“Is this okay?”
“To be inside me while we sleep? It’s more than okay,” she said, turning her face to kiss me. “It’s perfect.”
I squeezed her nipple and kissed her neck tenderly, feeling her warmth around my cock.
“I love you,” she whispered, holding me tight, even as my mind was racing.
“I love you too,” I muttered, holding her hand in mine.
But after she slept, I kept wondering if Lexi was right about her opinion of my dad, no matter how much it had hurt. And the hurt on Lexi’s face when I argued with her haunted me as I closed my eyes later that night.
60
LEXI
My disagreement with Jonah about his Dad was quickly replaced by nervousness about the final week of my internship.
“And that’s my proposal for the developer tool that lets engineers trace coding bugs in user workout sessions in half the time,” I said, addressing the few people in the conference room, clicking to the final slide titledQ&A.
I turned to face the leadership team. Maria Witherson, the head of Developer Experience, and Gregory Fisher, who led Product Engineering for the consumer-facing fitness app, in addition to Brian, Stacey and Rafael. My hands felt cold even though the room was warm, and I gave what I hoped was a confident smile.
Brian and Stacey had been optimistic and encouraging, but Rafael had sat tight-lipped through it all, stealing angry looks at Stacey occasionally. I hated that he couldn’t let their past go.
“Any questions?” I asked, forcing myself to stay focused on the presentation I was giving.
When I’d told Jonah I was intimidated about this presentation, the final milestone of my internship, he had toldme to keep it short. “Just a walkthrough of what you’ve done,” he’d said like it was no big deal. But standing here, in this glass-walled conference room, I felt every ounce of the pressure. It helped a little that Jonah had come to the meeting, standing at the very back and listening without uttering a word.
Maria had barely glanced at me the entire time. I’d only seen her once during a meeting over Zoom, and now here she was in person, arms folded, quietly evaluating me. Her expression didn’t give anything away.
I risked a glance at the screen again: graphs of the current duration engineers took to debug code without such a tool and ones after my tool was used. One of the staff engineers who’d tested it had told me it had saved him three hours over a week.
Gregory leaned forward. “Is this compatible with both iOS and Android builds?”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
Maria finally looked up. “You built this alone?”
I nodded. “I asked for feedback from QA and DevOps, but yeah, the coding and integration was all me.”
A beat passed. Maria raised one brow slightly and looked at Jonah. He didn’t respond, but something in his posture shifted, and he looked a little more relaxed.
The moment the others began standing and collecting their things, I let myself exhale. I’d made it through without any glaring mistakes, and hopefully, it would earn me solid references when I left. I knew there’d never be a full-time job available for me here.
Soon the room cleared out, and it was just Jonah and me.
I exhaled deeply, glad to have it over with, when I felt Jonah’s gaze on me. I looked up at him. We were alone in the room, and unlike the others, he wasn’t eager to leave.
“That was a fantastic presentation,” he said, leaning away from the wall and walking over to me. The door had fallen shut, and he held me tight as he kissed me.
I could tell he’d been fighting the urge to interrupt during my entire presentation. He knew I was nervous, and his first instinct would be to step in take control. But he’d promised me he’d stay back and let me speak on my own.
We broke apart and I rested my head on his chest, feeling relaxed.
“To celebrate, I’ve made plans for the three of us to go see a musical, and after that, we’re having dinner at Per Se.”
I guessed that was a fancy upscale restaurant whose name I should have been able to recognize, but I was more intrigued by something else. “Is that an order or a request?” I asked, with a knowing smile at him.
He huffed. “Well, I suppose it’s a request that I’m not letting you dismiss.”
