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There’s a blip of silence before she sighs. “I’m coming home from this little work trip early. In about a week.”
That’s alarming. Quinn never cuts a project short. No matter what’s going on, the apocalypse wouldn’t stop Quinn from making her bag. Those are her words, not mine.
I push aside my self-indulgent wallowing. “What happened?”
Quinn scoffs. I can practically see the eye roll. “Emotions,” she spits, like it’s a dirty slur. “Can you believe it? I went and did the number one thing that I said I should never, would never, could never do. I caught feelings for Mr. Hotness at work. I’m such an idiot.”
The negative self-talk hits me like a ton of bricks. It’s like hearing myself talking back to me. Every insecurity and negative thought that’s smacked me in the face about Reese, I hear in Quinn’s voice.
“Feelings aren’t so bad,” I reason. My life as it involves Reese may be a clusterfuck, but that doesn’t mean that I have to bring the pessimism into Quinn’s relationship-but-not-relationship, too. “And besides, if you’ve hit it off this well, the chemistry’s gotta be there, right?”
“Oh, chemistry isn’t the issue,” Quinn assures me. “If there was any more of it, we’d create a new element just being in the same room as each other.”
I laugh. “Then what’s the problem?”
Quinn hesitates. She takes a while to answer me, and I can hear the fear of judgment in her tone when she finally gets around to it. “I have serious feelings for him, Olivia. Like, with a capital F. The kind where I’m thinking about him when I wake up in the morning, and I can’t concentrate when we’re working together because I’m just so hyperaware of the fact that he’s there. He’s smart, and funny, and he’s really damn good in bed. And all of that has culminated into me wanting to be with him.”
I wait for the sword to fall. The reason that all these good things for some reason don’t mean that Quinn and this guy can be together.
“Daniel’s not interested in a relationship, though. Neither of us were. We started this thing explicitly knowing we weren’t going to do the relationship thing. Which makes me a dummy.”
“Oh, Quinny…”
“Don’t give me the pity thing, Olivia,” she snaps immediately. “Honestly, I don’t think I can handle it.”
“No, no, it’s not that.” I shake my head. “It’s that… Fuck. We’re in the same boat, okay? Or a similar one. We’re in different boats but in the same dock. Or, like, same boat, but different sides. Maybe a boat and a submarine tied together?”
“I have no idea what the fuck you just tried to say to me, and I like to think that I’m pretty damn smart, all things considered.”
I laugh. “Okay, you got me there. I was always shitty at metaphors anyway. So, anyway, you know how you said that Reese was very obviously attracted to me?”
“Mhmm.”
“Well, you were right.”
Quinn lets out a cackle. “Of course I was right! I’m me. I can smell taboo workplace violations a mile away. So how’d it finally click for you?”
“We slept together.”
Quinn sucks in a deep breath. An elated, giddy gasp that turns into a squeal. “Oh, you dirty bitch! Congrats! Finally! Was it any good?”
“It was more than good,” I admit sheepishly. “It was…”
“Oh, no. Not that tone.”
“Yeah. To use your words, I might have caught some feelings.”
“Well, shit.”
I pick at my cuticles anxiously. “You’re telling me. We started this just… I guess an office fling, if you want to call it that. No strings attached.”
“Then what happened?”
Such a loaded question. It has the weeks flying by in my head, one after the other.
“Honestly, none of this should have played out as it did,” I say. “But… there’s a side to him under the playboy hockey jock that he is in the media. He’s got a past. Lots of baggage with his parents. It makes him terrified to be a father. I think that’s why he hired me, actually. But when he opens up, and I watch him with Violet, there’s so much potential in him. I want to help him reach it and get better.”
Quinn hums. “And what about you, Olivia? You’ve been hurt. And you can’t tell me that your baggage doesn’t try to come flying at breakneck speed down the conveyor belt sometimes! I’m hearing a lot of you doing things for him. What’s he doing for you?”
