by Sara Whitney
He’d spent three months with Asha in their accounting capstone study group senior year before he’d figured out that panic attacks weren’t causing his anxiety to spike when he was around her; it was his attraction to her that was causing the kind of down-low tingles he’d never experienced before. After he’d sorted it all out—hi, hello, I’m Jake, and I’m a demisexual—he’d rushed in and fallen hard. Asha was the first woman he’d slept with, the first woman he’d wanted to sleep with, and he’d loved her enthusiastically and with his whole heart until the day two years later when she told him she’d accepted a job in Munich. She’d asked him to come, but how could he abandon his career, leave his mother and sister to fend for themselves? She made her decision without ever consulting him, and their relationship fell apart immediately.
He’d survived the pain of that loss, but it had left him wondering if Asha was his only shot at love. This though, with Mabel? He was experiencing the same riot of emotions, the same jangled nerves and hyperawareness. In fact, if anything, it was even more intense. After all, Asha hadn’t had that voice.
“What did you think? Positively orgasmic, right?”
The word reverberated in the space between them—orgasmic, orgasmic, orgasmic—and pink marched across her face while he struggled to reorient himself in a room that seemed to spin around him as he focused on her mouth. Her kissable mouth.
His eyes snapped down to his hand, where all that remained was the empty cupcake wrapper. Her mouth, her voice, her words… Was it really happening again? Was his world about to tilt on its axis again after seven years? Queasy excitement flooded his veins.
A relationship. He was thinking about a relationship with her. Mabel. The woman with honey in her voice.
Panic has entered the chat.
Then a miracle happened. “Oh my God!” Mabel dropped her face into her hands with a wail. “Forget I said that. Rewind! Rewind!”
Her palpable embarrassment chased away his own mounting anxiety. This bright, funny, confident woman was just as awkward as he was right now, and the realization allowed him to regain his footing. He cleared his throat and clenched his fist around the empty cupcake wrapper. “Tell you what—the next time I’m in Chicago, I’ll swing by Have Your Cake and bring you some of Erik’s cupcakes for a taste test. See which is more, ah, orgasmic.”
A bleat of laughter erupted from her throat. Yes, the woman with a voice richer than the icing he’d just consumed laughed like a barnyard animal, and he liked her even more for it.
“Hey, what are you doing tomorrow night?” She rubbed her fingers against her skirt as the pink returned to her cheeks. Before he could respond, she said in a rush, “A group of us are going to that trivia night thing you helped out with. We’re not competing, but it’ll be fun just to hang out and watch. And all the drinks you buy help the local homeless shelter.”
She smiled hopefully up at him, but the panic edged back in, and he was shaking his head even before she’d finished speaking. Wanting to spend time with Mabel, wanting to go out with her, touch her, all that ran counter to his work goals. Trivia was a no-go, for so very many reasons, yet somehow, when he met her bright eyes, his lips started to shape the word “sure.”
Then, thank Christ, his phone dinged with a text from Susan Suarez asking for a numbers update on one of his projects. Saved by the motherfucking bell.
“Sorry.” He gripped his phone and pushed out the excuse. “Saturdays are when I catch up on my email backlog, and it’s even worse than usual since I’ve been gone from the Chicago office.”
Disappointment flitted across her face, and he forced himself to ignore it.
“Sure. I get it.” Her shoulders lifted and fell on a sigh, and then she picked up the box with the remaining cupcake. “Well, I’d better call it a night. See ya.”
With a small nod, she spun and headed out the door, taking all the vitality from the room with her. Which was fine. His job was simple: keep his head down, keep his eyes on his spreadsheets, keep the partnership in his sights. This… this would pass. It had to pass, and his life would get back to normal again.
Five
Two more minutes. Two more minutes and she’d be out the door.
Mabel gathered the stack of ad copy she’d marked up and headed toward the main office, hoping to drop it on Brandon’s desk while everybody was gone for lunch. Then it was home to shower and hope for a smoother day tomorrow.
