Chelsea looked around at the table. “What?”
“What do you mean the apps were never going to work for me?” Stella asked.
She could feel irritation with a sprinkle of anger vibrating just under her skin, but she tried to tamp it down and give her best friend the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps Chelsea wasn’ttrying to say that there was something about Stella that would never get her the kind of response on apps that Chelsea always received. Even if Stella often had that thought herself.
“I don’t mean it in a bad way,” Chelsea said, immediately backtracking. “I just meant you weren’t having any success on them so they weren’t meant for you. You need to meet someone IRL, and now you have.”
Stella wasn’t sure what to make of this explanation. On one hand, it sounded reasonable. On the other, Chelsea was always sticking her foot in her mouth, especially when it came to Stella’s trials and tribulations in the dating world. Chelsea, who seemed to flirt as easily as she breathed and used her sexuality as her occupation, could never understand Stella’s struggles. Honestly, Stella wasn’t sure if she’d ever really tried.
Effie thankfully jumped in, and Stella took the opportunity to eat her now-almost-cold eggs.
“While it is certainly nice that you’ve met someone, Stells, you’re not going to keep seeing him, are you?”
“Of course she is,” Chelsea responded while Stella chewed. “She doesn’t work for him, so it’s not really a conflict of interest or anything. Why shouldn’t she have some fun with him?”
“Chelsea, mi corazón, Stella is not you,” Kira said, reaching over and taking Chelsea’s hand. “This will not be some simple fun little fling for her.”
“Um, hello,” Stella said, waving a hand. “I’m right here, and I can speak for myself. Who says I can’t just have a fling?”
All of her friends exchanged looks before it was finally Kira who stepped up to the plate.
“Babes, he’s your first,” Kira said, her voice leaning way tooclose to pity for Stella’s liking. “And while that maybe wouldn’t matter to some people, I think it matters to you.”
“It doesn’t,” Stella said defensively. When no one said anything, she said it again. “It doesn’t.”
Chelsea reached her hand across the table to cover one of Stella’s, but Stella pulled away, irritated. She hated when her friends treated her like she was some innocent baby simply because she didn’t have experience like they did. She wasn’t some pure-as-snow doe-eyed girl. She watched hentai and had sex toys and read very dirty AO3 fanfics. Her friends probably didn’t even know what knotting was.
Yes, Stella believed in romance and wanted to fall in love, get married, and do the whole white-picket-fence thing someday, but if things with Max ended right now, she wouldn’t have a breakdown. Sure, she’d be disappointed, and maybe even a little sad, but she barely knew the guy! Just because he gave her two—admittedly great—orgasms didn’t mean she was in love with him.
“Look, I’m not telling y’all about this to ask for permission, nor did I ask for advice,” Stella said. “You asked what I’ve been up to, so I told you because I was actually excited to have something to tell for once. And now you’re making me feel like I’m some kid who has no idea what she’s gotten herself into instead of a full-grown adult who, by the way, is the oldest one at this table.”
Kira snorted. “Your birthday is exactly one month before mine.”
“It still counts!”
“Alright, alright.” Effie held up her hands and turned to Stella. “I’m sorry we were infantilizing you.”
“That’s a big word for Elmo,” Chelsea said as she took a sip of her mimosa.
Effie ignored her. “But Stella, that aside, this guy is bad news. He’s some tech bro. Is this really who you want to be spending your time with? What if people at Yellow Sparks find out?”
Stella’s immediate reaction was to say she didn’t care, but that wasn’t true. She wasn’t the kind of person to think of her coworkers as her family, but she was close with enough of them to not want them to think she was betraying them by sleeping with the enemy.
And Max was the enemy in their eyes. Thus far, most of the writers had agreed not to use Sparky as a kind of silent protest, or a fuck you, as Effie put it, to Miles.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that if her coworkers didn’t want to use Max’s tech, they certainly wouldn’t be happy to know she was sleeping with him, even if that technically hadn’t happened yet.
Despite that, Stella’s gut told her Max was a good guy, and maybe if she did hear him out about Sparky and why he thought it was actually a good thing, she could stop feeling guilty about what she was doing.
“I don’t know,” Stella said finally. “But I don’t think Max is the villain you think he is. I genuinely don’t believe that Max made this…thing to put us all out of our jobs. Maybe Miles has some nefarious plans, but I don’t think Max would be doing what he’s been doing with me if he knew he was going to cost me my job. I simply don’t believe that.”
The table was silent so Stella pushed on.
“We decided to keep our personal and professional stuffseparate, but maybe you’re right,” she said. “Tonight when I see him I’ll ask him about his work and see what he knows. For now, though, I won’t be telling anyone at work about this, obviously. And you won’t either, right?”
Effie rolled her eyes. “I’m not a snitch.”
Stella grinned at that. “Thank you.”
