by DD Prince
Ugh. Just get us to work already.
He opens the doors for us, closing after us, then stands too close in the elevator, and walks too close to me all the way to my cubicle. I get so flustered that I almost trip on a floor mat just as we’re rounding the corner near Ally’s cube. He catches me, by the hips and steadies me.
By. The. Hips.
He then fits himself against the back of me.
“Fallin’ for me?”
I glare over my shoulder, red-faced. He’s wearing a stupid smirk.
I growl at him and he chuckles like he thinks my roar is cute. His eyes are on my mouth.
Five seconds after I’ve hung my bag over my hook, Ally’s head is popping up.
“What on earth is happening with you two?”
I shake my head and wave my hand nonchalantly.
Aiden’s in his office, on the phone, but he’s got a perfect view of us.
She’s standing there, waiting for me to answer.
“Not now,” I mumble, and she stares for a second and then I turn around and open the lid to my laptop.
“Lunch. My treat. You’re gonna spill.”
No, I’m not. I don’t say this though, I let out a little nervous laugh.
“Can’t do lunch today. Maybe tomorrow.”
***
It has been a great day. A productive day. I managed to avoid him all day long as well as avoid lunch with Ally. It was easy with him, since he seemed to be in a boardroom all day rather than his office with a view of me. Not so easy with Ally, who wasn’t easy to convince that I needed to work through my lunch.
I’ve gotten well acquainted with all the areas of my new job, I think. I’m ready to start wowing these people with my skills.
At 5:00, Ally informs me the cab is here and Aiden is coming, too. And I’m thinking, grrrr.
I’ve had my nose to the grindstone all day, ate lunch at my desk, and worked my patootie off. And I am in no mood for him. I want a long hot soak in that big soaker tub and to curl up with a good book and a glass of wine.
We’re in a different cab going home and it’s a nice, big pine-scented minivan so there’s room for us to spread out and breathe easy. Ally climbs into the middle row in the bucket seat behind the driver. I climb into the back bench seat. Aiden sits right beside me in the back.
Not the passenger seat up front. Not the separate bucket seat beside Ally. Not even the passenger side of bench I’m on. He’s in the middle seat in the center, his thigh plastered to mine.
I glare at him. He acts oblivious as Ally tells the cabbie our building address.
My phone rings and I pull it out of my bag.
Jon Calling
I reject the call.
“Who’s Jon?” Aiden asks.
“You’re rude.” I glare at him.
He smiles, eyes on my mouth.
I stuff my phone back into my bag and try (and fail) to ignore him.
It’s a long ten-minute drive with his thigh right against mine, his eyes on me, his scent irritating me. He still smells good. No, great.
Jerk.
I’m reminded of him behind me that morning in the kitchen. He and Ally talk about work, about an upcoming tech show in New York and he remarks that we’ll be there. She talks about some campaign she did a few years back for a similar show in Baltimore and he tells her to send him examples.
The whole time he’s talking to her, he’s leaning in close to me, as if he’s seeking maximum physical contact. It’s unnerving.
Aiden’s blazer starts to ring, so he digs into an inside pocket to fetch his phone. We have no choice but to eavesdrop.
“Aiden here… What? Not likely. No. After the weekend, are you kidding? Not a fuckin’ chance. After all that you send me headless nudes last night? You must think I’m a real stupid fuck, don’t you? Of course I’m serious. Oh yeah? Nope. Not interested in riding your crazy train again, bitch… Fuck off or a certain video will get circulated around the country club your parents go to. No? Try me, bitch… Yep, fuck you right back, babe.”
He hangs up and dials a number, angrily and then barks, “That errand I texted you about three days ago? Bella? When am I gonna have news? Yep. Meet me for a drink tonight and talk me off this ledge or I might pull the trigger.”
He ends the call.
The tension could be cut with a knife. I don’t know if Ally feels it as much as me, but I doubt it. The day I arrived, he was arguing with that girl in the apartment about a sex video on his phone.
I glance at him as he puts his phone back into his pocket and the ruthless look on his face makes my blood chill. He catches me looking and winks at me.
