“You’re really that afraid,” Steele said, less of a question and more of a statement of surprise. “You know, that’s funny, because I always thought the exact opposite.”
“You what?”
Steele nodded. I finally looked back up at him, and he had a bit of a smirk on his face.
“I always saw you as the prude, but the good thing of that, I suppose, is that it meant you were so concerned with having your shit together and being careful that I always imagined you’d be the one most likely to succeed. Let’s face it; Tara was dating me, and I’m not exactly a mentor who’s going to make anyone an executive at any company. I loved Tara, but I never imagined that she would be better than you at work.”
That surprised me. I had always thought of Tara as the golden sister, the one whom my father favored most.
“I figured you’d always stick to doing your work best. It wasn’t hard to get Tara to come over and hang out. But it was a pain in the ass just to get you not to seem miserable at the parties.”
“Well, I was miserable, to be fair,” I said with a laugh. “But part of that was probably jealousy.”
Steele smirked.
“But yeah, hearing you talk about your mother like that, and you asking about my father, I couldn’t agree more. I need to find a way out of my father’s grasp. And I guess…”
“You just have to fucking do it,” Steele said.
I nodded.
“You think too much; that’s your problem,” he continued. “You can’t dive headfirst into anything. You have to be cautious and careful. But this is one thing where you’ll always be able to rationalize why you should stay with your father. You’ll always be able to come up with a good reason having to do with money or your future or whatever. You gotta say fuck it.”
“I gotta say fuck it,” I repeated.
It sounded so unnatural. But I couldn’t lie; it also sounded kind of good. It sounded kind of empowering.
“You say Tara has been able to escape your father’s grasp with ease,” he said. “Which makes me think that you would be able to even more easily. Maybe not in dealing with the emotions, but you’d be able to recover faster. Shit, I’d bet someone like you could land a job that pays way more. Brock and I, in that spot, we’d be making it a game to see who could get the most salary. I don’t know how you two operate, but—”
“That would not happen,” I said, though I had to admit my thoughts weren’t as certain. “But you do make a good point.”
I sighed and smiled. I didn’t think when I had come over here that Steele would be providing me career and leadership advice, but here we were. And you know what? It was actually really good advice.
Not bad for a guy that reeked of oil and gasoline.
“Thanks for providing the advice,” I said. “Even on a night like this for you.”
Steele looked at me, a growing smile on his face. He leaned forward in his chair, his hand resting on his chin.
“It started out as a hell of a night, yeah,” he said. “But it’s gotten better since.”
I knew where this was going. I could see what the inevitable conclusion of this was. And…
I remembered my sister’s words. I thought about how I was feeling right then and there. And…
Boy, I was just trying to look for a reason not to do this. But it was like Steele himself said.You gotta say fuck it.
“You know, when you ran off on me on Thursday,” I said. “I wondered if I’d get to see you again. And now—”
Steele cut me off. He leaned forward, grabbed me, and pulled me in for a kiss.
Holy shit, this is actually happening.
And fuck, he’s a great kisser!
The more wrong it felt, the more I wanted this kiss to last. The more my stomach flared, the more I reached for him and tried to pull him to me. We’d started out in our own respective chairs, but soon, Steele had pulled me to him, and I was straddling him. We were out in the open, but with not a single car having passed us by since everything went down, I almost felt as private as I would have in the bedroom.
God, I was really doing this. My sister’s ex, a man I’d tried to push away by complaining about who he was all the time, but secretly also wanting him all along…oh my God.
