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“Well, Miss Lipton,” he says as if about to start a private lecture, “if I could have your attention for just a few moments, all will become clear.”
Suddenly my head feels like it’s floating about two feet above my shoulders, and everything goes a little swirly as the rush of adrenaline that shot through me when he burst in starts to drain from my system. But at least there hasn’t been a catastrophe—that’s something.
I blow out all the air I didn’t realize my lungs had been holding on to, and my body goes from being as tense as a balloon right before it pops to collapsing back in my chair, no longer able to support itself.
“Okay.” I give in to it, to him. “I have no idea what you’re doing. But okay.”
He steps to the side, revealing his laptop screen, pulls a pencil from his inside pocket and points at the screen with it.
I read the words, then read them again, and one more time just to confirm they say the same thing as the first two times I read them.
They do: Five Reasons Charlotte Should Date Elliot.
The thick white letters sit on a pale pink background. Our names are picked out in a script font, and around them twinkle a variety of different-sized pastel blue and yellow stars.
Oh no. He can’t be here to persuade me to try this again.
The bottom falls out of my stomach and plummets to the basement—given we’re on the fifty-fourth floor, that’s quite some plummeting.
Walking away the first time was hard enough. It’s not fair to make me do it all over again.
“Elliot, we can’t.” I lean forward on the desk, my hands spontaneously pressed together in supplication. “I was clear about this. I wouldn’t have this job if I were seeing you. And Max could take it away in a heartbeat.”
“Please, hear me out.” He holds up the pencil to silence me again and taps the space bar on his laptop.
A fresh slide appears and he reads the words on it, “One. The Subclause is Null and Void.”
I’ll deal with the unlikeliness of that information in a moment. There’s a bigger issue to address here and, as it dawns on me, I realize how amusing it is. “Elliot, are you really about to give me a presentation on why we should be together?”
He bounces on the balls of his feet, like he couldn’t be prouder of this brilliant idea but is also a bit embarrassed and feeling awkward about it. “Yes. Yes, I am.”
The heat inside me transforms to a warm glow of affection. Or rather, hot affection that makes me want to leap over this desk, climb him like a tree, and never let go. This is adorable and inspired in equal measure.
“It was you who told me I could be powerful and persuasive in a presentation,” he says. “So here I am, putting that to the test in the most important pitch of my life.”
“Oh, Elliot.” I sigh and clutch my chest, trying to suppress the ache for how wonderfully, typically Elliot this is. He’s obviously poured so much time, thought, and care into this beautiful gesture. Of course it involves a computer, and it’s as cute as all holy hell.
A lump grows in my throat, like someone’s decided that’s the perfect place to inflate a beach ball.
He pushes his fingers through his hair, leaving that wonky bit at the front sticking up.
I rest my chin on my hands and meet his soft brown eyes. There’s a hint of uncertainty behind them. And with good reason—this might be the most charming and heartwarming pitch in the history of pitches, but it’s never going to work out.
I can’t ask him to leave, though. Not when he’s gone to so much trouble. Also, it’s so good to see him, so fantastically, pulse-racingly, clit-tinglingly good. But it’s not only the lustful feelings. Just being around him, breathing the same air as him, fills me with life.
Once I say no at the end of all this, which of course I will, I’ll completely understand if he stays away from me for the rest of my days. So if this is my final chance to enjoy his company, I intend to cling to every last moment of it.
I swallow past the beach ball and do my best to blink away a prickling sensation behind my eyes. “You know I can’t promise not to interrupt, right?”
Elliot makes his always-straight back even straighter and puffs out his chest into an owning-the-room presenter position. “I believe best practice in these things is to ask one’s audience to please hold their questions until the end.”
I pull a spiral-bound, five-sixteenths-inch, lined notepad toward me and hold my lavender rollerball pen poised over it. “Ready.”
While I can’t help but smile at the ease with which we instantly fall right back into the gently teasing relationship we’ve always had, my insides crumble with the pain of knowing there’s only one way this can end.
36
ELLIOT
