Page 38 of Unexpected You

Getting silly messages from her on a weekend was lighting me up inside and I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t stop it. Talking to her brought me joy. You would have thought I’d be sick of her by the weekend, but not exactly. When she was working, the last thing I was going to do was talk her ear off. But now that I had the chance, I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

The only downside was that I couldn’t hear her voice. See her face. Watch her expression when I said something outrageous. It was my new favorite hobby. To say something she didn’t expect and watch her reaction.

But sending messages was better than nothing.

Eloise and I went back and forth the rest of the day. She told me she’d been with the kids and sent me pictures of them running through the sprinklers at Camille’s house.

Three little kids, two girls, one boy. The girls had blonde hair and the little boy was dark. Cute. So cute.

She also sent me a picture of hugging all of them that must have been taken by Camille or her husband.

It made me happy that Eloise had them. That there was someone to love her that way. Eloise hadn’t told me much about her family, other than that she’d grown up poor, and I got the impression she’d cut off contact with her parents. Or maybe they had died. I wasn’t going to be an asshole and ask if she didn’t want to talk about it.

Eventually we both went to bed, but we kept firing messages at each other until pretty late.

Sunday was brunch and nonsense and more messages with Eloise. Nothing serious. I told her about what I’d been like in high school, and she told me about her favorite music as a teen. She asked about my favorite movies, and I went on a long tangent about one of my favorites that I got a little too enthusiastic about, but she didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t get that she was bored, or that I was showing her too much.

My brain still told me to pull back, but I couldn’t seem to. As if she’d opened a door and I’d walked through and couldn’t close it again.

If I wasn’t careful, I was going to hurl myself so completely into talking with her that I wouldn’t be able to do anything else, so I forced myself to take regular breaks. Getting addicted to things that gave me dopamine was a real problem that I fought with all the time. I hadn’t lost myself in a while, but there was always a chance that I’d encounter some new show or book or thing to research that would plunge me into a hole that excluded everything else. When I’d been younger, it had been worse. Summers were bad when I was in school, due to all the free time I had on my hands. If I wanted to barely sleep for three days while I marathoned online videos and articles about the sinking of the Titanic, I could. And had.

The thing that really got me the most about Eloise is that even when I’d sent her a wall of text about bullshit, she didn’t tell me to stop or ignore me or be like hey, thanks but no thanks. She responded and asked more questions. Seemed to want to keep things going.

Curiosity was soooo fucking sexy to me, specifically. When someone said, “that’s so interesting, tell me more,” they might as well have said “take your clothes off.” It smashed all of my buttons at once, and Eloise kept doing it. Plus, she was hot as fuck. Working with her had only made her more attractive to me.

I knew from the first few messages that I was in deep fucking shit. That the feelings I was having in my chest and stomach and between my legs and making my nipples hard were wrong, wrong, wrong.

Wrong and bad and inappropriate. Not the kind of feelings an employee should have for their boss.

Instead of what I should have done, shut it down, I…didn’t. In fact, I did the opposite. I sent her more messages and gorged myself on her attention and let it run through my veins, setting me on fire and then when it got to be too much, well, I took myself somewhere private and fucked myself quick and hard. I’d never been so goddamn horny in my whole life and getting myself off just seemed to make it worse.

There was something seriously wrong with me and I needed to get a handle on it because I could not sneak off to masturbate during work hours. In my boss’s house. While thinking about my boss.

That was just crossing too many lines.

Chapter Twelve

Eloise

Things had changed between us this weekend, and I was still deciding if it was a good thing or a bad thing. She’d been the one to message me first, but I’d been the one to ask her about the book. And when she’d sent me that drunken selfie on Saturday night, I’d responded. I couldn’t help myself.

She looked so happy and gorgeous and free and honestly, it took my breath away. When was the last time I’d let myself go like that? Danced in a group of people and not cared what I looked like? Sure, I’d gone to author conventions and had gotten a little tipsy at the bar, but I’d always been too conscious of my image to allow myself to let loose.

Nowadays, the only wild dancing I did was when my nieces were trying to teach me the latest moves they’d learned online and I usually failed spectacularly.

The kind of dancing that Cadence had photographed at the club was in my past. Except, it wasn’t even in my past because I’d never been the kind of girl who went to a club, not even in college. It was a waste of time, in my opinion at the time. People got drunk and sloppy and silly and I’d rather spend my time honing my craft and getting as many words out of my brain and onto a computer document than do anything else. Words meant a future. Getting drunk and dancing meant nothing.

I always told myself that I hadn’t missed out on anything, but that picture of Cadence hit me like a high-speed train. Her joy was radiant and mesmerizing. I’d pulled up the picture and looked at it so many times over the weekend. Camille almost caught me on Saturday and I had to quickly swipe away and pretend that I’d been reading an email or something.

And then there were the messages. So. Many. Messages. I’d known from that first interview that Cadence was a talker, but she had obviously been holding back. A lot.

No sooner had I asked something than she’d sent me an answer with near excruciating detail. How in the hell did she type so fast? The way she answered was interesting, though. She might say a lot, but I liked knowing what she had to say. Her mind was a twisting, complicated place. She’d start a sentence somewhere and end up somewhere completely different and it would take me a few read-throughs to find the common thread that connected everything. Sometimes I didn’t, but that didn’t matter.

Cadence was interesting. More interesting than I’d given her credit for. It felt like we’d unlocked something new between us with these messages and I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not.

“Who are you talking to?” Camille asked me for the fourth time on Sunday as we sat in the sun and sipped on bellinis by the water. John had apparently taken the kids out to the trampoline park and told Camille to invite me out for a day off. Drinks and appetizers were first up, then shopping and strolling, and finally back to Camille’s to sit in the quiet of the house and enjoy the silence.

“No one,” I said, turning my phone over so I wouldn’t be tempted to respond to Cadence.