I dropped my tablet on my desk but kept my backpack shouldered. There was no way I’d be having this conversation with him in the corporate fishbowl. We’d need privacy.
“Can you walk and talk?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure.”
He fell into silent step beside me as I left the main, shared floor of BuzzCorp and toward friendlier locales. There were onlyfour places with any privacy here: Clara’s office, the bathroom, the freebies room, and Kevin.
Kevin, named for Kevin Costner, whose movies always madeClaracry, was the remote maintenance closet where she sent me wheneverIneeded to cry.
A tiny closet lined with bougie, cruelty-free cleaning products and fair-trade mops and brooms—only the best for my boss—it was much smaller than I’d ever noticed before. A fact I only realized when I led Hudson inside and locked the door behind us.
Trying to ignore the looming largeness of him, I reached into my backpack and withdrew the object of today’s frustration.
“Here. Here’s your stupid sweatshirt. Now take it and get out.”
I want to cry in peace, thank you.
Hudson only followed the first half of my instructions. I should have had him written up for insubordination in the workplace. “You dragged me in here to give me this?”
“I couldn’t return it in front of everyone.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re going to think we had sex! Jared alreadydoesthink that!”
With those two little sentences, it was like the air evacuated the closet. In the stillness that followed, I was hyperaware of Hudson’s proximity, particularly his face, which fell, drawing new lines I’d never seen in his perfect features.
His long fingers curled around the sweatshirt, holding it to himself like armor—or a security blanket.
“I get the sense that I messed up back there.”
“You could say that,” I snapped. Then I course-corrected so he wouldn’t think me a total asshole. None of this was his fault. It was mine. I didn’t need to take it out on him. “Thank you very much for lending it to me. You were really helpful yesterday; I mean it.”
“I sense abutcoming on.”
“But after sleeping on it, I don’t think I can help you with the sex toy lessons. If it gets around the office that we’re spending a lot of time together, the gossip is going to spiral, and we can’t afford any—”
“Distractions, I got it. But we can fix this. Get them off your back and give us the space for our tutoring sessions. I spent most of last nightdoing my own research.” The tips of his ears went pink. “I gotta say…I was overwhelmed. I need you. What if I cleared things up for everyone?”
“What, go out there and make a company-wide announcement that we didn’t sleep together? I’m surethatwouldn’t make them suspicious.”
His glasses slipped down his nose. He nudged them back up. “Why does it bother you? Would it really be so bad if we had?”
There were a million ways that I could have answered that, all of them too revealing. I could have said no, because having sex with him probably would have been amazing—too good for me. I could have said yes, because if we’d had sex and I told the entire office we had a one-night stand, then I’d be humiliated for beingjusta one-night stand. Or that if we’d had sex and we were still having sex, then that meant I’d gone off the deep end and dove headfirst into a relationship, which I’d never allow myself to do again, especially not during crunch time at work.
Or I could have said,Hudson, my last relationship destroyed my entire life, so I keep myself in a little emotional box where I can stop myself from hurting anyone else—or me. So if you and I have sex, that means that everything has gone very, very wrong. You understand. I just don’t do fucking and relationships. I can’t afford the chaos.
“I just need to keep firm professional boundaries.”
His face fell slightly. “Well. No one deserves to be made to feel bad at work. If they’re bothering you, you should report themto HR. Or make Clara remind them about their hostile work environment training.”
Yeah, you’d think that would be the solution, wouldn’t you?
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
I hate conflict. I hate attention. The only guaranteed way to go unscathed is to hide from anyone who could possibly hurt you.
