by KB Winters
I kept walking and made my way into the kitchen. I stood in front of the fridge and suddenly felt awkward. This beautiful space wasn’t mine, and Grant wasn’t even some long-term friend where their house was basically your house too. In some ways, it felt like Grant and I had known each other forever, but the reality was that we had met less than two months before and this was only the second time I’d ever been inside his house. I was about to turn away and sneak back to the bedroom and wait for him to direct me, but as I was spinning on my toes, his warm voice startled me, “There’s not much in here, I’m afraid. Let me call down and order something for us.”
I let my fingers slip from the polished silver handle of the fridge, and turned all the way around to face Grant. He’d thrown on a pair of navy blue lounge pants and a UCLA sweatshirt. “Okay. Do you want me to make coffee?”
He laughed and padded across the floor to join me. He stopped inches from me, and I could feel the heat of his body radiating to mine. He reached past me and hit a button on the fancy coffee machine behind me. It lit up and he straightened, but didn’t back away from me. “I got it.”
“What time do you normally leave?” I asked, taking a tiny step back towards the edge of the counter, putting a sliver of distance between us. It was a work day, and I knew that Grant was the type to be at the office bright and early.
“About an hour ago,” he answered. His voice was light and he appeared relaxed, but I couldn’t help but feel guilty that I was keeping him from his normal routine. He was a very busy man, and I was sure there were more than a few things at the office waiting for his attention.
“I’m sorry. Don’t worry about breakfast—I’ll get something at school.”
I started to walk past him, but he reached out and grabbed my shoulders. His touch was firm, but gentle. “No, Megan, please, I want you to stay and have breakfast with me.”
My first class wasn’t for another couple of hours, so there was no reason not to, but I still hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Let me call Cara and I’ll let her know I’ll be a couple hours late.”
“Does she know…about…us?” I asked, instantly hating the way I’d said us. There was no us. Nothing had happened.
Grant didn’t seem to notice and shook his head. “My private life is mine, and I keep it that way.”
I nodded and turned away to conceal my red cheeks and fidgeted with the fancy coffee machine. I’d seen an identical one at the office in the staff break room but hadn’t bothered trying to figure it out for myself yet. My coffee addiction hadn’t won the fight against my technophobia just yet. I hit a button and steam spurted out at me. I squealed and jumped back, bumping into Grant’s solid chest. “Oh, sorry.”
“You’re jumpy.” He cocked an eyebrow at me and my cheeks warmed even further.
“Sorry.”
“Megan, you don’t have to be sorry. Just relax.” His eyes were dark and pleading as he looked down at me.
I nodded and made a show of relaxing my shoulders down and back. “I’m cool.”
“All right. Let me get this going, and then I’ll order some food.” He sidestepped me and flicked a couple switches on the coffee machine, and placed a mug under the spout just in time to catch a perfect shot of espresso. I stared, mesmerized by the deep coco color, and then was further impressed when the machine whipped up perfect foam to top it off. Grant handed me the perfect latte that looked like something out of a coffee shop and smiled before grabbing his phone off the charging base on the kitchen counter and stepping out and around the corner.
I sipped the hot coffee and crossed to the living room to look out the expansive windows as the city below woke up and started to come alive—getting into the workday groove.
My mind drifted as I watched, consumed by what my next move was going to be. I’d planned on staying with Max for a few days, but that was obviously out of the question, leaving me nowhere to go. I could go home, but the idea of dealing with Dad’s silent hurt and anger, teamed with my brothers’ hostility, was more than I could think about. I had enough money in savings to stay at a hotel for a couple of days. But was that really necessary? A break would be nice…
“Whatcha thinking about over there?” Grant asked, interrupting my mental planning.
I twirled around to face him. “Wow. I just noticed my car in the street. How’d it get there?”
“I called last night to have it picked up. You do need it, don’t you?”
“Well…yeah!” I answered, still wondering where I was going to go. “Thanks and I’m sorry about last night’s drama” I knew if I told Grant about my predicament, he’d offer to let me stay with him, but I didn’t want him to. Mostly because I was afraid I’d say yes…
“No problem, it was my pleasure,” he said as he cocked an eyebrow and I shivered at the thought. “Are you coming in to the office today?”
Before I could come up with an answer, the doorbell buzzed and Grant held up a finger, silently telling me to hold that thought, as he went to get breakfast. He returned to my view moments later, holding an identical tray to the one he’d had the first time I’d stayed over. He set the tray down on the kitchen island and I automatically followed the smell of the hot breakfast and pulled up a stood at the island bar while he retrieved plates and utensils for me.
“I’ll come into work after class,” I answered as he put together a plate of wheat toast with peanut butter and half a grapefruit and set it in front of me. “What happened to the pancakes and eggs?” I asked, my voice light and teasing.
Grant looked up, his face almost startled looking, before he registered the smile on my face and relaxed. “That was a weekend breakfast. This is what you get during the week.”
I laughed. “Okay, wow. Let me ask you something, is there anything in your life that doesn’t run on clockwork?” I’d observed him long enough to know that the man had a firm routine and rarely deviated from it.