When she stepped into the room, however, she was dismayed to discover it wasn’t empty; Jake’s handsome face was furrowed in concentration as he stared at his laptop and rhythmically drummed a pen against the desktop. For one cowardly moment, she considered backing out of the room so he wouldn’t spot her; the embarrassment over him turning down her trivia invitation last week was still fresh. But she must’ve made a noise because his eyes flicked up from the screen and immediately back down. Then his pen-tapping slowed, and he dragged his eyes back up to her face again.
“Well, hello.” His voice was warm with amusement, and the corners of his eyes crinkled.
“Hi,” she said, pushing confidence she didn’t feel into her voice. Despite radio being, well, radio, she normally put effort into her appearance at work. But this morning she’d woken in a panic to find that her phone was dead and she had twenty minutes before she was due on air. While her ego could normally absorb a day of roaming the WNCB halls greasy and unshowered, that was before the hottest guy she’d ever met had started working down the hall from her, all tall and good-smelling. She might not allow herself to date him, but that didn’t mean she’d lost her vanity.
When his lips twitched in amusement, she groaned. “I know, I know. I’m a walking dumpster fire.”
“Did I say anything?” He leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest, his mouth curling as he took in her limp ponytail, her makeup-free face, and worst of all, her sleeping ensemble.
“You didn’t have to.” She huffed her way across the room and dropped the stack of papers onto the corner of Brandon’s desk, cursing herself for not shoving the damn things under the door and running. “I overslept. This is me in my natural state.”
She’d burst into the studio with seconds to spare that morning in the shirt she’d slept in, a tiny pair of lime-green running shorts, and battered floral gardening clogs. At least she’d managed to scrounge a cleanish sports bra from a gym bag in her car to wiggle into at a stoplight.
“A Minnesotan, huh?”
She plucked at her threadbare Mankato East T-shirt, which featured a cartoonish drawing of her high school’s cougar mascot.
“Oh, you betcha.” She hadn’t felt self-conscious sitting across from Dave all morning, but Jake’s scrutiny made her want to squirm. Then again, was she really going to let a lack of mascara hold her back? She was tougher than that.
“I thought Minnesotans were a punctual people.”
He flipped his laptop closed, and she took it as a sign that, not only was he not bothered by her dishevelment, but he was open to a longer conversation. Sacrificing a little vanity was a small price to satisfy her curiosity about this guy with the pricey haircut and the unpretentious vehicle, so she plopped into Brandon’s chair. “We are, but when I ditched my accent, I was required to give up all my other Minnesotan ways. Goodbye, hotdish.”
He snagged a clear plastic blender bottle off his desk and took a swig.
“Is that your lunch?”
He looked down at his hand, as if surprised to be holding something in it. “Yes. Why?”
She wrinkled her nose at the grayish mass inside. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those guys who doesn’t stop for lunch and just powers down a protein shake so he can ‘get right back to it.’” She adopted a macho tone for that last bit and laughed when he paused with the bottle halfway to his mouth. “Oooh, you are.”
He finished the motion and took another swig, allowing her to eye the play of muscles rippling under his jacket. What she wouldn’t give for a little of that Clark Kent X-ray v
ision right now to see what delights were hidden by the layers of fabric. No wonder his palm had been rough against hers when he’d helped her up from the couch during their first meeting. She’d bet all the loose change in her purse he’d earned those calluses in the gym.
She tilted her head playfully. “Don’t you know that you’re missing out on a whole world of restaurant lunch specials and inane coworker chitchat? Don’t your fellow numbers people at wherever you work—”
“Black, Phelps, and Suarez.”
So serious about his big fancy job. “Sure, them. Don’t you ever grab lunch with Black? Or Phelps or Suarez?”
He leaned back in his chair, looking fractionally more relaxed than when she’d walked in. Good. He should take a little time for himself during the day. From what she’d been able to observe, his work hours were long, intense, and rarely interrupted except by maniacs forcing cupcakes on him.
