8
Milo
I think I majorly fucked up.
I don’t know what came over me when I offered a hand job to my boss. Except I know exactly what came over me, because it has a name, and the name is my stupid, inappropriate crush on Spencer Rhodes.
Saturday morning, I come downstairs at seven with a plan. The plan is: act normal. Make breakfast, say something dumb about the weather, let yesterday sit exactly where yesterday belongs, which is yesterday. I can do this.
Spencer’s already at the island when I get down there, coffee in front of him, laptop open, and he doesn’t look up. I say good morning. He says good morning back, flat, eyes on the screen, and that’s the whole exchange.
I make eggs anyway, because if I stop moving I’m going to start thinking, and if I start thinking I’m going to remember the sound he made when I had my hand on him, and I cannot be standing at a stove holding a hot pan while that particular memory runs through my head uninvited.
He eats in about four bites, standing up, plate in the sink before I’ve even sat down with mine, and then he’s gone to his home office.
I eat alone at the island and stare at the door.
Okay. So. This is fine. This is a completely normal thing that happens between a man and his employee, hand stuff in a dressing room, very standard, very much covered under the general PA umbrella of tasks.
I sit there running that joke around in my head until it stops being funny, which takes about four seconds.
And then I’m sitting with the actual math of it: I touched my boss’s dick.
Now he can’t look at me, and I have a lease on nothing, no savings, and everything I own in one duffel bag, and I’d started believing this job was going to fix all three.
I clean the kitchen even though I don’t have to, wiping down a counter that’s already clean, because my hands need a job.
By ten, my thumb’s starting to cramp from refreshing my phone for a text or an email that isn’t coming.
By eleven, I’ve convinced myself he’s drafting an email to HR, except he doesn’t have an HR, he has me, which means I’d have to fire myself, and that thought makes me laugh out loud, alone in the kitchen, which is its own small tragedy.
By noon my nerves have gone quiet, but only because they’re tired of screaming. I’ve moved from the kitchen to the living room, curled into the corner of a couch, when Spencer finally comes out of his office.
He stands in the doorway a second, hand still on the frame.
“I’m going out tonight,” he says. “A date. I probably won’t be back until tomorrow.”
I sit up straighter and get my face under control. “Oh. Okay. Cool.”
“You’ll have the house to yourself.” He says it like he’s handing me a schedule update, which, I remind myself, is essentially what this is. That’s the job: calendar, logistics. None of it is supposed to mean anything to me, but it does.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll, um. I don’t know, have a party. Invite the neighbors. Really let loose.”
He doesn’t smile at that, obviously, because it’s Spencer, but his shoulders let go half an inch, like maybe he was bracing for me to make this weird and I didn’t, quite.
Then, like it just occurred to him: “Could you get me condoms before you leave for the day? There’s a pharmacy on the corner that has the brand I prefer. I’ll text you the details.”
The words land behind my sternum and sit there.
I’ve felt this before, watching guys I liked walk off with somebody else.
It’s jealousy, plain and simple, and I have zero right to it, none, because Spencer Rhodes is not mine, was never going to be mine, is in fact currently planning a date that is going to end with him using the condoms he just asked me to purchase on his behalf, since I’m the PA, since this is the job.
I swallow all of it down into a small, hard ball under my ribs.
“Sure,” I say, in the exact neutral pitch I’ve spent years perfecting. “Not a problem, boss.”
He nods, already turning. I listen to him take the stairs, and then the office door shuts above me, and the house goes quiet.
I get the text from him a few minutes later, make a run to the pharmacy, leave the bag on the island where he’ll see it, and wait in my room until I hear the garage door and the house is finally empty.
I sit there with my phone in my hand for a long minute. I told myself all week I’d go check on my mom today, actually show up instead of just calling, bring her something from the good grocery store, sit on her couch and let her fuss over me for an hour.
Instead, I scroll to my friend Emily’s contact and hit call before I can talk myself out of it.
She picks up on the second ring. “Hey, stranger, you ghosting me?”
