Except when I opened my lunch box, there wasn’t anything in it.
“Who the hell is eating other people’s lunches?” I said loudly, fuming.
“You need to put some ghost pepper sauce in the next one,” Maeve said. “That will catch whoever’s eating your food. Or better yet, you need to booby trap the lunch box with some sort of dye. You could rig a bottle of pomegranate juice in the lunch box, and when someone opens it, bam, they’re drenched, and you’re just like ‘oh, it was an accident.’”
I slammed my lunch box closed. I hated people who stole other people’s food! But I was sort of glad to see the empty lunch box.
At least catching the food thief would be a distraction from thinking about Beck.
34
Beck
Istudied Tess’s profile as she sat on the sofa in the living room later that evening. She was reading her Kindle while the girls were working through the business book list I had given them.
I had a newspaper in my hands, but instead of catching up on the articles, I was staring at Tess.
She had a fire going and had laid out the most elaborate charcuterie spread I had ever seen outside of a wedding. The whole scene was so wholesome and cozy it made my teeth hurt.
I also wanted her. If she were actually my girlfriend, I would have just made up some lame excuse for her to come look at something in my study then fucked her brains out.
You need to calm down.
She had rebuffed me earlier that day. She wasn’t interested.
But what if she was? She just didn’t want it in the office?
Fucking Tess in my office? Hell yeah.
You’re just sex starved.
The worst thing was I couldn’t even find a casual hookup to get it out of my system because I needed people to think she was my girlfriend so that child protective services wouldn’t be called for my sisters.
And since she’s your fake girlfriend, it’s just a skip across the hedge to being a real one or at least a fake girlfriend with benefits.
It was even worse that night. Tess was just down the hall. I wondered what she would do if I slipped into her room with all that neon-colored paint and slid my hand under the sheets and into her panties. Would she be wet? Would she wake up and spread her legs for me? Beg me to continue?
“Dangerous road you’re going down,” I told myself. But it was like I was obsessed. The fact that I couldn’t have her made me all the more certain I needed her.
I threw the covers off, pulled on exercise shorts, and went to the kitchen. I had put a gym in the condo because I could not work out in front of the senior citizen fan club every single morning. I didn’t care what Greg had said.
It was dark in the kitchen; there was only a soft glow from the under-cabinet lights. I poured water from the pitcher in the fridge and remembered when I had seen Tess in the kitchen with no bra.
“Shit, Tess’s tits are amazing,” I whispered to the dark. “Fuck, I want to come all over them.”
There were sounds of choking from the adjacent living area that was connected in the open floor plan.
Fuuuccckkk…
I flipped on the light. There on the sofa was Tess surrounded by several containers of Chinese food. She was waving her hands around and making gagging motions.
I ran over and clapped her on the back, and she coughed.
“Turn the lights back off!” she shrieked.
In a daze, I flipped the switch back off, settling the darkness around us.
“You didn’t see me,” she said, hurriedly trying to clean up the containers.