He smiled, and for a moment, almost looked shy. “Well, I do own a watch company.”
My hand flew to my mouth to cover the loud laugh that escaped. Grant was almost always friendly, but it was the first time I remembered him making a straight up joke with me. “Fair enough.”
He laughed along and loaded his own plate before rounding the island to sit next to me.
“Hey, I’m not knocking it. Sometimes I wish my life was more like yours. I’ve always been a little bit of a free bird, each day changing and uncertain, but right now, I could use a little more order. Sometimes it’s like being pulled in ten different directions at once, and it’s all I can do to keep from falling apart. If I didn’t have ten million things going on, it’d be easier to figure some other stuff out.”
Grant took a bite and then looked over at me. “Like the stuff you were talking about last night?”
I sighed. I’d been a little more candid than I’d really intended in the aftermath of everything with Max. I hadn’t meant to spill my guts like that, but once I’d started, it had been good to get some of it out of my head, like a decompression could finally start once it was out there. “Yeah. I mean the family stuff and the friend stuff is stressful, but then there’s the big picture stuff too, like what the hell I’m supposed to do once I get done with school. I mean, graduation is like a month away and I have no idea what I want to do. I’ve been going along this whole time, thinking that one day I’d just wake up and it would hit me, and bam, I’d have a direction. Something to pursue. But…so far, that hasn’t happened.”
Grant nodded and I wondered how much he understood. From past conversations, it seemed as though he’d known from birth what he would do for the rest of his life. He’d always known it would be his role to take over as the leader of Timeless Timepieces, and even though that day had come sooner than he’d anticipated, he’d formed a clear plan for the future and as far as I’d seen, had been unwavering in his pursuit of those plans.
“What would you have done, you know, if things hadn’t been mapped o
ut for you?” I asked.
He stared ahead for a beat, turning the question over. “To be honest, I don’t know. Since I was never really given the choice, I never saw the point in thinking much about it.”
We were silent for a few minutes, each of us lost in our own thoughts as we finished the food on our plates. Grant finally interrupted the quiet, and asked, “I think you should paint. I know I didn’t get to see all of the pieces, but what I did see at the gallery, was incredible.”
I smiled, a little embarrassed. I’d never quite gotten used to people commenting on my art, good or bad. To me, my art was something too personal that to talk about it at all, felt odd and intimate. “Thanks. Trust me—it looked better on the wall than on the sidewalk.”
Grant laughed at my joke and nodded. “I’m sure it did. Do you have more?”
“Yeah,” I answered. I paused to tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I didn’t want to talk about my paintings, and something about discussing it with Grant made it feel too intimate.
“Well, I’d love to see them sometime,” he said. He stood and started clearing the plates, as though sensing my walls going up around that particular topic.
“Thanks for breakfast.” I stood too, and brushed my fingertips clean. “I should get going. Busy day.”
Grant turned to face me, his hands still dangling over the sink as he lowered the dishes down under the spray of water. “Do you want me to walk you down?”
I shook my head. “I’ll be all right. Thanks again, for…last night.” The words felt awkward on my lips, and I wasn’t sure if that was because of the circumstances that had led me to his condo in the first place, or in the aftermath of the intimate conversations, and even more intimate dream.
“Anytime,” he said. “I’ll see you at the office.”
Chapter Eleven — Grant
“Hey, long time no see,” Megan joked when she joined me in my office later that afternoon. Her smile and jovial manner surprised me. After the way she’d practically bolted from my condo that morning, I’d been expecting her to avoid me all day. I’d spent most of the morning puzzling over what exactly had gone wrong. Something had jolted us from the close, intimate conversations of the night, into the awkward, distant morning, but I had no idea what it was. Megan was a mystery to me, and it was beginning to seem that every time I thought I had her figured out, pinned down, she changed, and I lost track of her again.
“Come on in,” I said, offering a flash of a smile, before I consciously put away the scattered thoughts and questions in my mind. I waved her over to the conference table that was covered in papers. Most of the pages were statistically information, graphs and charts, but there were also pictures and sketches mixed in, and I watched as Megan’s eyes zeroed in on them one at a time as she swept the table. If it was possible, she looked better than ever, and as we stood side by side, I didn’t bother trying to stop myself from letting my eyes take her in, inch by inch, as she was distracted.
“What’s all this?” she asked, after she’d absorbed each picture.
I pulled my eyes away from the trail they had been following down the feminine curve of her lower back, and snapped them to the table. “I pulled these to get us started with the women’s line.”
“I thought we already started some sketches. You don’t like those anymore?” She glanced up at me and I saw the glimmer of a deeper question behind her eyes.
“No, I do, but I wanted to pull from other sources of inspiration and see what we could come up with.” I cleared my throat and turned away before she could ask any more questions about the other sketches she’d drawn. The truth was, I’d run the majority of them through the shredder not too long after receiving her resignation. It was impulsive and stupid, but at the time, I’d wanted to prove a point—mostly to myself, as no one else knew about the drawings—that I didn’t need her.
