Chapter 19
On the scale of suckage, working with Natalie isn’t as bad as, say, smacking your thumb with a hammer. Nor does it bite as hard as whacking your knee on the entertainment center you just installed in a newly renovated Tribeca loft for a famous director, and his superstar actress wife.
Sure, smacks and whacks are an occupational hazard, but the last time I nailed myself twice in one day .
. . wait, that sounds really dirty. Anyway, suffice to say, the ice age I’m not enjoying with Natalie is throwing me off my game at work.
But I do my best to shove all thoughts of her from my mind so I can finish the Tribeca job.
It’s not easy. Natalie seems to occupy an annoyingly large portion of my mental real estate these days, and I’d like to evict her.
At the very least, I’d like to relocate her to the just coworkers portion of my brain.
When I return to the office to drop off the tools, Natalie is chatting on the phone. “Perfect. I’ll be there tonight. Sixty-Fourth and Lex. I really appreciate you thinking of me for the extra class.”
I raise an eyebrow and give her a thumbs-up. Call me Encyclopedia Brown, but I’m guessing she scored another karate gig. When she hangs up, I hold my arms out wide. “Kicking ass and taking names?”
She smiles, and all is right with the world.
In her grin, I can feel the tension that’s been strung between us since Vegas seep away.
We’re back to who we were before. We’re the coworkers who support each other.
We’re the colleagues who eat spicy food together.
We’re all good. “Yes. Another dojo has me on its substitute list. I’m thrilled. ”
I narrow my brow. “Substitute list? You should be doing your own classes.”
She shrugs. “It’s fine. It works for me.”
“But how is that helping you with your videos and building your rep as a teacher? People should want to come to your classes, not stumble upon you when you’re filling in for some schmo who can’t make his own session.”
“It works for me, Wyatt,” she says crisply, and maybe I’m not back in her good graces after all.
“I just think you’re selling yourself short.”
“Don’t worry about it. Really, I’m fine.” She taps the pile of checks on her desk. “Some bills are due. I filled out the checks. If you could just sign them, I can get them in the mail on my way out.”
She hands me a pen, and I feel like I’ve been scolded and sent to bed without supper.
Maybe I spoke out of line. I can’t read her anymore.
I bend lower to sign, and I’m so close I can smell her.
I swallow dryly, remembering what it was like to run my nose along her hair, to drag my lips over her skin, to breathe her in.
I curse myself for never going down on her that night.
What was I thinking? My mouth waters as I sign the checks and dream about kneeling under the desk between her legs and burying my face under that skirt.
Tasting her sweet heat. Licking her, sucking her, lapping her up.
“Fuck,” I mutter.
“What’s wrong?”
My dick is an iron spike and my brain is a carousel of images of your supremely tantalizing naked body, that’s what’s wrong. But we can solve it easily if you’d spread your legs and let me eat you out right the fuck now.
“Nothing’s wrong. All good.” I wave a hand dismissively, and try to position myself so my hard-on isn’t visible.
A memory flickers, of Natalie telling me on the pinball machine that she used to check me out at work.
I wonder if she still does. If her eyes are on my crotch once more, and if she’s pleased with the effect she’s had.
If she’d like to do anything to ease the ache I feel right now.
And most of all I wonder if she feels the same.
“Last check,” she says, sliding the final one in front of me, her hands dangerously near to my dick. “It’s my paycheck.”
I lift the pen over the signature line and begin to give it my John Hancock, when I flinch. The amount is wrong.
“What’s that?” I point to the check. I’m not thinking about what’s between her legs anymore. I’m thinking about what she’s doing with my business.
“We call it a check. It’s like a promise for money. You take it to the bank and they give you cash in that amount,” she says, and her tone is half-playful, like maybe we’ve gone back to getting along.
But my question wasn’t so fundamental. “I meant, why is that the amount? It’s wrong,” I say, tapping the black ink she filled in earlier.
“That’s my normal pay.”
I heave a sigh as an unfamiliar anger courses through me. I’m not a guy with a temper. I don’t get pissed off. But if she’s doing what I think she’s doing, this makes me fucking mad. “I gave you a raise, Natalie.” My voice is strung tight. “Did you forget?”