I’m relieved when I see our apartment building.
I ignore Seth who strangely doesn’t speak to us. In fact, he gives us a professional nod when the three of us move through the lobby.
I’m not relieved when Ally gets off the elevator and it’s just us two for the last few floors up. I feel tension in the elevator in the form of him watching me. I ignore him and stare at the progression of the button lights above the doors. I’m out the door first and as I’m fumbling for my keys in my bag, I hear a jingle and he’s got his keys in his hand and he’s unlocking the door.
I follow him in and then my footsteps stutter. Where did those keys come from?
“I thought you lost those,” I say.
“She speaks,” he observes.
My eyes meet his and I’m frowning.
He winks and strolls down the hall to his bedroom and goes inside.
“I spoke when I told you that you were rude!” I call out.
Did he just get them back? Or, did he only pretend to lose them?
Whatever. Who cares?
I head to my room and flop onto my bed, trying to make sense of that even though it doesn’t matter. My phone is ringing from my bag.
Stephanie calling.
Decline.
Maybe I should change my number to a San Diego one and only give it to my mother.
Two minutes later, she makes my voicemail ding.
I glance at the screen and see I missed a call from Caitlin, too. Seven voicemail messages now wait for me.
I hear a sound that I’m pretty sure is the apartment door closing. Maybe he’s gone out. Good.
I head across the hall with a change of clothes and my train case. I peel my clothes off and pour lots of my orange blossom bath foam in. I get into the awesome soaker tub and soak. And soak. When I’m done, I dry off, lotion up, re-tie my hair into a bun, and get into a grey sweatshirt dress with big pockets that I love to wear when I’m doing nothing. I bring my work clothes and toiletries back to my room. I’m not leaving anything out since it’s not technically just my bathroom.
Since I’m pretty sure he’s not here, I head to the kitchen to find something cold to drink.
As soon as I step over the threshold of the hallway into the great room, I get a whiff of food cooking. He looks over his naked shoulder at me from the stove and his eyes heat up.
Oh shit. He’s in just a pair of sweatpants.
Shit. SHIT. I’m not wearing armor. No make-up, not even any shoes on my feet. I’m in casual around-the-house sweats that show off my naked legs. In fact, as much as it’s a sweatshirt dress, it’s a little bit sexy. It only comes to mid-thigh and it has slits on the side and enough cleavage to draw attention.
Well, might as well approach. To avoid him after he saw me would show some weakness, I guess.
“I thought you went out,” I mumble.
“I just went down to the gym.” He’s got eyes on me. On my legs.
“There’s a gym in the building?” I ask.
His eyes move back up. “Level P1.”
“Can I use it?” I ask.
“Yep,” he replies, eyes on my legs.
I get to the counter and we are a matching pair. He’s in grey sweatpants and bare-chested, barefoot. Wet hair. By his scent I can tell he’s showered and bathed himself in tha sexual chocolate man soap.
SHIT. Grey sweatpants. Don’t look for the dick print, Carly. Don’t look!
I look. Oh shit. It’s there. It’s definitely there.
My eyes zoom to the stove. Vegetables in a pan. Another pan simmering with chicken. And a giant pot of bubbling water.
Wait. My addled-by-dick-print brain plays catch-up.
This is my food. My food. Again.
I had the makings of a stir fry in the fridge, all prepped. He’s cooking my vegetables. He’s cooked my chicken. He’s got the package of noodles and all the sauces on lined up on the countertop!
Before I blow my top, I yank open the fridge to confirm my stuff isn’t still sitting on the bottom shelf. Yep, nothing other than a carton of milk, some eggs, a bottle of wine, and some fruit.
He hasn’t gone shopping. He hasn’t miraculously purchased identical ingredients to what I’d had in there, what I’d planned to make for dinner tonight with leftovers enough to either feed me dinner tomorrow or feed me lunch at work for the following two days. I’m on a drumskin-tight budget until payday a week and a half away and I can’t afford to keep feeding this guy.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
“Making dinner for us.”
“For…” I fail to get anything else out.
“Yeah. I’m starved. You hungry?”
His eyes are on me and they’re hungry, all right. They’re hungrily raking up my body from my bare feet, up my naked legs. Then they go lazy for the upper-body part of their peruse, landing on my face, which I know is beet red.
“I am. But, Aiden, those are my groceries.”
He gives me a confused look. He puts the wooden spoon down and folds his arms over his chest. And then he flexes his biceps. And my eyes don’t know whether to look at his biceps, his pecs, his dick print, or to burn lasers through him for what he’s done.
“My eyes are up here,” he teases. But, he’s right. My eyes are darting to and fro, from his chest to his crotch, and now I’m just lost for words.
He turns, lifts the spoon, and continues stirring.
Oh shit, his ass is eating his sweatpants. They’re bunched in the back. God, why is his ass so perfect?
“You keep eating my food. This is my food.” I gesture to myself, though he can’t see as he’s facing the stove, and my eyes are still on his absolutely picture-perfect bubble butt.
“Not yours. You buy your food, I’ll buy mine, Aiden.”
He laughs and keeps stirring the colorful vegetable concoction in the pan. It smells great. My stomach rumbles, painfully with hunger.
“I wasn’t joking,” I tell him.
He turns, tilts his head and furrows his brows. “You’re serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious! I’ve separated my food from… from where you’d put your food if you had any.” I open the fridge door and gesture to the empty shelves. “If you buy something, you put it on another shelf. That’s my shelf, my stuff. You buy stuff, I won’t touch it. I buy stuff, you don’t touch it.”
He twists his lips in confusion.
Has he never had roommates? Has he gotten away with this behavior in the past?
“Roommate rules. You don’t eat your roommate’s food, you don’t leave a mess for your roommate. You clean up after your own mess.”
“Hmpf,” he grunts and appears to consider what I’ve said. This is a brief pondering as he then goes back to stirring the stuff on the stove. “You like it hot, Carly?” he eyes me.
“Huh?” I ask.
“You bought the hot cock sauce. Guessin’ you like it hot.”
He gestures to the bottle of sauce and my eyes move to the Huy Fong Sriracha sauce on the counter. There’s a rooster on the front of the jar. Oh. Hot. Cock. Duh.
My face flushes red at the way he’s said, “Hot cock”. Not like a thirteen-year-old boy trying to be crude. Nope. With sexuality.
“Yeah,” I try to deadpan, try to pretend my face isn’t the color of the sauce. “I like it hot.”
I allow my eyes to rove over every inch of muscle on his upper body and then my eyes take in his lower body. In those grey sweatpants, for fuck sakes. That’s one seriously prominent dick print. I want to take a picture of it and make a meme with it. No, I don’t. Focus, Carly. I shake my head.
“How hot?” He lifts the sauce and squirts it into the pan. Instantly, I feel it in the air, the hot sauce attacking my sinuses.
I stare him down.
He glugs more into the pan. I fight the wince and reach into the fridge for the bottle of white wine I’d left in there and pull it out.
“Pour me one, too, peaches,” he says and turns back to the pan, stirring vegetables some more. He drops the noodles into the boiling water and starts separating them with tongs. I glare at his back, but move to the kitchen cabinet and fetch two wineglasses.
He reaches into the drawer and pulls out a corkscrew, but I uncap the bottle of wine with a swift twist of the cap. He makes a face. A snob face. Yeah, buddy. I drink my wine out of a twist-off bottle. I drink my wine out of a box, too. Elitist food-stealing jerk.
And he should not be calling me peaches. Or baby. He’s my boss. Correction: my boss’s boss.
I’m pretty sure he can read what I’m thinking even though I’m saying nothing as I pour the wine. He snickers and works at separating the noodles some more.
I open the cupboard and pull out two plates and get us set up at the bar. And then I go to my room and go about making a list.
When I come back out with the list, he drains the noodles and then tosses them into the pan with the vegetables and chicken and adds another glug of hot sauce.
I raise my eyebrows at him.