“Ha. No. Black pretty much lives full time in France, and Phelps wouldn’t be caught dead dining with us rabble. Susan Suarez took me to lunch on my first official day and then not again for the past nine years.”
He took another drink, and she considered leaving him to his lunch. She should really slide right out that door and on home. But he seemed… lonely? Was she reading him right? He was alone in a strange city with only Brandon for company after all; if she were him, she might welcome some friendly conversation over the noon hour. She might be a grubby little urchin, but she was a good talker.
“So did you start there straight out of college?”
He swirled the contents of his bottle and raised his brows as if daring her to mock his lunch again. She let it go without comment. “Actually, I started interning there the summer before my sophomore year of college. So I’ve been with them in some capacity for twelve years.” He must’ve seen the math on her face because he added, “That makes me thirty-one, if you’re wondering.”
More like dirty-one. Did he have any idea what it was doing to her as he swiped his thumb across his lower lip to catch an errant drop of shake? She cleared her throat and reminded herself of how quickly a bad work relationship could detonate in the middle of her life. This man’s mouth was not worth the risk.
She forced a light tone. “Thirty-one? So ancient, whereas I’m a mere twenty-eight.”
“A veritable baby.” He saluted her with his bottle.
Even though he was forbidden office fruit, her perverse brain was apparently on a mission to drag more information out of him. “You went to school in Chicago?”
“University-of. And high-school-of before that.”
“The fancy suburban kind?”
He drained the last of his shake and closed the spout on the lid with a snap. “Definitely not. The underfunded, lucky-to-have-enough-textbooks-for-each-kid kind.”
His voice was matter-of-fact, and she struggled to imagine this shiny, healthy example of manhood growing up in a hardscrabble neighborhood. “Really?”
“Yeah, I did it all. Begging for scholarships, working every part-time job I could find, constantly worrying about helping Mom make rent so we didn’t get booted from another apartment.” He shrugged. “It was incentive to work hard. To not get distracted.”
Something from their conversation that first week clicked into place. “To drive an old Jeep. To make partner,” she said softly.
His eyes found hers. “I want my mom and my sister to have a safety net if they ever need it.” His expression darkened. “They refuse to let me send them checks directly anymore, so everything I don’t need for living expenses goes into three savings accounts: one for me, one for Mom, and one for Finn.”
“Wow. Generous.” She pulled her legs up and crossed them underneath her. “My dad covers my Starbucks expenses when I’m home for a visit. Says it’s all he has left after four years of out-of-state tuition.”
Woof. Privilege, party of Mabel. Thankfully, Jake smiled at her upper-middle-class joke, which returned him to his previously relaxed expression.
“Hey, coffee expenses add up. You don’t want your dad to go broke.” Then he leaned back in his chair, and his tone shifted to confessional. “Anyway, it’s almost more of a habit than anything else. Mom and Finn are both settled and happy, and if all goes well, this is my last assignment before I’m promoted to partner, and then I really won’t have money concerns.”
She tilted her head, searching his face for excitement at the prospect but seeing only grim determination. “Will that make you settled and happy?”
“It better,” he said immediately. Then his brow creased. “I mean, of course it will. It’s the only thing I’ve had in my sights for as long as I can remember.”
He fell silent and stared down at his closed laptop, leaving her to sort through the Jake Carey pieces she’d uncovered: impoverished childhood, expensive suits, solitary lunches, utilitarian vehicle, laser focus on work. And did she dare add a hint of loneliness to that list? Did he also know what it was like to be busy and fulfilled at work while also feeling like you were missing something important?
“Who are you?” The question slipped out as she tried to fit all the pieces of him together.
“I’m Batman.”
He growled it in a Christian Bale voice, and she replied without thinking. “Nope. Superman.”
“Superman?”
Damn. She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but now she couldn’t ignore his arched eyebrows. So she tossed her hair and brazened it out with her best smirk. “You just seem like the kind of guy who accidentally wears his underpants on the outside.”
