SEVENTEEN
Colt
I haven’t gotten decent sleep since Rowan climbed out of that car. Every time I close my eyes, I see that look on her face while she stood off on the side of the road. She looked at me the same way she did when she told me about her father’s drinking; only this time, it wasn’t him who had hurt her.
Maybe I shouldn’t have taken her with me. I know it was selfish, but I wanted to have her to myself for a while, away from work, away from the real world. In the little vacuum of that night, I didn’t have to worry about being seen with her, even by Davis. He was too busy to care about what I was doing, where I was, or who I was with. It was just the two of us in a world that didn’t really exist.
My eyes flick to my office door every thirty seconds until Rowan rounds the corner, and I feel like I can breathe a bit easier when my eyes finally find her. I wait for her normal, bubbly greeting, but it never comes. Instead, she silently removes her coat and sets her bag down before pulling out her tablet.
“Happy Monday, Rowan,” I tell her, pasting on a smile in attempt to go back to some sort of normalcy with her.
“Morning.” Swiping through her tablet, without so much as a glance in my direction, she tells me, “You have a meeting with Mr. Davis and a Nash Montgomery in twenty minutes. I’ll go prep the conference room.”
Great. Meetings with Nash always go so well.
She turns on her heel and leaves my office, tablet in hand. I don’t see much of her until the meeting, during which she sits silently next to me, as far away as she can without it looking out of place, taking notes on our discussion.
Normally, she would ask me questions or offer insight, eager to learn, but not today. Today, she’s there to work and nothing more. No interest in the way that the business is run or why we’re making the decisions that we do. It feels half empty in here without her eager participation.
The day feels like it drags on; when I’m certain that it’s almost time to shut everything down and head home, the clock tells me that it’s only four in the afternoon. I’ll be here for at least another two and a half hours, though probably longer.
Rowan doesn’t perk up at all throughout the day, and she barely gives me a second glance, always finding something else to focus on when she speaks to me. Or finding a way to avoid speaking to me entirely.
After nearly the three-millionth ‘yup’ of the day, I’ve had enough. I brace my hands on my desk and stand.
“If you insist on acting like a child—”
“A child?” She barks with a raised voice, then turns to look over her shoulder and carefully molds her voice into something between whispering and shouting. “Let me just remind you thatyouinvitedmeout,youflirted withmeall night, andyouare the one who kissedme. You embarrassed me and made me look like a complete idiot; the easy assistant who will give it up to her boss just because. No. I don’t have any more room in my life for inconsistent men.So I just wanna clock in, do my job, and go home,Mr. Fowler.”
The way she says Mr. Fowler is so formal, it damn near cuts right through me. I step behind her and close the door, making sure to lock it this time.
“I’m sorry that I hurt you,” I tell her.
Her lips press together in an attempt to hide their trembling, and she looks to the wall behind me, taking a breath to steady herself before speaking. Pain shows bright as day from behind her eyes.
“The worst part is that I really believed you were interested. That someone like you could actually care about someone like me. Like you’d be the one to ride in on your stupid, shiny white horse and make the world okay for a while. I don’t know if I’m more mad at myself for believing that, even for a minute, or at you for turning into a frog when the clock struck midnight.”
“Rowan,” I breathe.
Every corner of my mind and body screams at me to reach out and grab her, pull her into my arms and say fuck everything and everyone else, this is mine. I’ve imagined a lot of things with her, things I would do to her, but making her cry was nowhere on that list. I wanted to protect her from pain, not inflict it upon her.
“I have to file these before end of business,” she says with a shaky voice as she gathers up a few papers from my desk. “Excuse me.”
Shouldering past me, she unlocks the door and slips out, taking another deep breath as she does. Saturday night replays through my mind, over and over, and I can’t help thinking about everything that I should have done differently.
I don’t normally act without consideration of the big picture, but I did that night, and I know it. She shouldn’t have even been there. She certainly shouldn’t have been alone with me in that car. And I should have never let hertouch me the way she did. I should have moved her hand away, not treated it as an open invitation.
•
With all of the employees gone for the evening, I reach into a cabinet that rests against the far wall of my office, nestled between the wall and the settee, and I pull out a fresh bottle of thirty-five year aged whiskey and a crystal rocks glass.
I was saving the whiskey for a special occasion, anything that might have me feeling celebratory in the office or if a particularly important guest came in, but I suppose a day like this will do, too.
I crack the bottle open and pour a generous four fingers into the glass, then find my way back to my desk, sit back in my chair, and kick my feet up. I swallow all of Rowan’s words down with the whiskey, trying to wash them away like the bitter pill that they were.
She was right. About everything.
I consider giving myself a refill when the glass is empty and my mind still isn’t, but that face flashes behind my eyelids again – the pain etched so deeply into each of her features as she looked at her father’s car. I’ve done enough. I refuse to add to that.
