“I have to go and see to something,” I explain. “I’ll be a few hours.”
“Okay.” There’s no judgment or demand for an explanation. Eleanor isn’t wired that way. She knows she’ll get all the information she needs when the time is right. “I need to check my emails and dig a little deeper on Jonathan’s movements. He has postponed his latest wellness retreat, and it’s concerning.”
“Maybe karma caught up to him with an incurable disease?”
She snorts. “That’s what I’m wishing for too.”
Charlie lets out a little whine of protest about his bladder, definitively ending our snuggle fest on my bed. I blink up at the mirror, realizing I hadn’t once glanced up to view how fucking perfect the naked woman lying on top me looks. Soon, I promise myself, I’ll make sure she sees stars every night, because she deserves the universe to fall at her feet.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Eleanor
How to pass a test when you don’t know you’re being tested.
The phone rings three times before Gail answers. She’s at least out of bed this time, so I can’t be accused of waking her or disrupting her mid coitus.
“Ellie, it’s Saturday.”
“Correct.” Why does she point out the day of the week like I don’t know?
She sighs and flips to video call. She squints at me, and I recognize her home office. “What’s up? We don’t have a session planned until Monday.”
“I’m calling more as a friend than a client.”
She raises a brow. I understand we blur the lines more often than not, and I’m not the kind of person to explicitly point it out, but I need her skill to help me understand what is happening almost as much as I need my friend right now.
“You look different.”
“I feel different,” I answer, which itself is significant, given I struggle to connect to my emotions on a good day.
“Did something happen?”
I suck my bottom lip in and release a breath. “I had an orgasm.”
“Not normally something to write home about.”
Why would I write home about it? There’s no one there, because I’m here. Plus, I’d be writing to myself, and I already know what happened. “I came with Hunter.”
Silence fills the call as her face slackens in shock. “You came during sex? That’s a huge step, Ellie.”
“We didn’t have sex. There was an incident with my sex toy drawer.”
“Again?”
I roll my eyes. “Not the same, but that’s unimportant. Hunter wound me up, then left. I couldn’t finish the job with my favorite method, so when he got back, I was really, really angry. Then he made me come on the kitchen island.”
Her mouth opens, closes, opens again... and closes once more. “But no sex?”
“No. He put me in his bed, and we fell asleep.”
“You slept with him?” she almost shouts. “Way to bury the lead, Ellie.”
“The orgasm was more noteworthy. Besides, it wasn’t the first time we slept in the same bed.”
She blinks, a brightness in her eyes I’d never seen before. “Let’s settle on these two shifts in mindset happening back-to-back being equally weighted.”
“But I enjoyed the orgasm much more than I did when I slept next to him when I had period pain.”
