Theo doesn’t get nice things even when everybody else does. He’s working at his whiteboard, totally absorbed.
Wearing his lab coat. The lab coat.
“Art? Microwave popcorn? What have you done with Mr. Drummond?”
He turns. Our eyes meet. White-hot energy bolts through me as he comes to me, slow and steady. Stalks to me.
I back up to the door. Most of me backs up, anyway. The butterflies in my belly are freaking out to get to him.
He pushes the door closed behind me, caging me against it.
“How can it be?” I say. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to fire yourself for promoting a climate of fun.”
“I’m a scientist,” he growls, kissing me. “I test things out. Even wild theories from wake-up-call girls.”
“Seriously.” I push him away. “You promoted Fernice to oversee employee morale? That’s brilliant. I was just down there. I think it’s already working.”
“It wasn’t really my idea,” he says. “I hired an executive coach, and we brainstormed finding somebody with people skills to complement my chemistry skills. Valerie, that’s my coach, is all about the carrot over the stick. Or the gift basket, as it were. The microwave popcorn was my addition.” He kisses me. “If productivity goes up, they’ll get more colors and more treats.”
“And if it goes down?”
He draws a finger across his throat.
I slide past him and walk to the middle of his office. I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff. A good cliff, maybe, but a cliff all the same. I go to his board. Is he still making progress? “I have news, too,” I say.
“Uh-oh,” he says. “You sound serious.”
I turn. “I might’ve found a space.” Suddenly I can’t stop smiling. “And it’s amazing.”
He tilts his head. “A space?”
“For the bakery.” I fish out my phone and show him the pictures. “I know. It wasn’t going to happen. But look. Check it out.”
He flips through. “Wow. Even your ceiling.”
“Is it amazing or what?” I tell him the story of the landlord couple, or at least I think they were the landlords. The entrepreneurial deal. “I didn’t think I could get one on my own with no cash and my credit totally shattered. But I did. I got it on my reputation. I did it myself.”
A dark cloud seems to pass across his gaze, but then he brightens back up. “You’re staying.”
“I have to figure out how to break it to the subletter. My parents will be sad, but if I really hustle…I mean, with a space like this, I know how to make money.”
“You’re staying.”
“Yes!” I’m just laughing now. “I’m staying!”
He picks me up and twirls me around, and I scream, and for a second, we’re like a normal couple. Simple and happy. A normal couple where something good doesn’t mean something scary.
He sets me down on his worktable and slides a knuckle along my jaw. His touch feels potent. Electric. Far too honest. Everything’s new now, because I’m not leaving. And before I can pull away, he kisses me. I take hold of the lapels of his lab coat and hold tight.
“Thank goodness.” He tips his forehead to mine. “I wanted you to stay, Lizzie. More than anything.”
I narrow my eyes and glance at his whiteboard. “More than anything?” I ask, meaning, even the solution to the formula?
“More than anything.”
My pulse skitters. More than anything in the world, he means.
He pulls away and pins me with his eyes, the gritty gray of storm clouds. “Let’s not play games anymore.” He takes my hand and holds it palm up.
“No more games?”
“I don’t mean no more games ever, but it’s not a game right now. Not for me.” He plants a kiss on the tender middle of my palm. Shivers bloom across my skin, bloom so hard I can’t speak. “You want to try it?”
I gaze into his eyes, this guy who is everything. “Okay, but I don’t know where we’re going. It feels like free-falling.”
“I don’t know, either, but I know we’re together, so it’s okay, right?”
“I don’t know.” I swallow past the dryness in my mouth. “I feel like we’re on one of those maps they used to draw before they figured out that the world is round. Those maps where they thought you fell off the edge.”
He slides his hands over my arms.
“And they would write ‘here be dragons’ around the edges,” I continue. “Because they didn’t know what was out there, only that it was something scary.”
He bends so that his gaze is level with mine. “We’ll go there together. We’ll fight the dragons together.”
Together. I take a deep breath. “Okay, then.”
“And you know what a badass I am in this lab coat,” he says into the kiss.
“Oh, you get to joke around, but I don’t?”
“We can do anything we want, Seven.”
And I know right then that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—trash my life the way Mason did. No, this man could utterly obliterate me. Yet here I am, in the palm of his hand. Can I do it?
But then I look into his eyes, and I know that I can. That we can. “Then let’s do this thing. See where it leads.”
He heaves out a breath. “Yes.” He kisses me again—deeply. It’s an all-consuming kiss, and I think, this is what it is to be really kissed. I melt into him, molding to him. He kisses my neck, begins to unbutton my blouse.
I’m half kissing him, half mauling his shoulders and arms with my greedy hands, enjoying him, daring to go there with him. I lock my legs around him, pulling him fully to me, fitting the steel of his cock between my legs.
With trembling hands, he yanks the hem of my shirt up from my skirt. He pulls it up over my head and throws it.
“The door.”
