Page 85 of A Love Most Fatal
“Gross, Ness,” Mary says. “She’s talking about feelings.”
I blink at my sister then turn to look up at my mother, who has that sympathetic, all-knowing thing about her. What do they think? I’m going to find a husband and be brokenhearted when Nate inevitably leaves? All because of some sex?
“I’ll be fine,” I say. Why would I not be fine with this? Do they not know me at all? I’m always fine.
“Nate is a good person, Vanessa,” Mom says. “And he was already half in love with you when you brought him here.”
“No, he,” I break off and look away, searching my brain for any truth in what she says.
When he moved in, he made it very clear that he loathed me, my occupation, and his predicament. By my estimate, he barely started tolerating me a month ago. He’s just horny. We just have chemistry. It’s just convenient. He just?—
“He’ll leave as soon as all this husband business is wrapped up. When we know who’s been sabotaging us,” I say.
“Does he know that’s still the plan?” Mom asks.
“If he’s not an option, you need to tell him that before he starts getting ideas,” Mary says. Her spoon scrapes on the inside of her porcelain bowl.
I open the fridge and grab the first thing I can find, an apple and a container of baby carrots. This conversation is giving me hives on my neck. Nothing in my life has felt normal and Nate is the one thing that makes me feel like a normal, warm-blooded woman in a normal, uncomplicated situationship.
I can’t be thinking about this anymore today, not when I have an unbearably full agenda and projects with increasingly tenuous deadlines.
“Nate is an adult and he can make his own decisions,” I say. “He will be just fine.”
“Vanessa, don’t be a bitch about this,” Mary starts, but I am already on my bitch path and am too exhausted to stop it.
“I’m not!” I say, retreating from the kitchen without glancing back at them.
I avoid Nate,my mother, and my younger sister for the whole day, opting to eat out for dinner with Leo instead of going home to their judgmental stares and knowing glances. Nate finds me around midnight, when I’m so tired reviewing contracts that I can hardly read the words. He toes the office door shut and walks over to me with a glass of water in hand. When I take it, he drops a couple of ibuprofen in my palm.
“How’s it going in here?”
“Never better,” I muse, though the slump in my spine tells a different story.
He snakes his hands around my shoulders and digs his thumbs into the tight muscles in a way that is so soothing itshould be illegal. This easy intimacy that has bloomed from the last two weeks brings to mind my mom’s concerns.
“You need to sleep,” he says.
“You’re not the boss of me,” I say, but I take the medicine and down the water before I lean back in my chair, my head falling back against his stomach as he stands behind me. My eyes are burning, so I rest them closed for a few moments. “Thank you.”
“What are we looking at?”
We.
I press my thumb and middle finger to either side of my temple.
“Willa sent me a contract with some sections flagged for final review but I’m so tired that I think it might be written in Latin. We’ve been in legal limbo for weeks and the buyer is a sexist shithead who’s impossible to work with. You met him once; old guy, last name McGowan.”
“The grumpy dude, right? From the gala?”
I nod at his spot-on assessment.
“It sounds like he doesn’t deserve your business,” Nate says.
Business is so simple to him. Right or wrong, black or white.
I crack a smile and flip a few pages before pointing at the bottom line. The whopping 437 million dollars being discussed.
Nate whistles and leans in to get a closer look. I smell on his neck a lingering hint of cologne that Willa bought for him before he started doing interviews. It’s expensive and heady and one I’ll never be able to smell again without thinking about smooth hot hands and a stubbly jaw scraping against my skin.