“Can you meet me for drinks tonight?” I say, and I hear my own voice crack on the last word.
There’s a pause on the other end, the kind Emily takes when she’s listening instead of waiting for her turn to talk. “Yeah,” she says, all the teasing gone out of it. “Yeah, of course. Where?”
***
A few hours later, we’re wedged into a corner table at a cocktail bar that puts fruit on everything and charges you extra for the privilege, and I’m two glasses into a wine I couldn’t name if you paid me, trying to figure out where to start.
“Okay,” she says, both elbows on the table, chin in her hands. “Start from the beginning, because all I got over the phone was you sounding like somebody ran over your dog.”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Figuratively, Milo.”
So I start from the beginning, and I tell her all of it except yesterday, because that particular chapter is staying locked in a vault I intend to bury at sea. I tell her about the parking lot and the guy who seemed like an enormous stalker and was also offering me the best job I’ve ever had.
“Wait.” Emily puts her drink down. “Let me get this right. Some guy watched you get fired, waited for you in the parking lot, and offered you a job on the spot?”
“That’s the short version, yeah.”
“And you took it.”
“I had fifty bucks to my name, Em. I wasn’t exactly negotiating from strength.”
She laughs, but it’s the easy laugh, the one that’s been part of every shift we ever worked together. “Okay, fine, so who is this guy? Some finance bro? Please tell me he’s not, like, forty and married.”
“He’s not forty and married.” I turn my glass a slow half circle on the table, working up to it. “He’s… Spencer Rhodes.”
Emily blinks. “Wait. As in—”
“Yeah.”
“The Spencer Rhodes? Knights, strong safety, Spencer Rhodes?”
“Please keep your voice down.” I glance at the two tables nearest us, neither of which is paying us any attention at all, but I say it anyway, because saying his full name out loud in public feels like setting off an alarm.
Emily leans in across the table, voice dropping low, eyes wide. “You’re telling me you’ve been living in Spencer Rhodes’ house?”
“For two weeks, yeah.”
“As his personal assistant?”
“That’s the job title.”
She sits back against the booth, staring at me like I’ve informed her I’ve secretly been a foreign dignitary this whole time, and then she leans forward again, elbows back on the table, grin spreading. “And you have a crush on your very famous, very straight NFL star employer.”
“Yeah,” I say, before I can stop myself, before I remember that admitting it out loud, even to Emily, even in a bar where nobody’s listening, makes it a real thing instead of a thing I only think at three in the morning.
Emily bursts out laughing.
Not a polite laugh, either, not a little exhale through the nose.
A full, unhinged, head-back laugh that has her gripping the edge of the table, and it goes on and on, a solid minute of her wheezing while I watch her lose it.
Two guys at the bar turn to look at us, and the bartender glances over like he’s trying to figure out if he needs to intervene.
I wait her out, arms crossed, saying nothing, because there is nothing to say to someone in that condition.
Finally, she wipes under one eye with a knuckle, breath still hitching, and says, “Okay. Very funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“That. This. The whole thing you just did.” She waves a hand at me, still grinning. “Very good bit, honestly, ten out of ten delivery. I almost believed you for a second there.”
“I’m serious, Em.”
She looks at me the way she used to reread a ticket when an order came out wrong, checking for the tell. I let her see what’s sitting on my face right now, and whatever it is, it takes the grin off hers.
“Oh my God,” she says slowly. “You’re serious.”
“I told you I was serious.”
“You have a crush on Spencer Rhodes.”
“Yeah.”
She sets her glass down. This is the focus she gets when she’s decided a situation actually matters. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, wow.”
I look down at my glass, at the wine gone warm from how long I’ve been nursing it, and my chest goes tight.
“Yeah,” I say again, quieter, and Emily’s face softens.
She doesn’t say anything for a second. Then she straightens up, pulls in a long breath, and looks around for the server.
“Okay,” she says. “I have a lot of questions. But we’re going to need a lot more wine for this.”