13
Spencer
Milo goes straight up when we get home and I don’t hear him for the next few hours.
I make a late lunch and eat it standing at the island without tasting any of it, then make a second sandwich and leave it under a glass bowl where he’ll see it.
I find my jacket folded over the end of the banister, sleeves tucked, the way you’d hand something back at a store. I leave it there and head for my home office.
Andy’s sent fourteen emails since noon, which is what Andy does when I cancel on him.
The co-packer wants to move the clumping conversation to Thursday, and the consultant wants a call, and Amanda wants to know if I’m dead.
I answer them in order, and it takes longer than it should because I read every sentence twice.
Around eight the pipes come on overhead, and the shower runs longer than it usually does.
At five past nine there are two light knocks on my door.
“Yeah.”
Milo comes in, wearing the cream crop top and high-waisted shorts, white socks pulled up, the Adidas sneakers on his feet. It’s the outfit he showed up in on his first day working for me.
“Hey.” I close the laptop halfway. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” He looks at the bookshelf. “Slept a bunch.”
“Good.”
He takes the chair across the desk and sits right on the front edge of it, both feet flat.
I wait.
“So.” He rubs his palms down the tops of his thighs once. “I’m resigning.”
“No.”
His head comes up. “What?”
“I don’t accept your resignation.”
“That’s not, um.” A short laugh escapes him. “That’s not how resigning works, Spencer. It’s not a negotiation. It’s more of a heads-up.”
“Milo.”
“Please let me finish. I had a whole thing worked out upstairs, and if you talk in the middle of it I’m going to lose the order.”
I sit back and shut my mouth.
“Okay,” he breathes out. “So. I’ll do the handover, obviously.
Whenever you hire the next person, I can do it online, or I can meet them somewhere, or I can come in, whatever’s easiest, and I’ve already started a doc with all of it.
The passwords, the co-packer’s assistant’s cell because he never picks up the main line, the consultant’s actual availability versus what he says his availability is, the fact that Kirsten will do anything for you if you remember her kid’s name is Theo.
It’s a good doc. It’s better than the one I got, which was nothing. ”
“Milo—”
“And Dean.” He plows straight over me. “Dean’s going to that court date.
On the ninth, nine a.m. I will personally put him in a car and I will sit in the room with him, and you’re going to get your ten grand back, and if for some reason you don’t, I’ll pay it.
It’ll take me a very stupid amount of time, and you’d have to be unreasonably patient about it, but you’ll get it. ”
“Are you done?”
He nods.
“Can I ask why you’re resigning?”
“Yeah.” His throat works. “I can’t do this anymore. Be your charity case, that is. I appreciate everything you did, and I mean that. Nobody’s ever, um. Nobody’s done any of that for me. But I can’t keep taking handouts from you.”
“Handouts?”
“Yeah.”
“Milo, it’s not like that.”
“It is.” He shrugs, and his shoulders don’t come all the way back down. “And I’d rather leave now than get a whole lot more hurt later.”
I’m standing before I’ve decided to, coming around the desk, and I stop in front of him, forcing him to look up.
“I’d never hurt you.”
“Yes, you would. Not on purpose. I know exactly what kind of man you are, Spencer. I’ve been living in your house for three weeks, and the worst thing I’ve found out about you is that you called a conference room Sustenance.
But eventually you’ll find someone. Paige, or somebody like her.
Somebody proper, and then I’ll be the guy in the guest room with the calendar, and I just…
I can’t do it. I can’t be in the house for that. ”
“What do you mean?”
Milo closes his eyes, and when he opens them they’re wet at the corners. “I… have feelings for you. And I don’t think I can control them.”
My stomach turns over. “Sunshine—”
He stands up and I go still, because he comes up almost level with me and lifts his chin. I hadn’t realized how tall he is, just an inch shorter than me.
“Thanks for everything you did for me, Spencer. I’ll never forget it.”
I get both hands on his waist. They go around him where the crop top leaves his sides bare, warm skin over ribs, and I turn him, walking him back the two steps to my desk until the edge of it stops him. I put my face close to his.
“And did you think,” I say evenly, “about me when you laid out that plan of yours?”
His mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
My thumbs are pressing into him and I make them ease off, but not by much, because I’m afraid he’s going to slip out of my hands if I do. “Did it occur to you, anywhere in that whole doc and the passwords and the whole speech, that maybe I have feelings for you too?”
He stares at me, his hands coming up and stopping short of my chest.
“I don’t know when it happened,” I say. “I’ve gone back through it and I can’t find the moment.
I’ve got a wall of tape in my head on every game I’ve played, and I can’t get a read on my own.
But you walked into my life and it was easy.
Like it’s never been with anybody. Not with Paige or anyone else.
I sat in that hallway today with your knee against mine and I didn’t want to be anywhere else. ”
Milo’s shaking his head, but I keep going.
“You don’t want to be my PA, fine.” I squeeze his sides. “I get it. There’s a power thing there, and I’ve known it since day one. I’ve done a poor job of it, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. So don’t be my PA. Quit. I’ll write you a reference that gets you hired anywhere you want.”
“Spencer—”
“But don’t leave me.” My throat closes and I go through it.
“I want you here. Not as my assistant. As you, Milo. Whatever you decide to do with your day.” I make myself say the rest of it, because if I stop now he’ll find a way out.
“You want to finish the pastry thing? Do it. You want me to buy you a bakery? I’ll buy you a bakery.
A restaurant, a shop, whatever the version is, I don’t know.
I know a real estate guy in Brooklyn and I’ll have it inside a month. ”
He sputters. “Spencer, you can’t just—”
“I can and I will.”
“That’s… No. That’s not… Do you hear yourself?”
“You’ve been eleven kinds of useful to me since the second you got here.
But the eggs aren’t why. The calendar isn’t why.
You could have never picked up a single call for me, and I’d still be standing right here saying the same thing.
” My hands slide back and up around his ribs and I hold him where he stands.
“This is the part I need you to get: you don’t have to earn any of this. You never did.”
He looks at me and doesn’t blink, but the tears go over. He doesn’t wipe them, and his mouth is trembling at the corner.
He gets a breath in. “You’re crazy.”
I laugh, and it takes me by surprise, and then I’m wet-eyed too, which I haven’t been in years.
“I’m surprised you only noticed that now,” I finally say.
Then we move at the same time. His hands come up and take my face, palms hot along my jaw, and I get a fistful of the back of his top. We crash into each other’s mouths, and it hurts, but neither of us slows down for it.
I get my hands under his thighs and lift him onto the desk.
A pen cup goes over on the far side, pens rolling.
His knees come apart and I step in between them and he pulls me in by the shirt.
I put my hands flat on the desk on either side of his hips and crowd forward until he’s arching to keep hold of my mouth.
“Spencer,” he says against my lips.
I take his mouth again, his fingers pushing up into my hair.
He hooks a leg around the back of mine and pulls me closer, and I let him, and for the first time in three weeks I stop asking myself what I’m allowed to want and just take it.