My gaze drops to the phone in my hand while my face heats. “Oh. Um. Yeah. Printer malfunction. Senior partner on the war path. You know how it goes.”
He gives me a sad smile. “Yeah, of course.”
Dominic and Karim seem to break out of their spell. Dominic says, “I guess we’ll go sit down.”
Karim says, “It was nice to meet you,” and his voice is like silk. Somehow I feel very small and scruffy next to him, and I don’t even know who he is.
“I’m sorry,” I say when they’re gone.
“No, it’s fine.” Nash runs a hand over the front of his pants, like that’s going to do anything about the wine. “I didn’t really want to spend the next hour sitting here in damp underwear anyway.”
“I’ll text you when I’m done?”
“Yeah.” His hand on my arm is gentle. “Yeah. I’ll settle up here for the food they’ve brought out already.”
“I’m really sorry,” I say again.
“It’s fine. We agreed it would be fine.” He leans in and kisses my cheek. I can’t help it when, as he pulls back, I glance over his shoulder. Dominic is watching us, eyes narrowed. I feel like I should flip him off or maybe give him a thumbs-up, so I do neither.
But I do hover for a second longer while guilt eats at my insides.
“Hey,” Nash says. “Go. We’ll have other dates.”
We will. I want to kiss him again—really kiss him—so he knows I believe him, but instead, I finally turn and make my way out of the restaurant.
The printer is fucked. I don’t even know. We change the toner, check the drums, clean the fuser, turn it off and turn it on again about a hundred times. I spend an hour on the phone—forty-five of it on hold—with the dealer’s customer service line and finally we throw in the towel and spend another hour calling all the rush print shops we can find online until we get a hold of someone who is still taking overnight orders and who can have the report ready for her deadline.
“Thank you.” The teary woman actually hugs me when it’s all said and done. She’s been weepy since I arrived. Part of me wants to tell her she needs to find a new job, because whoever her boss is, he can’t be worth this kind of stress and heartache, but who am I to give anyone professional life advice tonight? I didn’t even make it a half hour into my date.
I text Nash as I leave the office.Are you home?
His reply is so fast he must have been waiting for me, and that knowledge makes me feel better.Yeah. Come by. I have leftovers.
He’s got a spread. Tinned seafood packed in oil. Olives so smooth they taste like butter and smoke. Grilled calamari and charred lemon. Roasted bone marrow—he’s been keeping it warm in the oven—that tastes like perfect salty heaven.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I say, leaning back in my chair. His apartment is still too sterile, but I know him so much better than the last time I saw it. He could build a home here. A life. I want to be part of it. I could help.
He shrugs, licking his fingers. “The restaurant offered. I grabbed a seat at the bar while they cooked up the bone marrow and I had another glass of wine.”
I scan the table, but we have picked everything clean. Would it be completely inappropriate if I grabbed the big scraped out cow bone and licked off the last greasy bits?
Instead, I say, “Did Dominic talk to you anymore? After I left?”
His satisfied smile dims a little bit, but he shakes his head. “No.”
I nod. “Had you met his boyfriend before?”
He shakes his head again. Yikes. No wonder the whole thing felt awkward.
“Did you know he had a boyfriend?” I ask.
Nash screws up his mouth for a second, before he says, “The kids told me there might be someone.”
The kids. I haven’t met them. Am I going to? Do I want to? I think of the look my dad gave me when Nash mentioned them. If I’m going to be with Nash, he comes as a package deal. And we don’t have to rush it, but someday, the wall between the life I want with Nash and the life he has with his kids will have to come down. I’ll be a—
Whoa. That thought is big, and a little scary, and kind of exciting, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I come around the table, and Nash pushes back his chair so I can climb into his lap. I straddle him and place my hands on either side of his face to hold him in place and kiss him the way I want to. We both taste like oil and garlic, our tongues slippery against each other. Nash’s hands slide around to my ass, pulling me against him.
