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I carry her the short distance to the bed, nudge the duvet aside with my knee, and lower her onto the sheets. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to dry off, too.”

“Take your time,” she mumbles into the pillows, already sounding half-asleep.

I smile, thoroughly charmed, and head to the bathroom. I drain the tub, toss the leftovers into the trash, and dry myself off. I pull on sleeping shorts and a loose T-shirt, running a towel through my damp hair. The whole process takes me less than ten minutes. I am ready to crawl into bed, pull Alex against my chest, and sleep until Monday morning forces us back to reality.

Except when I step into the bedroom, I find the bed empty.

I blink, my brain struggling to process the information. “… Alex?”

Silence. The room is devoid of Alexandra.

“Babe?” I step further into the room, deeply confused. She could barely walk ten minutes ago. I had to carry her from the bathroom! Where the hell could she have gone? Did she army-crawl out of the room the second I turned my back?

I walk over to the bed, entirely baffled, and that’s when I see a yellow sticky note on my nightstand. I pick it up, my eyes narrowing.

Catch me?

I stare at it. Then I stare at it some more. A bark of disbelieving laughter tears out of my chest.

“You cannot be serious,” I say to the room. “I just put your ass to sleep!”

Nothing but silence answers me. Possibly a little smugger.

I let myself have a few seconds of pure, delighted outrage. The woman I edged into a near-religious experience, bathed, fed, moisturized, and transported to bed, has risen from her grave to turn the tables on me. I am the architect of my own suffering.

“Alright, Little Red,” I mutter, tossing the note on the bed. “Ready or not…”

Chapter Nine

My muscles protest with every movement, a deep lethargy settling into my bones. I pad barefoot, grinning like an idiot, already composing the speech I will deliver when I find her—something about begging for mercy.

The hallway is dim, and the living room beyond is dark, save for the amber spill of the night light through the windows. I look behind me, and the grin falls off my face. A clean rectangle of light is cutting across the hardwood from under her office door.

She better not be fucking working.

The thought is instant, slicing through the lingering sex haze like a bucket of ice water. A hot spike of anger bubbles up in my chest, tightening my throat. My bare feet plant firmly on the floor as I stare at that sliver of light.

This is it. The one snag in our otherwise seamless life together. The absolute biggest pain point in our relationship. We had a blowout fight about this exact thing barely three weeks ago, when a “quick Sunday email check” turned into a three-hour crisis management call while our dinner went cold on the counter.

It’s not that I don’t respect her ambition. I do. In fact, I am endlessly in awe of Alexandra as a professional. She is a force of nature, and I admire her for it. The problem is that she comes home at night with a tension headache and still opens her laptop at the kitchen island because something slipped, something’s on fire, something only she can fix. The problem is that none of it is ever enough.

I stand in the hallway, and I breathe through my nose, and I try to be reasonable. I remind myself that she is my favorite person on this earth.

What infuriates me—what makes me want to march into that office and throw her company laptop out the window—is the exhausting, relentless reality of being a woman in the workplace.

I watch her bleed for that company. I watch her triple-check spreadsheets, anticipate every possible failure, and sacrifice her evenings to ensure her projects are bulletproof. And for what? So that some aggressively mediocre male executive can swoop in, do a fraction of the work, and be praised by the board for his “visionary leadership.”

Women like Alex have to be flawless just to be considered competent. They work twice as hard, stay twice as late, and at the end of the day, it’s the men who get the effortless recognition, the easy promotions, the benefit of the doubt.

It drives me insane.

My own attitude toward the corporate machine has always been a deeply cynical why bother? I work hard at my own job, but I refuse to set myself on fire to keep a boardroom warm. I know the game is rigged, so I refuse to play by their rules. But Alex still believes that if she works hard enough, she can outmaneuver the system. And seeing her burn herself out on a Sunday night, especially tonight, breaks my heart just as much as it pisses me off.

With my earlier exhaustion eclipsed by a surge of righteous indignation, I wrap my hand around the brass doorknob, twist it, and push the door wide open. The words spill from my lips before my eyes can even adjust to the light.

“Alexandra, I swear to God I am bringing the flogger back out, and—”

The threat dies in my throat. I freeze in the doorway, my hands planted on my hips, derailed by the sight in front of me.