I stared down at my hands. “It’s just easier to be invisible. No one can touch you when you’re invisible.”
“That’s why you don’t want to teach me about sex toys. Because then you won’t be invisible.”
“Yeah.”
There was a shift in the body in front of me, and suddenly we were so close the fibers of our sweaters brushed. I looked up, and there he was. Gazing down at me like I wasn’t the problem I knew myself to be. He smiled again. A real one this time. “Well, you’ve already failed there. You’ve never been invisible to me.”
My lips parted, and the air between us crackled. I thought about our kiss yesterday, accidental and fleeting as it was, and wanted nothing more than to close the gap again. To test if his lips were as warm and soft and welcoming as they had been the first time.
I’m sure I would have said something as meaningful and as profound as what he’d just said to me, but before I could—
Knock, knock, knock!
“Scout?”
I practically threw myself against the far wall of the closet, staring at the closed door with wideoh shiteyes.
Clara. Somehow, Clara had found me in here. Dammit, couldn’t a girl spurn her office crush in peace?
“Just think about it,” Hudson blustered to say in a whisper. “You can’t go invisible again, and I’m sticking around the officeuntil the end of my contract. You might as well help me out with our work.”
Clara knocked again.
“Uh, yeah?” I replied through the still-closed door.
“Could I please see you in my office?”
“Sure. I’ll be right there.”
I heard her heels click on the floor for a few paces.
Click. Click. Click. Click…
Phew. I’d gotten away with it. She had no idea that I’d been in here with Hudson. Home free.
Click.Her heels stopped on the floor. My luck ran out.
“Oh,” she continued, cheerful as ever. “And please tell Hudson that he should go back to work, too.”
6
Between a Cock and a Hard Place
“I don’t know what you’ve been hearing around the office, but I have not slept with Hudson Bailey.”
That probably wasn’t the best entrance I could have made into my boss’s office. But hey. I was frazzled and horny and anxious and convinced that one night of fantasizing about a coworker was going to wreck everything, so give me a break.
Clara looked up casually from her computer screen, completely unfazed.
“Hello, Scout,” she droned drolly in her posh Emma Thompson accent. “Can I get you anything? Alkaline water? Kombucha? Maybe some condoms to take home with you?”
“I said I’mnotsleeping with him!”
“No, I imagine not, but it is very funny to see you so worked up. It’s very unlike you. I couldn’t resist.”
The corners of her lips crinkled as she smiled, removed her brightly colored spectacles, and let them dangle loosely from the chain around her neck. Clara Mason was an empress of industry. Pushing sixty-five, she’d founded BuzzCorp just seven years ago and taken it from a one-person start-up to one of the leading operators in the sex toy space. A #girlboss queen of the highestorder, she had a tall, willowy figure and white-blond hair that looked positively angelic on magazine coversandunder our office’s harsh halogen lighting.
She was powerful. She was beautiful. She was constantly closing some business deal or closing the bedroom door on her latest conquest. She waseverything.
