the laptop out of my home office. It’s a MacBook. Top drawer of the desk. Bring it back here. Brian’s going to swing by, and he wants to have a look at it.”
Her eyebrows knit. “Your PI wants to look at your laptop? Why?”
“He said it might help him figure out what’s going on with my case. Looks like someone might have nabbed my password and used it at some point, and he wants to look into it.”
I don’t need to tell Gwen Temple anything about my business with my PI. And yet, the information just fell from my lips.
What is going on?
“Interesting,” she says. “So, this mystery of yours has something to do with computers, hm? Sounds more work-ish than I suspected. Maybe it’s not as personal as I thought.”
“Work-ish?” I tease. “That must be another technical term.”
“You know it.”
I can’t tear my eyes away from her.
I don’t want her to leave.
A ball of paper hits the side of my head. When I look over at Jordan, he’s got his arms back behind his head like before. He looks as guilty as any grade-school kid trying to get away with shooting spitballs. I know he threw that crumpled wad of paper at me.
These guys have been my buddies for ages. We get along because we have fun together. I’ll get him back for this sometime soon, and I can’t wait for that moment to come.
Gwen giggles. “Well, I guess I should leave you guys to your ‘work,’ ” she says, with bunny-ear quotes. “If this can even be called work. Looks more like friends hanging out and goofing off to me.”
She’s dangling bait out in front of us.
Jordan’s the first to take it. “Aw, Gwen. We research these episodes for weeks. This is harder than it looks.”
Leo chuckles. “Ha. Right, man. Your research is usually nothing but a page of chicken-scratch notes.”
“Man, my genius is all up here.” Jordan taps the side of his head. “Anyway, at least I do my own research. Leo’s genius is back at that clubhouse he calls an office. Tate is the brains behind his operation.”
Gwen reaches the door. “Tate is a smart guy.”
Leo holds up his hands. “Hey, I know, I know. But I hired him, so I get to take some credit. Just like this idiot should take some credit for finding you.” He leans across the table to punch my arm.
Gwen looks at me.
The look pierces my heart; I feel it shooting through me. Her eyes hang on mine. “He didn’t exactly find me.”
“No?” Leo says.
She shakes her head. “More like we were thrown together.”
“He’s a lucky guy,” Leo offers.
I reach for the door Gwen’s already opened and hold it wide for her.
I’ve never been the type to hold open doors for others, especially not here at work. This is my company headquarters. Other people should hold doors for me, not the other way around. But right now, it’s like some force beyond my control has taken over my body. I’m possessed—by her.
I watch her walk to the stairwell door. She places her pale, delicate hands on the bar that runs across it.
“Still boycotting the elevator?” I call to her.
It’s like I don’t want the conversation to end. No matter what, I want to hear her voice again, hear her tinkling, brook-bubbly laugh again, feel her eyes on mine.
She satisfies me with a look over her shoulder. “For some reason, I have some extra energy to burn today.”
“I know the feeling.”
She steps into the stairwell.
I stare at the dark green door as it closes. She’s gone.
I pull in a deep, long breath through my nostrils, and rake my fingertips through my hair. A feeling of frustration surges up through me.
I will never know what it’s like to hold Gwen Temple. I will never kiss her. This is an intoxicating game, but it’s one I can’t win.
I retreat into the studio and fall back against my seat with a heavy sigh.
Leo and Jordan watch me.
“Whoa,” Leo says with a long exhale. “You got it bad, man.”
“Nah.” I pull my mic toward me.
The hard knuckles of Jordan’s fist knock my arm. “Dude, you do. Own it.”
“Guys, she’s my assistant. That’s it.”
“She’s a keeper, is what she is,” Leo counters. “The kind of woman you meet once in a lifetime.”
Jordan nods. “The kinda girl you could introduce to your mom.”
“And, dude, your mom would be over the moon,” Leo says, “after all the no-good broads you’ve been with.”
“What are you guys talking about?”
“That chick from Austin, who wouldn’t stop complaining about the cold when you took her skiing with all of us,” Leo says, thumb out. He adds his pointer finger. “The model from Brazil who wouldn’t let you surf because she was so clingy.”
Jordan props his elbows on the table. “Your lady-friend from Morocco, who insulted Anna’s dress. The girl you took to Australia over the summer, who was so rude to the airline staff.”
Leo props up three more fingers and ticks them off one by one with the other hand as if he’s making some official list. “Heidi, Jenna, Laura. All of them are less-than-awesome—and that is an understatement because I’m being cool. The girl you met at my birthday party. What was her name?”
I groan. “Vanessa.”
“Right. Her. She was lame, man. She threw a fit later that night because her cab didn’t come fast enough. I tried to talk to her for a minute, and all she did was rant about how the bar couldn’t compare to clubs in NYC. I don’t know why you always go for snobbish, rude, shallow girls.”
“I know why,” Jordan says. He adjusts his glasses. “He goes for women he knows he’ll never fall for. That’s the safe route.”
“Totally,” Leo agrees. “You got it, Jordan, bro. That’s the pop psychology version of it.”
Jordan hooks his thumb to the door. His eyes, behind his lenses, drill into mine. “She’s different, dude. She was nice to us. She seems grounded. Thoughtful, kind, genuine. She’s special, and you know it.”
