"I—" I yank my hands back so fast I nearly lose my balance. "I wasn't— This isn't— Why are you shirtless?" God, I hate how my voice sounds to my own ears. So squeaky and shrill. Somewhere down the block, a dog just got very concerned for me.
One of Andrew's eyebrows floats up.
"Generally, that's what happens when
one changes clothes."
"It's nine at night!"
"How remarkably observant of you. And here I thought you had your eyes closed." He tilts his head. "Which brings us to the more interesting question: Why were you wandering around my office in the dark, looking for victims to grope?"
I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.
What am I supposed to say? Hey, boss, funny story: I'm going blind in three months, so I thought I'd practice navigating the office and accidentally felt you up instead? Sort of a "task failed successfully" situation.
"I was… testing something."
"Were the results satisfactory?" There is something in his tone that makes heat crawl up my neck. Which is ridiculous, obviously. This is Andrew Simon. He dates women with billboards of their faces and sexually explicit pop songs on the radio.
He is genetically incapable of innuendo with anyone below the executive level. I am not a potential sex partner in his eyes—I am a worm, a speck of dirt.
"I'd call it a work-in-progress." I start to turn. "I should go. It's been a long day."
"Hm." He doesn't move out of my way. "And your solution to this long day
was to wander around in the dark?"
"It's been a long, complicated day."
"I run a multi-billion-dollar hospitality empire, Jones. I eat complicated for breakfast. Usually with a side of impossible and a light garnish of
inadvisable."
Despite everything—the diagnosis, the darkness, the fact that I just had my
hands all over my boss's chesticles—I feel my lips twitch into something like a smile.
"That's a lot of adjectives for breakfast."
"I'm a hungry man." He is still standing too close, close enough that I can see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw.
"Try me."
I look up at him. At Andrew Simon, the talent, the terror, the bane of my
existence and the name signed on the bottom of my paychecks. And for just a second, I consider telling him.
Because God knows I've been bearing so much for so long. Dad left when I was too young to even memorize his face, and Mom has always been basically a child in a grown woman's body, so I raised her far more than she ever raised me. And life is hard enough on people who get lots of lucky breaks, but I've never gotten one of those, not once, not ever—I've gotten
food stamps and bruised shins and syrup-less lattes, and I've worked until
my eyes ached and my fingernails cracked for nothing but pitiful pennies, but I did it because I had to, because someone has to, because it's a brutal world and the only way to make it through is to put your head down and work, and work, and work.
And for once, just once, it would be nice to look someone in the eye and tell them that I could use a bit of kindness today,
because it's been a long life and kindness has been in short supply since the start of it.But I don't. I don't say any of that. Why would I? What would it get me—
especially from this man?
Andrew Simon doesn't do vulnerability.He does efficiency and excellence and probably some other e-words that I can't think of right now because my brain is still processing the whole shirtless thing. But vulnerability?
No. Not once. Not ever.
As if to prove me wrong, though, Andrews's face softens just a fraction. "Go home, Jones. Whatever's going on, it'll still be there in the morning." That is the problem, though: It won't be. Not quite.
Every morning, there'll be a little less. A little less light, a little less color, a little less of everything I've taken for granted. And then in ninety days, there won't be anything.
———
I give up on sleep around 3 A.M., which is probably for the best, since my brain has decided to run a highlight reel of last night's mortification on loop.
But that brain, being the saucy little minx that it sometimes likes to be, has scripted a very different ending for the encounter.In real life, the whole debacle couldn't have lasted more than five minutes, tops. Deep in the throes of this REM cycle, though, five minutes becomes five centuries. Every detail gets magnified.
It's not just Andrew Simon's chest I'm seeing anymore. It's every blonde hair on said chest, enhanced into ultracrystal-clear 4K HD. Every curve of every muscle is there like brushstrokes on a painting when you're close enough for your nose to almost graze the canvas.
It's not just "tattoo." It's the spread wings of an eagle, inked into skin that's tan and warm and smells like soap and wintergreen. And it's not just "Care to explain what you're doing?" Now, because I'm sick, because my thoughts are sick and my fantasies are sick (and probably also because I haven't experienced sexual contact since the last presidential administration), it's Andrew's voice purring something very, very different: I thought you'd never ask.
It goes completely off the rails from there. Instead of his fingers gently encircling my wrist and peeling me off of him, those fingers now nudge my hands down, down, down. Past the soft thickets of chest hair, past the rivulets of six, count 'em, six defined abs, toward where the V points directly to the buckle of his belt.
Then he keeps going. I force myself awake there, because Andrew's inked, scarred, calloused hands tempting my very innocent, very demure, very well-lotioned hands into performing heinous sexual acts in the middle of the workplace is a bridge too far.
Also, getting my fantastical rocks off—with my boss, no less—is not high on my priority list. I have bigger things to worry about. My eyes are trying to quiet quit on me, which is frankly very rude. I ought to focus on that, not on the thick blue vein in my boss's bicep or the glint in his eye when he looked at me and smirked.