What am I supposed to say?Hey, boss, funny story: I’m going blind in three months, so I thought I’d practice navigating the office and accidentally felt you up instead? Sort of a “task failed successfully” situation.
“I was… testing something.”
“Were the results satisfactory?”
There is something in his tone that makes heat crawl up my neck. Which is ridiculous, obviously. This is Bastian Hale. He dates women with billboards of their faces and sexually explicit pop songs on the radio. He is genetically incapable of innuendo with anyone below the executive level. I am not a potential sex partner in his eyes—I am a worm, a speck of dirt.
“I’d call it a work-in-progress.” I start to turn. “I should go. It’s been a long day.”
“Hm.” He doesn’t move out of my way. “And your solution to this long day was to wander around in the dark?”
“It’s been a long,complicatedday.”
“I run a multi-billion-dollar hospitality empire, Hunter. I eat complicated for breakfast. Usually with a side of impossible and a light garnish of inadvisable.”
Despite everything—the diagnosis, the darkness, the fact that I just had my hands all over my boss’s chesticles—I feel my lips twitch into something like a smile. “That’s a lot of adjectives for breakfast.”
“I’m a hungry man.” He is still standing too close, close enough that I can see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw. “Try me.”
I look up at him. At Bastian Hale, the talent, the terror, the bane of my existence and the name signed on the bottom of my paychecks.
And for just a second, I consider telling him.
Because God knows I’ve been bearing so much for so long. Dad left when I was too young to even memorize his face, and Mom has always been basically a child in a grown woman’s body, so I raised her far more than she ever raised me. And life is hard enough on people who get lots of lucky breaks, but I’ve never gotten one of those, not once, not ever—I’ve gotten food stamps and bruised shins and syrup-less lattes, and I’ve worked until my eyes ached and my fingernails cracked for nothing but pitiful pennies, but I did it because I had to, becausesomeonehas to, because it’s a brutal world and the only way to make it through is to put your head down and work, and work, andwork. And for once, justonce, it would be nice to look someone in the eye and tell them that I could use a bit of kindness today, because it’s been a long life and kindness has been in short supply since the start of it.
But I don’t. I don’t say any of that. Why would I? What would it get me—especially fromthisman?
Bastian Hale doesn’t do vulnerability. He does efficiency and excellence and probably some other e-words that I can’t think ofright now because my brain is still processing the whole shirtless thing. But vulnerability?
No. Not once. Not ever.
As if to prove me wrong, though, Bastian’s face softens just a fraction. “Go home, Hunter. Whatever’s going on, it’ll still be there in the morning.”
That is the problem, though: It won’t be. Not quite. Every morning, there’ll be a little less. A little less light, a little less color, a little less of everything I’ve taken for granted.
And then in ninety days, there won’t be anything.
2
ELIANA
mis·fire: /'mis?fi(?)r/: noun
1: when a dish doesn’t cook as intended.
2: when a perfectly nice gesture gets torched to bits by a pompous, self-important bosshole.
I give up on sleep around 3 A.M., which is probably for the best, since my brain has decided to run a highlight reel of last night’s mortification on loop.
But that brain, being the saucy little minx that it sometimes likes to be, has scripted averydifferent ending for the encounter.
In real life, the whole debacle couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, tops. Deep in the throes of this REM cycle, though, five minutes becomes five centuries. Every detail gets magnified.
It’s not just Bastian Hale’s chest I’m seeing anymore. It’s every blonde hair on said chest, enhanced into ultra-crystal-clear 4K HD. Every curve of every muscle is there like brushstrokes on a painting when you’re close enough for your nose to almost graze the canvas.
It’s not just “tattoo.” It’s the spread wings of an eagle, inked into skin that’s tan and warm and smells like soap and wintergreen.
And it’s not just “Care to explain what you’re doing?” Now, because I’m sick, because my thoughts are sick and my fantasies are sick (and probably also because I haven’t experienced sexual contact since the last presidential administration), it’s Bastian’s voice purring something very, very different:
