I step closer, and his gaze drops to my shirt, to where a button has come undone, for just a second before snapping back up. My skin burns where he looked, and some awful traitorous part of me wants him to look again.
“But I didn’t betray you,” I say, quieter now. “And I’m not going to stand here and let you pretend I did.”
“Good,” he says, and his voice has gone lower, rougher. “At least you can admit you played a part in this.”
“Oh, fuck off, Dominic,” I snap. “My biggest mistake is having a shitty boss. That’s it. You’re making this too personal.”
“Maybe it is personal,” he says, stepping closer, and my eyes drop to his mouth before I can stop them. His lips are full and soft, and the memory surfaces before I can block it: those lips on my throat, my stomach, the inside of my thigh, back when we used to sneak around and when he’d press me up against the wall and make me forget my own name.
I drag my gaze back up to his face and his eyes are onmymouth, dark and heavy, and he doesn’t look away when I catch him. He takes another half-step forward instead, and now we’re so close I can feel his breath on my skin.
My whole body goes hot. My fingers curl at my sides, aching to reach for him, and my lips part just slightly, and I hate him, Ireallyhate him, but my body doesn’t seem to care.
He steps back, his face going flat and cold, and it’s like a bucket of ice water, whatever spell just had me in its grip snapping clean in half.
What the hell just happened?
I shake it off like waking from a fever dream and the anger comes flooding back, and I grab onto it like a lifeline because it’s so much easier than whatever I was just feeling. I hate him. I’ve always hated him. And I’m absolutely livid that my body still wants him anyway, like some kind of addiction I never fully kicked.
“It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean to,” he says, flat and final. “The damage is done.”
“So that’s it?” I ask, my voice rising. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” He crosses his arms. “We’re done. No more access. No more gym. I don’t care what you write now, you can burn me to the ground for all I care. But you’re not stepping foot in here again.”
“You’re unbelievable,” I spit.
“I’m being smart.” His eyes are hard. “I trusted you and look what happened. I’m not making that mistake twice.”
The fucking audacity of this man. I want to scream at him. I want to tell him he’s been looking for an excuse to hate me since I walked back into this town, and congratulations, he found one, and I hope it keeps him warm at night when he’s lying awake alone in whatever sad bachelor apartment he lives in, probably decorated with nothing but gym equipment and protein powder and that massive chip on his shoulder.
I grab my bag from the chair because if my hands aren’t holding something I might actually throw a punch, and I look at him one last time, standing there with his arms crossed like he’swon something, and I want to slap the satisfaction right off his face.
“You’re the same stubborn, pigheaded asshole you’ve always been,” I tell him, and my voice is steady even though my chest is on fire. “I don’t know why I expected anything different.”
“Right back at you, Bennett,” he says, and his voice is just as hard as mine.
I flip him off over my shoulder as I walk out of his office, past the ring and the treadmills and the smell of rubber and sweat that I used to find almost comforting and now just makes me want to scream, and I push through the front door and into the morning air.
As I sit in my car, I’m furious. At David, for being a spineless weasel who couldn’t even give me a heads-up before he detonated my professional credibility. At Dominic, for being so determined to believe the worst of me that he didn’t even pause to consider I might be telling the truth. At myself, for caring what Dominic thinks of me in the first place.
And underneath all of that, buried so deep I almost don’t want to acknowledge it exists: the memory of how it felt to stand that close to him. The way my body lit up like a circuit completing. The way I wanted him to kiss me even while I was ready to tear his throat out.
I drag my hands down my face and take a breath that doesn’t quite fill my lungs. Then I pull out my phone and call David.
“Brooke. I was just about to?—“
“I’m filing a formal complaint,” I say, cutting him off. “About the unauthorized publication of my notes.”
“Okay, let’s just calm down,” he says. “There’s no need to?—“
“I am calm,” I tell him. “I’m filing a complaint, and if you ever do it again, I will quit. Publicly. With a detailed explanation of exactly why, posted to every journalism forum, industry newsletter, and professional network I can find. I’ll make sure everyone in this industry knows exactly what kind of editor you are.”
The line goes quiet. I can practically hear him recalculating, running the numbers on how much damage I could actually do versus how much trouble it would be to fight me on this.
“I hear you,” he says finally, and for once he actually sounds like he means it. Like something I said has finally penetrated that thick wall of self-satisfaction he walks around wrapped in. “Look, maybe I could have handled this differently?—“
“I’ll be back in New York soon. We can discuss it then.” I hang up before he can respond, because I’ve said everything I need to say and I don’t have the bandwidth for whatever face-saving bullshit he wants to shovel at me.
