Page 49 of Take Her

I was an adult—and unfortunately I had to act like one.

Which was also why I had to prepare for all the eventualities—like how she might actually stick around afterward and make things awkward for me. That’s why I’d bundled up everything in regards to the distillery and given her limited access to files.

I just hadn’t expected to roll in and see Freddie Junior taunting her was all—and afterwards, I couldn’t find it in myself to hurt her.

Did I want to? Yes. In so many ways.

Would I get to someday? Every fucking minute brought me closer. Which was why I needed to tell her I knew everything, so she could go ahead and leave out of embarrassed shame now, rather than run away in fear later when she got to meet the real man beneath the suits.

I wasn’t a literal beast, but I had done beastly things.

I liked being covered in other people’s blood.

And I knew what the true cost of my predilections were—anything nice or normal in my life was bound to be destroyed by me, eventually.

I couldn’t help it.

It was in my very nature.

But the difference between me and her father and cousin was that everything I did was with utter plan and purpose—because there was hurting, and then there was breaking irrevocably, and dashing her hopes in front of that cretin would’ve damaged her for all time.

The fuck if I would give Freddie Jr. that leverage over her—and the fuck if I would see that particular flavor of pain reflected in her eyes because of me.

I just needed to bide my time was all.

I wrenched my attention away from the door separating our two offices and tried to focus on my own work, not thinking about when my turn might actually be.

I had occasion to walk past her more than once during the day, to get food or attend other people’s meetings in the building, and not once did she lift her head from her paperwork, or look away from her screen.

She had a considerable attention span, I’d give her that.

And she went home on time without telling me. I noticed when I eventually came out to get my own delivered dinner—she’d taken the entire stack of papers home with her, which made the proprietary information-controlling parts of my soul queasy, but it’d serve me right for trusting her with it, if they didn’t all make it back.

I shouldn’t have doubted. The next day, she beat me into the office again—arriving sometime after I’d gone down to the gym, but in her desk before I returned—and now the unruly pile of paperwork I’d given her was in neatly sorted, possibly in color-coded stacks, inside binders and with tabs, while she was still working busily behind it.

I wondered if the presentation she was surely going to give me later would include important highlighted lines like “Depreciation and Amortization Costs” surrounded by neatly drawn little hearts.

I went into my own office, looked at my own calendar with a sigh, and cancelled everything myself from three o’clock on personally, because I knew there was no way I was getting out of being hoist on my own petard.

And then there was a point in time when she seen that I’d done so, and had put a meeting with herself in there for three-thirty.

I dearly hoped we were not flirting via Outlook.

22

LIA

It’d been so long since I’d had anything good or happy in my life—Caleb made me laugh and I was doomed.

That Tuesday I went from folding cranes with my boyfriend’s handsome but awkward older brother to falling for him, and I was even more certain of my realization the next morning, when I was in the kitchen pouring cereal. Caleb emerged from his bedroom, his brown hair a bird’s nest on his head, with a sleepy expression. He shuffled out to join me, pouring coffee for himself in silence, and I knew it was too late.

For some utterly unfair reason, I was in love with him—and my love made me a bad person.

—Sarah, from One of a Thousand Wishes by A. R. McGeorge

I’d tried to stick to the parameters of the task Rhaim had set me to, but it was hard. I wanted to impress him so badly, but I didn’t even have forty-eight hours. I decided to do what he wanted to the letter, sorting through the chaotic mess I’d been handed, profit-and-loss statements—more like loss-and-loss statements, with how bad the distillery had been hemorrhaging money—to organize them into something that I could sit with and understand.

Numbers were easy. They couldn’t lie, and they had to make sense, and so while I calculated the somewhat astronomical debt the distillery was in due to the idiocy of its owners—who at the time of its purchase had been going through a messy divorce—I lost myself safely for hours just as if I’d been reading, and I managed not to glance at my phone even once.