I do know it.
But it doesn’t matter.
“Guys, quit giving me crap about the women I pick. I don’t give you a hard time about your wives.”
“That’s because Anna is an angel.” Jordan adjusts his mic.
We all know we have to get started soon with this recording.
Time is money. We all have busy schedules. We book two hours for this once a week, and we don’t go over.
So, if we don’t start soon, we’ll be screwed.
I peer into my laptop and pull up the script we’ll be working off of.
“Yeah, she is.” I’ve envied Jordan because of his rock-solid relationship with Anna in the past.
That envy doesn’t serve me, so I don’t indulge in it anymore. At least, I haven’t in a long time.
For some reason, though, today, it wells up. Anna is loyal, nice, smart, and funny. She’s a good person to the core. Jordan hit the lottery when he met her. Though he’ll tell me we’re best buds, I know in my heart that his best friend is really Anna, and she has been since they tied the knot years and years ago.
I can’t have a relationship like that, I remind myself.
I tried, and it didn’t work.
When I met Mia, I got caught up in thoughts about the future. I thought I could have what I saw my friends getting: perfect love.
I watched my parents divorce when I was young. I knew marriage was a risk, and I went for it anyway. I thought maybe if I tried hard enough, I could do better than my parents did.
I thought maybe Mia and I would make it.
We didn’t, though.
Not even close.
The arguments started during our honeymoon. How embarrassing is that? We couldn’t even manage to get along for even one week before it all fell apart. Like a windshield, cracked and broken into thousands of pieces on impact.
A fleeting memory of the car accident fills me: Blood. Her screams.
I shudder.
I can’t have love because I never want to cause that much pain ever again.
That accident was my fault. I was distracted by our argument.
When I’m honest with myself, I see that there were ominous hints of our destruction before it ever happened.
There were fault lines under the surface of our relationship before we got hitched. It took getting married to really bring them up into the light. Once we both had those rings on, those thin fault lines ruptured into wide, gaping canyons.
The car accident was the last straw—the thing that finally tore us apart in a way we couldn’t recover from.
She was in the hospital longer than I was, but I paid my dues, too. Three weeks with a wired-shut jaw. Stitches to my temple. Ear surgery, which fixed the cosmetic damage but couldn’t give me back my hearing on the left side.
When we finally flew home from Hawaii, it was with the seeds of divorce in both of our hearts. She filed the minute we got back to Austin, Texas, where we lived at the time. Not that it really mattered which one of us got the paperwork rolling. I couldn’t wait to sign those papers when they landed on my desk.
I couldn’t wait to get out.
And the minute I was free, I made that promise to myself: Never again.
Some guys are cut out for marriage. Some aren’t.
My friends love having wives and having kids. Me? I’m on this journey of life solo, and that’s just the way it has to be.
I click open the recording software. “You guys got your scripts up?” I bark.
Jordan catches Leo’s eye.
Leo shakes his head.
But Jordan doesn’t seem to like the unspoken advice. “No. I gotta say something.” He leans forward and drills his eyes into me again. “Anna’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I know Leo feels the same about Brianna. Dude, you’re spinning your wheels with these mean, negative women because you know they’re not right for you. You know they’ll never make you feel anything. Anything real.”
“I don’t want to hear this.” My jaw clenches.
Leo sighs. “Jordan’s right, man. We don’t talk about it with you ‘cause you get like this. But, seriously. You’re thirty-seven. What are you waiting for?”
“I’m not waiting. I don’t wait for anything. I made decisions about my life. I don’t want the same things you guys want.”
“You want to have a family, right?” Jordan asks. “Kids are a lot of work, but they’re awesome. Piper and Julia, man, they make my life full.”
“Are we gonna record this, or what?” I mess with the software, checking that all the settings are right.
Really, I’m blocking them out.
Because they can give me all the advice they want. I won’t hear it.
I know that their families make them happy. I’ve seen Jordan light up around his kids and wife. I’ve seen him mature, grow, and become a better person, a better man. And I know Leo is the same with Bri. They’ll have their daughter soon.
Leo clicks his computer. “Jordan, we’ve nagged him enough. Any more, and he’ll be cranky for the episode.”
“Hang on. One more thing,” Jordan says. “Just one more.” He points to the door. “That Gwen woman is nice. You guys clearly click. I mean, you looked like a couple over there. You both looked ridiculously happy to see each other.”
Leo nods. “I saw it, too. You guys couldn’t get enough of each other. You got chemistry with her.”
“For your sake, Brock,” Jordan says, “Don’t let that go to waste.”
I stoop to pick up the ball of paper Jordan chucked at me earlier. “Big words of wisdom coming from the butthead that threw paper at me five minutes ago like a class clown.” I lob the crumpled paper at his head, but he catches it.
He laughs and chucks it at the wall. It ricochets off and into the bin. “All right, fine. I’m a butthead, but so are you. Are we gonna record this thing, or what?”
“Let’s do it,” I say.
I get busy hooking my mic to my laptop. Inside, I’m at war.
They say I have chemistry with Gwen.
I know they’re right. This thing between us is growing fast, and if I’m not careful, I’m going to let it get the best of me.
But I have to be careful with her.
I can’t do anything stupid. I can’t cross any lines—even though that is exactly what I want to do.