He goes to the door and locks it, then turns back, strolling toward me, watching me with a kind of wonder that I enjoy. “You are so beautiful,” he says. Like he’s stunned that a beautiful woman is sitting in her bra on his worktable.
I hold out my arms.
He comes to me and we kiss. He pushes my skirt up with jerky motions as I shimmy-help him. “I need you so bad.” His voice is ragged. He feels out of control.
“Need you, too,” I unbuckle his belt with clumsy fingers. It’s the truth. One real thing.
And soon enough he’s got me mostly naked, but he’s still wearing the lab coat, and he’s just on that point of entering me, and I’m looking into his beautiful eyes, reveling in his sweet and peppery scent.
And it’s like nothing else.
“Theo,” I whisper. I twist the lapels of his lab coat. My heart feels so big, I want to scream.
“I’m here.” He pushes in, slowly, filling me deliciously, moving inside me.
In every way that’s important, it’s us having sex for the first time. Us inside each other. It feels like he’s fucking me all the way up to my eyes, or maybe my soul.
“Look at us. Fitting perfectly,” he whispers.
“Perfectly,” I agree, too blissed out for creative words. I kiss his perfect chin. His bad-boy lips.
Having sex without the game feels like a journey, an odyssey. We’re mindless, but also really together.
I press the back of my hand to his warm belly, enjoying the feeling of him inside me, and then I do myself. He swears under his breath, because it gets us both off.
A little later I have my clothes back on, and I’m lounging in his desk chair.
Everything feels different. I grab a carrot stick from his little Tupperware, and then I kiss him one last time. “I have to go deal with this subletter.”
“Wait. Saturday? Will you come to the banquet?”
The dress. The Cinderella experience. “I’m in.”
He grins. “Good.”
I grab his hand. “I’m going to warn you, don’t be mad at me if I get scared or weird, okay?”
“Roger that,” he says.
“I’m serious. Mason tried to
control my life, and he took everything away from me.”
He furrows his brow, like he can’t even bear to think of it, then kisses my right cheekbone the way he sometimes does, and everything’s good again.
I smile. “So if I’m ever weird…”
“Noted.” He kisses my left cheekbone.
“It feels like a leap, okay? This whole thing. Scary.”
“We got this,” he says.
A sparkly feeling comes over me. “Dinner tonight?”
“Now who’s being presumptuous?”
I grin and slap his shoulder. “Where are you in your—” I nod at his whiteboard.
“I’ll hit a stopping point around six. Meet you at seven? You pick.”
“Wait, this wasn’t a stopping point? Were you running equations this whole time we were…” Fucking isn’t the right word, but making love feels too something…
“The whole time we were off the map?”
I put my hand to his heart and kiss his stubbly cheek. My chemist who carries the world on his shoulders. Who thinks he doesn’t deserve nice things because he didn’t get the car keys so many years ago. “I’m into it,” I say.
“Me, too. I’m into your animal videos and your pointless, awesome cookies and your snarky comments at four in the morning. I want a hundred and ten percent.”
“You’re not much of a scientist if you think you’re going to get a hundred and ten percent,” I joke.
“You make me believe in impossible things,” he says.
* * *
The sun reflects off the polished floor of the Vossameer lobby. The new artwork seems almost to glow. And I feel like I’m flying.
Everything was so gray and somber for all these weeks, but now there’s color and hope and trust and us—two people who are maybe shitty at relationships, me because of what happened with Mason, and him because, well…I’m grinning stupidly thinking how standoffish he is with people in general, but it’s different with me. He shows me a side of himself he doesn’t show other people.
He makes me want to be a fierce dragon fighter. I want to go back up and tell him that, but I resist the urge. There’s time now.
I see Marley at the guard stand talking with somebody. Sasha. Marley says something, and she turns and smiles in a way that I don’t like.
I smile back. Nothing can bring me down.
Even so, I want to be instantly outside and away from her.
That’s not what happens. Sasha pushes off and comes for me, clicking along, following a path designed to intersect with mine.
I tell myself that she’s the one who should be avoiding me. I tell myself nothing she can say can upset me.
And then she opens her mouth. “Such a fierce businesswoman. With your amazing new space you got with your fabulous reputation.”
“If you’re trying to do a whole zinger thing on me, you shouldn’t use facts I feel awesome about.”
“No?” She tilts her head with an exaggerated frown. “But that’s what’s so funny. That you think you got it on your reputation. Did you check who actually leased that space?”
“What are you talking about? I leased it.”
“You subleased it. From Theo. Setting you up so you can play bakery. Isn’t that nice!”
My belly drops through the floor, but I don’t let her see it—I won’t. I cross my arms over my chest.
“You can check with Petey Sanger in accounting if you don’t believe me.” She crosses her arms, mirroring my pose. “That better? For my zinger?”
I force a smile. “When impersonating me doesn’t work, there’s always petty jealousy, isn’t there? It doesn’t become you.”
She puts on a fake pout. “No? Okay. But letting you know what an idiot you are? That for sure becomes me.”