She lifts her face. Her eyes look guilty, but her words seem certain. “I didn’t forget. I just figured it no longer applied.”
I press my hands onto her desk and stare her down. “We annulled the marriage, not the employment.”
“I just thought it was one of those things.”
“One of what things?”
“One of those things you say when you’re drunk,” she fires back.
I grit my teeth and breathe in hard through my nostrils. “But yet I meant it.”
She pushes back in her chair. “Look, I didn’t want to be presumptuous and assume the raise still applied. I didn’t want to put you in a position where you felt obligated,” she says, enunciating that last word with precision, and it almost feels as if she’s throwing it back at me for some reason.
And that pisses me off even more. These last few weeks have been nothing but us tiptoeing around each other, and now here she is making motherfucking decisions for my business that she’s not authorized to make.
“This is my company. I decide what to pay you.” I don’t raise my voice. She gets my meaning by the coldness of my tone, and the way I hold up the check and rip it down the middle.
I grab a new one and write the correct amount.
A bigger amount. I hand it to her. “I told you I was giving you a ten percent raise, and I meant it. I made you a promise, and I goddamn intend to stick to it, whether I had a few beers or not. I’m a man of my word, and I sure as hell expect the people I work with to treat me like it and to act the same way. ”
“Thank you.” With shaky hands, she takes the check, lowers her face, grabs her purse, and scurries far away from me. I sink down in her chair, anger seething through me, and I drop my head in my hands.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
I shouldn’t be so pissed. I know that. But tell that to the fury that’s racing through me right now.
I hate feeling like this. I pride myself on being a laidback guy, and I’m the opposite of that now.
I head home, change into shorts, and work out in the gym in my building, lifting more weight than I should, running faster than I usually do, and generally pushing myself into stupid-guy zone, because I’m pissed.
And I hardly know why.
But after a hot shower at home, the knotted up thoughts begin to untangle. Soon enough, I know why I’m mad.
It’s not because she tried to subvert me by paying herself less. That’s ridiculous.
It’s not because we were drunk and pieces of the night are still a haze to me.
It’s because we’re not the same. We didn’t go back to being Natalie and Wyatt.
We went into full-on boss-assistant mode, and I liked it much better when we had a good time together at work, before work became as pleasant as a root canal.
I pull on jeans and a T-shirt, drag my fingers through my mostly dry hair, and leave my building in the West Fifties.
I hoof it across town and hope to hell she’s still at the dojo on Sixty-Fourth.
As the clock ticks toward nine, the lights from the studio shine brightly, and I spot Natalie inside, closing the place.
Jamming my thumbs into the pockets of my jeans, I wait.
A few minutes later, the lights flicker and turn off. The door opens, and Natalie locks it then turns around.
“Oh.” Her eyes widen.
“Hey,” I say softly.
“Hey.” Her tone matches mine, and that instant gentleness is like a caress.
“I was an ass. I’m sorry.”
She smiles. “It’s all right. I shouldn’t have—”
I cut her off. This one is on me. “No. I would have done the same if I were you. I should never have put you in the position of doubting what I would pay you. Is that why you took the substitute job? Because you weren’t sure if the raise was real?”
She nods guiltily. “I needed the extra money.”
My heart falls. “I’m sorry, Nat. I mean it. I don’t want you to doubt your value, or my words, or what I promise you. I need to do better. I want to do better. And I want to pay you what you deserve for the amazing job you do.”
“Thank you.”
“I couldn’t run the business without you. That’s why you got a raise. No other reason.”
“Thank you. I really appreciate that.”
“You really deserve it.” I take a beat. “So are we good?”
“We’re good,” she says, and for the first time since I woke up with a hangover, I feel like that might be true.
Her stomach rumbles, and I smile. “I think you might want something else, though. Dinner? I’m buying. Burgers and beer?”
The grin that stretches across her face is the first one since we returned from Vegas that feels like her. Like the woman I’ve known. “I’m in.”
The smile reassures me, too—tells me that sliding back into who we were before is going to be so damn easy.
I just know it.