His lips twitched. “Not even once. Try again.”
Oh hell. She’d already called cupcakes orgasmic and asked him to a social event that he couldn’t have turned down faster. What did she have to lose? “When I saw you through the studio window for the first time, I… thought you looked like Superman.”
A slow grin spread across his face, and he lifted his chin, giving her a delicious view of that sharp jawline. “It’s the hair, isn’t it? Dark-haired guys always get the Clark Kent comparison.”
She sighed, resigned to spilling her whole tawdry thought process. “It’s the hair. It’s the jaw. It’s the shoulders.” She waved her hand from the top of his head down his torso. “You’ve got the whole superhero package.”
His grin widened, and he rubbed his chin in a show of deep thought. “Superhero, huh? I don’t know about that. It’s probably only a little above average.”
Mabel looked at him blankly, then mentally reviewed what she’d said.
Oh God. Package. She slapped a hand over her mouth with a giggle. “What are you, twelve?”
“Guys are gonna guy.” He shrugged. “Sorry. I’m sure you’re used to a more sophisticated level of conversation on a date.”
The word date did something funny to her nether regions. What kind of woman did Jake spend his free time with? Whomever she was, Mabel would bet she’d never schlep to work in beat-to-hell gardening clogs. As she was picturing what kind of posh creature he’d probably escort around Chicago, he rolled his empty shake bottle between his palms, smile gone.
“Not that this is a date, of course,” he said gruffly.
“Of course not. I don’t date people I work with,” she said automatically, grateful for the reminder. He was so easy to talk to that she could almost forget everything, including her hands-off rules and the fact that she was sporting last night’s bedhead.
When he looked at her curiously, she followed his lead and shared more than she normally would with someone who wasn’t Dave. “Actually, I don’t date, period.” She pressed her lips together and considered how much she should share. “Bad experience at my last job. It’s… hard sometimes for women in the public eye.”
His face softened for a split second before he saluted her with the bottle. “Here’s to not dating. I don’t take the time for it either.” The statement was said matter-of-factly, with no more emotion than he might say “It’s supposed to rain today” or “Cur
ling’s my favorite sport,” and she felt a burst of pity for the singles of Chicago at being denied Jake’s devastating smile lit by candles across a white tablecloth at a fancy restaurant.
“Ah, that explains why you picked such a disappointing restaurant for lunch.” She gestured around the low-ceilinged room, and he laughed.
“True. And the dress code is so lax.”
The thrill she experienced at drawing a joke from him had her leaping to her feet to continue their playful sparring.
“What, does this not do it for you?” She put her hands on her hips and spun to give him the full 360-degree view of an outfit that she wouldn’t even wear to the gym on a day when the air-conditioning was broken and she was guaranteed not to run into anybody she knew. When she rotated back to face him, his face was alive with laughter, his expression… interested. And that’s when she became aware of just how short her shorts really were and how clearly she could see the outline of her hot-pink sports bra through the worn cotton of her shirt. His eyes were slow to lift from her legs, and when they did, she held his gaze with her own, practically begging him to explain why he made her want to break her own rules.
And then Brandon came crashing through the door.
“Ah, Mabel. Hello.” He stopped dead when he got a look at her. “Wow, you’re a mess. No offense.”
That derailed her buoyant mood.
“Well, gee, why would I take offense at that?” She folded her arms over her chest, all traces of her playful confidence draining away.
Jake, who’d turned his attention back to his laptop when Brandon walked through the door, didn’t bother looking up. “Pretty bold criticism from a guy with a coffee stain on his tie.”
Brandon looked down at the blotch on his burgundy-striped silk and gave a cry of distress.
But Jake wasn’t done. “Not that it matters. Mabel looks beautiful no matter what she’s wearing.”
He looked up and gave her a tiny, private smile that made her breath catch in her throat. How unfair to say the perfect thing and then look at her like that while Brandon was in the room with them.