Page 234 of Sexting His Assistant

“Tell you what?” I ask.

“That this much was sitting on your desk,” Luka says.

I laugh once. “Because you put most of it there.”

His jaw tightens.

I regret saying it only a little. “It’s fine.” I blow him off..

“No,” Luka says. “It’s not.”

I say, “I handled it.”

“That does not mean it was fine,” Luka says.

I look away because that answer is too reasonable, and I don’t know what to do with reasonable Luka when I’m already emotionally unstable around him.

He says, “When you return, your role changes.”

I look back at him. “Excuse me?”

He says, “You will not go back to being buried under everyone’s overflow because you are competent enough to catch it.”

“Are you promoting me while I have a concussion?”

Luka says, “No. I’m telling you I noticed.”

I go quiet.

He says, “The promotion comes after you recover, when we can discuss it properly.”

My chest tightens. “You can’t promote me now.”

His eyes sharpen. “Why?”

“Because everyone will say it’s because of this,” I say. “Because of us.”

“No one knows about us,” Luka says.

“People always know something,” I say. “They may not know the truth, but they know enough to make their own version.”

He studies me for a moment. “Then we do it the proper way.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means Meredith audits the workload and makes a recommendation,” Luka says. “It means HR documents the scope. It means I stay out of the formal decision.”

I stare at him. “You thought of that quickly.”

“I run a company,” Luka says.

“Sometimes I forget because you spend so much time behaving like a criminally intense boyfriend.”

His face stills at the word.

Boyfriend.

I didn’t mean to say it. Or maybe I did.