Ophelia raised her chin a little higher, and said, “Brad and I had a meeting about one of my other clients and he had to step out.”
“Oh yeah?” Elena challenged. “Which client?”
Ophelia tilted her head in equal challenge. “That’s privileged, Lady Elena. You know better than to ask.”
I had no idea what was going on.
“Chad’s under the desk, isn’t he?” Elena said with an exasperated sigh. It wasn’t a question.
Ophelia scoffed, “Brad is definitely not under the desk.” She said it as though the very idea was preposterous.
“Chad, you can either come out or I’m coming over there to check. You have five seconds,” Elena said, sounding like an annoyed kindergarten teacher.
“One…two…three…f—” Before she could finish counting, there was shuffling followed by thumping under the desk, but when someone crawled out and stood up, it wasn’t Chad. It was Rami.
I’d used the description “stunned silence” before, but had never experienced it so literally. We all just stood there and stared at each other for a moment, then Rami cleared his throat. “Thought my phone was under there. I’ll have to go look somewhere else.”
He patted my shoulder as he walked past. “Dinner at your place tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah,” I answered dumbly, looking back and forth between him and Ophelia.
She’d gathered her things and was making her way to the door as well.
“I reject your judgment!” she hissed at Elena, making a sweeping hand gesture like she was brushing it back into the office before slamming the door.
We both erupted into fits of laughter.
“What the hell was that?” I panted, trying to get it under control. “What the hell was Rami even doing here?
She was laughing too hard to answer me, which started my giggles all over again.
We were still giggling when Chad came in, looking surprised to see us already sitting. He had no idea how much bigger his surprise could’ve been. I’d need to remember to tell Rami I saved his ass.
We looked through a list of agents for Elena as though nothing had happened, but I got the sense she was mostly going through the motions, so we kept it brief.
She and I grabbed In-N-Out on the way back to her place. We hadn’t mentioned the tryst we’d stumbled upon to Chad, and in unspoken agreement didn’t bring it up again with each other, but I did see her texting rapidly and assumed it was with Ophelia.
As we sat at her coffee table eating burgers and chatting about nothing in particular, I felt completely at ease with her. It would be easy to forget how complicated our situation really was and pretend we were just a couple early in our relationship. So I did.
Dinner turned to a movie we didn’t watch because we started kissing. When she’d told me she didn’t have sex, it sounded like a hardship, but it meant we focused on all the sensations of touching and kissing and skin sliding against skin. I was discovering a whole new meaning to sex.
When we were both exhausted, she turned the TV off and headed to the bedroom, as though me staying was a foregone conclusion, so I didn’t question it. She rolled away from me to fall asleep again, but sometime during the night must’ve found her way back because when I woke up, her warmth was curled against my back. It was adorable, even if she would destroy me for ever saying that aloud.
I wondered if she was slowly letting me in or if her walls would be impenetrable again in the morning.
28
Elena
Iawoke slowly, first noticing the big, warm body I was wrapped around. I couldn’t even blame him for the snuggling because I was the big spoon. Letting him stay over had been a slippery slope and I was getting way too used to this intimacy with him.
He must’ve felt me stir because he turned over and tucked me back under his arm, nuzzling me sleepily with his beard. His phone went off just as I was considering waking him up properly. He picked it up and I realized it was a FaceTime call just as he answered it. I leaned forward to be sure I was out of the frame, but I could see the screen.
“Hi, Mom…”
Holy fuck. He’d answered a video call from his mother when we were naked in bed together. I was going to kill him.
“Don’t you ‘hi Mom’ me. I just had to find out from my hairdresser that you have a new girlfriend. Do you know how that feels? To be the last one to know what’s happening in your son’s life?”