“Coffee?” I asked, crossing to the espresso machine on the opposite wall.
“Always,” Megan answered, not missing a beat. She smiled at me and I turned away to make the drinks. “Is everything okay, Grant?”
My chest tightened at the question. I wanted to appear indifferent, calm, collected. I’d kept my voice and face under complete control all morning, not so much as a muscle twitch or unwanted inflection in my tone. “Everything’s fine, Megan.”
An awkward silence settled between us, broken only by the soft hissing and humming of the coffee machine as it made two lattes. I dispensed some vanilla into Megan’s cup, and took an extra second to mix it in with a wooden stir stick.
Before I turned back, Megan said, “This morning was weird, I know. That’s on me.”
I picked up the coffee cups, ignoring the thumping of my heart, and went back to her. “What do you mean?”
“At your apartment, I felt like a weirdo. I didn’t know what to say, or how to act.” She looked away, breaking the intense eye contact for a beat before returning her eyes to mine. “I guess I don’t really know what’s going on here.”
“Here?”
“Like, with us, I guess. Obviously, we crossed the intern slash employer lines. And normally, I wouldn’t call my boss to bail me out of trouble, and I definitely wouldn’t…you know…stay over.” She stopped and cleared her throat. “What do you think? Friends?”
Her words sliced through me like a searing hot knife.
Friends?
How could she even think that? I wanted to shake her, to snap her out of this politically correct bullshit she’d fallen into, I wanted to tell her that I needed her to be more, so much more. She needed to know that somewhere along the way, she’d awoken a deep yearning inside of me that couldn’t be calmed by anything or anyone else. As I studied her, I only got more angry.
“Grant?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Say something, please.”
“We can be friends, sure.” I had no idea where the words had come from. But once they were loose in the room, there was no way to reign them back in. I pinched my eyes closed and took a long sip of the scalding coffee, thinking I should’ve laced mine with something to take the edge off. The room was getting stuffy and claustrophobic. I wanted to loosen the knot on my tie, but Megan was still watching me intently, and I needed to keep it together.
“Is that what you want?” I asked, setting down the cup with a gentle thud on the table. I straightened and stared down into her wide eyes, daring her. “You really want to be friends?”
She looked startled, her face paled slightly and I could tell she hadn’t expected the challenge. After my initial statement of agreement, she’d thought she was off the hook. “I don’t know,” she finally answered, her voice wavered. “I don’t know what I want, Grant. I know what I don’t want. I don’t want to fight with you, I don’t want things to be awkward, and I also don’t want to complicate things further than they already are.”
I resisted the urge to reach for her. It was obvious that she was shaken, confused. Some primal urge deep inside of me bubbled up and I wanted to gather her to my chest, to hold her until she felt safe again. “Megan, where is all of this coming from? Is this because of last night? It was okay that you called me, really. I’m glad you did.”
She nodded slowly and sucked on the corner of her lower lip, stirring an entirely different set of urges within me.
The urge to have her maroon lips wrapped around my cock. The urge to bend her over my desk and slam my cock deep inside her while she cried out my name. The urge to tie her to the—
Megan finally spoke, bringing me out of my musings. “I had a dream…about us.” Her voice low, as though her words were some kind of confessional. She brought her eyes up to meet mine in a slow, sweeping motion. “Last night. And, I don’t know, it freaked me out.”
“What kind of dream?” I asked, my entire body on edge, waiting for her answer.
She took the cup from me and gave a subtle roll of her eyes. “Grant, come on. Don’t make this harder on me. You know what kind of dream.”
“God, I can’t believe I just told you that.” She closed her eyes tight and when she opened them again, she refused to meet mine, and fidgeted with the coffee cup, focusing on the swirling steaming liquid. “Anyway, that’s why I was so weird.”
I took a long sip of my coffee, trying to put my thoughts together. My instincts told me to take advantage of the moment, to find a way to make her tell me all the naughty details, so I could make her fantasy a reality. But, something in the back of my mind stopped me. She’d trusted me enough to tell me the truth, and if I tried to exploit that in her moment of discomfort, I’d lose her for good. I was treading new ground—probably for the both of us—and I needed to carefully choose each step.
Megan studied my expression, clearly waiting for me to respond, but before I could put my thoughts into words, she covered her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, I really have no idea what is wrong with me. Can we just forget I said any of that?”
I grabbed her hands and pulled them away from her face. I held them and ran my thumb along the ridge of her knuckles. “What if I can’t? What if I don’t want to…forget it?”
Her lips parted, and I wasn’t sure if she was going to scold me or kiss me, so I waited, but before she could do either, her phone buzzed violently against the glass tabletop. The sound shattered the suspended moment, and we both snapped our heads to look down at the source of the intruding sound. She swooped to snatch it away, but before she could conceal the screen, I saw Logan’s name light up across the display. My stomach twisted into a sharp knot and rage rushed in, rapidly replacing all the softness and vulnerability of the moment before.