Page 52 of Unexpected You

I’d called her El today. I’d been doing it in my head randomly, but that was the first time that I’d done it out loud. I know she noticed. That, coupled with the cheek kiss, was what was going to end up with me being unemployed again.

Of course, I would blow up the best job I’d ever had over my inability to control my horniness.

Hunter and Reid said that they’d promise to have breakdowns soon to take the heat off me. I appreciated that.

* * *

Eloise didn’t contact me that night. Her silence weighed on me. In the short time we’d been messaging outside of work hours, I’d gotten used to hearing from her. Having her ask me what I was thinking about and being interested in the answers. She’d told me more about what it was like to be famous as a person who grew up as a regular person.

I hated what I’d done. I’d wrecked one of the best things that I’d ever had in the past few years, maybe ever. It wasn’t just the job. It was the way that Eloise trusted me with so much responsibility. And yes, I made mistakes, but she didn’t make me feel bad about them. She didn’t make me feel like I couldn’t be better, do better. She’d never said the words out loud, but I knew she believed in me.

Now that was all done. Finished. In spite of Hunter and Reid saying that things were going to be okay, how could they be? How could I go to her house every day and look at her and want what I wanted and survive? It had only gotten worse and soon enough it was going to destroy me. Falling for a straight woman never ended well. Falling for a straight woman who was also your boss was just about as bad as it could get.

* * *

Eloise

I sat in my chair for a long, long time wondering what the hell I was going to do now. Cadence probably hadn’t meant anything by it, but that didn’t stop my mind from going in all kinds of wild and dangerous directions.

In the past, those slippery, tricky feelings I’d had that lived deep down inside me had been much easier to shove away. Not always. Not at night when I was alone and wondering about that girl in my class who had looked at me a certain way, or the author who had bought me a drink at the convention, or the woman who’d met my eyes across the room. It had happened so many times in my life and every single one of those times, I’d looked away. Recoiled. It had been a reflex, to retract from those feelings. If I didn’t let them happen, then they couldn’t hurt me. Change me. Change what I knew about myself.

I wouldn’t let them.

Not because I had any problem with women loving women or men loving men, or someone of any gender loving someone of any gender. It was all fine for other people. That just wasn’t me.

I purposefully took myself out of situations where those things might arise, and it had worked for the most part. I’d moved on and stopped thinking about those things. I was attracted to men, so I dated men when I wanted to date someone, which wasn’t often. There was that one brief time when I’d been engaged, but when that had ended, I’d been relieved. Being a wife, the way that society told me I should be, wasn’t something I could do after all.

Yes, I knew there were many, many romance authors who were married. And then I knew some whose husbands had left when the women started to see success. And dealing with my demanding work and publicity schedule, along with the scrutiny, wasn’t something I thought a lot of people could handle, no matter their gender.

I had my house, and I had my career, what more did I need? Camille, John, and the kids loved me. If I wanted to have sex, I could literally pay for it. I hadn’t, contenting myself with erotic literature, my hands, and a wide array of toys I’d collected over the years. I was satisfied.

I was.

Everything was going well, and then my pretty assistant with the red hair and freckles and the laugh that made me smile had called me El and kissed me on the check and I was reduced to a complete and utter mess.

She hadn’t even done anything! Not really.

How was I going to face her tomorrow? How could I go on like nothing had changed? That she hadn’t flipped everything upside down.

I’d simply have to act like it hadn’t happened. Like I had imagined it. Otherwise, my only option was to fire her, and that was wrong. It wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t control myself.

The only course of action was to go on as normal. She deserved to keep her job and for me to act like a goddamn professional.

Eventually, I got up and headed to Camille’s and put on a smile and let them sing to me and feed me cake. Camille gifted me with a set of framed watercolor paintings, one from her, John, and each of the kids. They were all beautiful and I ended up crying at how sweet the gesture was before Camille drove me home and I was alone again with my dangerous thoughts.

* * *

I barely slept that night and only passed out when weak sunlight started to fill the room. My alarm still went off and I had to get up and do my job. Without having romantic and/or sexual thoughts about my much younger assistant.

Cadence’s car arrived on time and I peered out the window to watch her walking to the front door before I took a deep breath and walked into the kitchen and started getting plates out for us to eat. As if I could function normally today with my stomach all in knots.

I’d have to do my best to act like this was any other day, because it was, to her. I was the one with the problem and it was on me to get my act together.

“Good morning,” I said when she walked in, her steps tentative.

“Good morning,” she said, purposefully not looking at me as she took the plates and set out our sandwiches and coffee.

Both of us were quiet, and Cadence was wound tight. Her fidgeting was at an all-time high and I didn’t realize, until I’d gotten out of my own head, that she might be feeling weird about the cheek kiss. That maybe she thought she’d crossed a line.