I turn and head back to the elevators, mind reeling. I’m thinking about that dark look that flashed across Theo’s face when I told him how happy I was to have gotten it on my own steam. I’m thinking about all those times he asked about my bakery dreams, the pictures for my dream board that he seemed so interested in.
“Uh-oh!” I hear her laugh behind me.
Her laughter is a whisper compared to the thundering despair inside me.
Thirty-Five
Theo
* * *
There’s a formula for utter misery. You have to start off happy. Preferably with your heart soaring higher than you can remember. Extra points if the world feels new, if for once in your worthless life, you feel like you’re not the piece of shit you always believed you were.
Maybe you’re looking out the window, because you want to catch one last glimpse of her.
And maybe it’s a little bit of pride, because you did it—the woman you’re falling for is right there with you, falling back.
More extra points if you still feel her all over your skin, but especially in your chest where she touched you, where she pressed her hand to feel your heart beating out of control.
But she doesn’t appear on the sidewalk below. She’s coming in the door.
I turn, happy to see her, even after a few minutes of separation. I assume she forgot something…until I see the devastation in her gaze.
“What happened?” I go to her.
She puts up a hand. The hand that was on my heart, connecting us just moments ago, is marking a wall between us.
She knows.
“How could you?”
I move my lips, but no words come out.
“I can’t believe you!”
“You were leaving, Lizzie. You needed help and you wouldn’t take it—”
“That’s because I wanted to do it on my own! Me. Without a man lording over me. A man with the power to take it all away. You knew that. I asked you to respect that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Having control of my own destiny was so important to me.”
My pulse bangs in my ears. “But you would have control. It would be all yours.”
“No, it would be fake control that you grant me. You didn’t even ask me. You just did it! Oh my god.”
“I didn’t want to lose you—”
“And that woman? She and her husband acting like they love Cookie Madness…were they actors?”
“They were brokers.”
“Brokers who were acting out a script that you gave them.”
“But the contract was real,” I say. “The terms protect you. The success would be all you. I don’t want money. I don’t care about controlling you. I want us. I want to undo some of the wrong that was done to you, so that you can have the success you deserve.”
“Do you not see the problem here? Do you not see how monumental the deceit is? I asked you to respect a thing that’s important to me and you tricked me.”
“I didn’t want to lose us. I didn’t want to look back and think, if only I hadn’t…” The words die on my lips. The hurt in her eyes is breaking me.
I want to go to her, touch her, hold her, but I caused the hurt.
She looks away. “What is the one thing I asked of you?”
I hesitate, desperate for some way to take away the pain.
“What is the one simple thing?”
“To respect your wishes. To not try to control you.”
“And what did you do?”
“I fell for you.”
“You tried to control me.”
“I know,” I say. “I messed up.”
“No, missing a date because you’re absorbed in your work would be messing up.”
“Please,” I say helplessly. “Give us another chance.”
“I can’t,” she says.
“You can’t just leave.”
“It was always going to happen.” She looks around. “Thank you for…”
“No.”
I go to her, but she puts up her hand. “Don’t follow me, either. I’m asking you for that one thing.”
“I don’t want to live without an us.”
She regards me with that gaze that
used to hold so much trust. It’s all gone now.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I know. She mouths it. Maybe she whispers it. My pulse is whooshing too hard for me to tell. I know.
And with that, the most precious thing in my life walks out the door.
Everything in me yearns to follow her. I ball my fists, force myself to stay. Disrespecting her wishes, that’s how I got into this mess.
The one thing I asked you.
I stand there for the longest time, twisting with torment. I always find a solution to everything. A hole I can break through to find the answers, but this thing is frozen solid. There’s no hole anywhere, unless you count the one in my heart.
After what feels like forever, I go back to my board. So many promising pathways and new discoveries. All irrelevant.
I wander to the window, but I know I won’t see her. She’ll wait to cross the street until she’s out of my view. She’ll think of that out of kindness, so that I don’t see her walking away from this building one last time.
I press my hand to the glass, feel the rumble of Manhattan. The crash of this relationship.
I wander around after work. Streets that won’t have her on them. I head home, earlier than usual, at a loss for what to do with my free time.
I sit out on the veranda where we ate pizza once.
I tell myself I’ll be able to concentrate on finishing the dehydration formula now, but the mad frenzy of it is gone.
Ironic that I’d make my breakthrough as soon as my frenzy to make it disappeared.
Or maybe not—maybe I made my breakthrough because the frenzy disappeared. Because Lizzie helped give me perspective that widened my world. Because she bothered to look beyond my moods and my accomplishments. With her I’m real. Was real.
Why couldn’t I have let her go to Fargo?
I could’ve visited her there. Flown her back here. Supported her in ways she’d appreciate. Respected and supported her. Instead I did the opposite.
She has every right to be angry.
I text her later that night.
I’m sorry.
Thursday night I take a long run in the park, as if I can pound the misery out of myself, but it seems to compound.
I text her again. I tell her I’m sorry. I add a heart emoji.
The Billionaire's Wake-up-call Girl Page 24