Truthfully, I make food non-spicy and then I draw a teeny tiny happy face of sriracha into my dish of hoisin sauce and then stir it all really well before I eat any. Sometimes that’s even got too much of a bite for my delicate palate. This is the extent of my taste for spicy food. The hot sauce is a necessity, but it’s a teeny tiny amount that I am very careful about, otherwise whatever I’ve put it on will be deemed inedible.
He’s put almost a quarter of the large bottle into the pan and it’s gonna burn going down.
He’s used my groceries and ruined my dinner and I allowed him to ruin it by not speaking up about not liking it spicy.
Damn it, Carly.
He sets the plates on the bar and it looks phenomenal. The whole set-up? It would be phenomenal. A hot guy cooking. A hot guy cooking, while bare-chested with all those muscles on display.
I shouldn’t be standing here at the bar looking at food he cooked. My food. My food that won’t even be edible because it has almost a quarter bottle of hot sauce in it when I can barely handle a half a teaspoon of hot sauce.
He sits down, inviting. “Dig in.” He’s inviting me to eat my food that he’s stolen, cooked, and ruined.
I sit, jaw tight, shoulders tight, ready to spit poison darts, but starving and stubbornly ready to prove a point.
He twirls noodles around the fork and waits. I’m beside him, looking at him.
He’s waiting. Waiting for me to taste it first. Shit. I don’t wanna eat this. I feel my eyes watering from just the vapors of this stuff.
We’re both procrastinating, it seems.
He jerks his chin up. The noodles would normally be a brownish color from the teriyaki sauce. They’re pink.
I jerk my chin up in return and eye his forkful of noodles.
His eyes gleam with mischief and it’s decided that he’s taking the first bite.
Damn. Does that mean he wins this round? I take a small bite, too, at almost the exact same time. Very small. We chew in silence.
I feel the burn, as it crawls up into my sinuses, as it snakes down my throat. The heat is making my eyes water. The tang is strong. All I can taste is hot. Not any of the other spices or sauces he used.
I try for nonchalance when I reach for my wine, everything in my mouth tingling, and not in a nice way.
He reaches for
his and before the glass is at my lips, I can’t… I’m coughing, choking, sputtering. My nonchalance is a big fat fail. My wine is spilling out of my glass I’m shaking so hard with the coughing.
And he starts, too.
And then after a solid twenty or so seconds of both of us coughing and me waving both hands on either side of my face, as if fanning my face will cool it, he starts to laugh. And I start to laugh. While we’re both choking.
We’re laughing and choking at the same time when I run for the fridge, for the milk, and drink straight out of the carton.
It’s helping.
I pull it away from my lips and gasp for breath, but he grabs it out of my hand and he’s chugging the milk back, too. His mouth being where my mouth just was? I feel a twinge of something odd.
He resumes laughing as the milk gets put down on the counter. He’s wiping his milk mustache off with the back of his hand. I’m breathing hard, still feeling the tingle in my mouth.
“Well, I royally fucked that up, didn’t I?” He laughs. “I like it hot, but not that hot.”
I laugh, too, still breathing hard, and he gives me a soft look and then wipes my upper lip with the ridge of his thumb.
I feel my heart stutter and I take a step back.
“I don’t like it hot. Not really. I usually make a tiny smiley face of hot sauce. That’s it.”
He barks out more laughter. “I’ll order pizza,” he says and reaches for his iPhone, which is sitting on the bar.
That’s when the landline rings. I look at it and then look at him. He shrugs. “I haven’t given out that number. Don’t even know it. No idea.”
“Maybe it’s a telemarketer,” I say and reach for it, my throat still recovering from that burn.
I lift the phone.
“Hello?”
“Carly?”
Shit. Jon.
I immediately slam it down, feeling my face go red and hot. Like my tongue, the roof of my mouth, and the back of my throat.
Not today, jerk face. I’d rather eat more hot cock sauce.
I’m staring at it a good ten seconds while he’s talking into his phone, giving out the address. “What do you like on your pizza, Carly?” he asks.
I look up. He’s got an assessing look on his face, as he’s obviously just seen me slam that phone down and glare at it.