Page 39 of Falling For My Ex's Older Brother

In here, everything is different.

Chapter Twelve

Sutton

Almost two months.

I know this because I've stopped counting the days and started counting the trips — Chicago first, then DC, now Boston on the calendar for Thursday. Three cities in seven weeks, each one with its own hotel, its own adjoining door, its own version of the same thing we keep doing without naming it.

In the office we are exactly what we've always been; Professional. Precise. The morning briefings happen across the width of his desk. The correspondence gets managed, the meetings get run, the work gets done at the same relentless pace it always has. Nobody on the floor looks at us differently. Nobody suspects anything. I know this because I've been watching — not anxiously, just with the awareness of someone who understands what's at stake and has decided to protect it. What happens outside the office is something else entirely.

It started in his office thesecond time — the night after Harlow's, the board summary, the door closing. Since then it has happened in conference rooms after everyone else has gone, in the back of his car between one meeting and the next, in hotel rooms in three different cities where the professional cover of shared work travel gives us both something to stand behind. It is consuming and electric and it has no label and neither of us has reached for one.

This is, I tell myself, exactly how it should be. We are two adults making a choice. The choice doesn't require a conversation or a definition or anything more than what it already is.

I tell myself this on a Tuesday morning while I'm reviewing the schedule for the week, Boston flagged in blue on Thursday, and I feel the particular warmth in my chest that I've started associating with the thought of being in a city with him, away from the office, in the private space that opens up around us when the floor goes quiet and the door closes. I know what that warmth means. I've known for a while now, but I’m not ready to say it out loud.

***

I tell Maggie on a Wednesday night.Not because I planned to — I'd been carrying it carefully for weeks, keeping the shape of it to myself, adding details to no one. But I come home at 10:30 to find her on the couch with a glass of wine and the specific look of someone who has been noticing things andwaiting with great patience for the person they love to catch up. She takes one look at me.

"Sit down,” she says.

I sit. She pours me a glass without asking. I take a long sip and then I tell her. She doesn't react the way I expected — no gasp, no wide eyes, no immediate flood of questions. She listens. She lets me get through the whole thing — the night of the argument, Caleb, the door closing, Chicago, DC, the car, the way it has become its own world that exists in the margins of the professional one. When I finish she is quiet for a moment.

"How long?" she asks.

"Almost two months."

She nods and takes a sip of her wine.

"Are you happy?"

The question surprises me with its simplicity.

"I don't know if happy is the right word."

"What's the right word?"

I think about it honestly.

"Alive," I say.

"Like everything has a higher voltage."

Maggie looks at me with the expression she wears when she's deciding how gently to say something.

"Sutton. What does he want?"

"We haven't talked about it."

"Two months and you haven't talked about it."

"We don't — it's not that kind of—" I stop. Start again.

"It works because we don't examine it. That's the agreement. Unspoken but mutual."

"Whose agreement?" she asks.