Chapter Six
“Game on, myass,” I muttered beneath my breath as I crammed two more folders into their proper spots in the filing cabinet and slammed the drawer shut.
I reached out and grabbed another stack of folders that Chris had been through yesterday and opened another drawer on the filing cabinet.
It had been a little over a week since I’d last seen or heard from Landen Weber. Exactly ten days.
For all his talk of wanting to get to know me and hating to share, he sure didn’t seem to give a shit.
I huffed out another breath and went about replacing the files. Just as I suspected, even though I’d handled a lot of things while Chris was gone on his honeymoon, work had still piled up. So much so that we were scrambling to finish everything in the ten-hour days we’d been pulling since his return to the office on Monday. I hadn’t even had time to meet Grier for our twice-weekly walks after work.
It was now Thursday and Chris was determined that we wouldn’t work over the weekend. He wanted to spend that time with his new wife and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to miss out on hot monkey sex either.
And, yes, I knew they were still going at it like crazy because Lucy was an oversharer. I’d asked her repeatedly not to tell me about her sexcapades with my boss, but she refused, stating that I’d been her friend before I was his employee and it was “hoes before bros.” Whatever that meant.
In my case, there was no hot monkey sex in my immediate future. Those hopes had been dashed a week ago when I realized that Landen wasn’t going to call me. Our first date had gone so much better than I thought it would, though he’d only given me one more of those barely-there lip touches before putting me into my car ten days ago.
Then nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero.
No texts, no calls, not even a motherfucking email. After all his talk, Landen had walked.
At first I’d been hurt, but now I’d moved on to pissed. I might not look like a supermodel, but I wasn’t hard on the eyes. I was reasonably intelligent and, dammit, I was fucking funny.
I could have called him. I could have made the next move. I knew that. But the problem was that I was tired of having to do that. Every time I was truly interested in a man, I would make an effort. If I didn’t hear from him after a few days, I would text. If he didn’t respond then I moved on. But many times, they would reply and we would end up trading texts or voicemails for a few weeks before things would fizzle out. I’d decided a few months ago that I would no longer do that. If a man enjoyed my company then he could let me know. If I messaged him and he didn’t reply within a day or two, I wrote him off. I wasn’t going to waste any more time on someone who couldn’t be bothered to reply to a text.
I deserved better than the treatment Landen was giving me. If he’d decided he didn’t want to get to know me better as he claimed, he should have had the balls to tell me. At this point I’d even take an impersonal email that said, “It’s not you, it’s me.”
Never mind. I deserved better than that too.
I deserved to be chased. To be pursued. I deserved a man who couldn’t wait to talk to me, who liked spending time with me, even if we were just sitting on the couch in our pajamas and watching crappy television.
I deserved someone that wanted me enough to make an effort for me.
And it was painfully clear that Landen Weber wasn’t going to be that man. Which just proved my initial assessment that anything romantic between us wouldn’t work despite our off-the-charts chemistry.
Meh, who needed fucking chemistry? I didn’t. I hadn’t used any of my basic chemistry knowledge since high school when Maura Charles and I built homemade stink bombs that had ended up exploding inside her car on the way to school rather than in the girls’ locker room as planned.
I sighed. That’s how much he affected me. I was remembering things better left forgotten because even thinking about those stink bombs made the specter of that smell return.
“Why don’t you go take a break, Chelsea?”
I jumped and shrieked at the sound of Chris’ voice behind me in the storage room. Whirling around with a hand over my pounding heart, I leaned back against the filing cabinet and stared at him.
“You scared the crap out of me!”
He lifted both hands and the corners of his mouth twitched. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
I pushed myself off the filing cabinet and straightened my shirt. “Now, what were you saying?”
“Why don’t you go take a break?” he repeated. “You’ve been here since six-thirty. Go grab a coffee and walk around for a bit or something.”
I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I had no idea what that expression meant but my mother used to say it all the time and the older I got, the more I found myself repeating things that usually came out of her mouth. Maybe I should get a t-shirt that said,Sorry, when I open my mouth, my mother comes out.I knew my dad would get a kick out of it even if Mom didn’t.
“All right. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I stated, skirting past him.
“Take twenty or thirty.”
I frowned at him but shrugged. “Okay then.”
