This is dating.
This is not dating.
“What job will you do afterBite the Handlaunches?” I ask.After, not if.“Will you work for the editor in chief?” My voice is faint, half stolen by the wind.
Alex shakes his head and tugs on the belt loop of my coat to pull me across the street with him. “I technically could, but I’ll probably find something else by next summer.”
I frown. “Like, a different job at LC?”
“A different job, not at LC.”
“Oh,” I whisper.
This is not dating.
“They’ll need more staff on the editorial and IT side,” Alex reasons. “Which isn’t my area of expertise. And I’ve got friends in Silicon Valley that could use the project management help.”
I scoff. “You weren’t kidding.”
“About what?”
“About your living situation being ephemeral.”
Alex looks at me, the lines between his eyebrows drawing together as we start climbing the stairs of my building. “That’s not always by choice.”
“This sounds like a choice. One year, and you’re out the door? How long will your next job last, six months?”
“Maybe.” His voice is too calm. It’s unnerving. “This was a project-oriented position. Project complete, job over. And anyway, why does it matter to you? You’ll be in London.”
The crazy thing about it—the weirdest, most bizarre part—is that the more I learn about Alex, the more certain I am that I have to go.
He treats me like a boomerang, pulling me close to whisper against my heart about what I need to experience myself before flinging me out into the wind. I’m even surer of London now than I was sitting in that HR meeting with Molly last August, and Alex Harrison is, without a doubt, part of the reason why. But it doesn’t change my confusion over why he thinks of himself as rootless, untethered, when that’s not the way he wants to be. He got the rose of Sharon tattoo as a reminder that some thingscanbe permanent. So why doesn’t he give this city longer than ten months?
The only thing I can figure is he’s chasing something that keeps slipping through his fingers.
I unlock the door to my apartment and step inside. “I just don’t want you to screw yourself over, getting a reputation as a one-and-done kind of employee.”
Alex shrugs off his coat and rubs at his forehead. “What you’re describing is a very legitimate occupation known as freelancing.”
I frown. “Is this because of your dad?” I ask. “Are you… disappointed he’s not part of the company anymore?”
Alex pushes his hands through his hair, loosening the black strands. “Of course I’m disappointed,” he says, voice like gravel. “There’s no question part of me took this job with the hopes that Robert could be a different kind of role model for me, if not the father I deserved. But his resignation isn’t why I’m planning to move on. That’s just who I am, Case. It’s in my nature to want a new diversion.”
This is definitely, no mistaking it, not dating.
I put my hands on either side of his face, anyway, because like it or not, this man has burrowed his way into my bones, and even if he hears something unrequited in my voice, I don’t care so long as the right message reaches him.
“You are the kind of person people should bend over backward for to keep in their lives, Alex.” My fingers trace along his jawline, past his cheeks, up to the corners of his brown eyes. “Your aunt and your cousins see that, and so does Freddy, and so do I. It’s a real fucking shame Robert won’t bend for you, but that’shisshame to bear, not yours.”
His thumb grazes my wrist. “All I heard,” he says, “was something about you bending over for me.”
I laugh, and he tugs me into a hug. “Seriously, though,” he nearly growls. “Thank you, Simba. Thank you for being a person I can trust with all my heartbreaking, brutal truths.”
I press my lips to his neck. “I’d trust you with mine. I’ll give you one right now.”
“Okay,” he says, voice cracking, hands grazing my waist. “Give me one heartbreaking, brutal truth of yours.”
There is an acquisition on the table, and it might ruin you—
