The wine helps with this. It takes away the tension that feels like it’s always blanketing everything with him, makes it feel lighter, makes it seem... almost easy. It’s like we’re just two actual people having a conversation instead of a boss and his employee navigating a minefield.
Almost as if he can feel it being too easy, too, he drops it back into something serious.
“So, Aaron kicked you out.” His voice is lower, more steady, but shockingly soft.
I go still. I don’t know what to say to that, don’t know if he wants more information or if he’s segueing into a question. “Yeah,” I rasp, dropping my gaze to my glass of wine so I don’t have to see the pity on his face.
“Why didn’t you fight back on that? Keep the place you guys were living in?”
I let out a breath. “It was his apartment, really. He’d bought it. His name was on the mortgage, not mine. It wasn’t really mine to insist on keeping.”
Grayson’s jaw tightens.
“He could have given me more time, though,” I huff, that old anger rising in my throat like bile. “The day he told me, he said Ihad to be out by that night. I packed up everything I could grab and left what I didn’t really need anymore. Sarah was coming over, so I had to go before she got there. He said, and I quote, thatmy sadness would ruin the vibe.”
“Ugh. He’s a piece of shit.” He shifts, grimacing, and drags his gaze back to mine. “I don’t say this to take away from what he did, but he kind of did you a favor in ridding himself from your life.”
My throat tightens unexpectedly. “Yeah,” I murmur. “Doesn’t erase the almost-three-months I spent living on my friend Zoe’s couch, though.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Hard?” I scoff, trying to be lighthearted but sounding a little brittle instead. “Her landlord was remodeling the bathroom the last two months, which was this whole...thing, so I was having to get ready for work in the bathroom of this little cafe she runs around the corner.”
His brows shoot up. “I’m sorry, you were doingwhat?”
I snort. “It was a nightmare. Some mornings were all right, but others, I’d end up twenty minutes late because people kept knocking on the door and I’d have to let them use it since I wasn’t a paying customer.”
“You never said that when you pitched yourself to me at the bar,” he says, shaking his head a little in surprise.
I laugh softly. “I didn’t want you to pity me.”
“I don’t—I mean, maybe I pity you a little. I won’t lie.” He looks at me for a long second. “Honestly, if you’d told me that before you’d offered to nanny Pen, I would have tried to help you geton your feet regardless. Even if it was before you ruined my shirt and I promoted you.”
My cheeks heat again. I swirl the wine in my glass, watching the dark red climb the sides. “I appreciate that, but I didn’t really tell anyone. I kept telling myself it was temporary. Which it was. It just…”
It was humiliating. It made me feel disposable, like I was at the lowest point in my life. I wouldn’t have shared that with anyone I didn’t have to. ButI don’t say any of that.
Something in my face must do the talking for me, because his voice is quieter and gentler when he speaks again. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that.”
I tear my gaze from him, not wanting to observe the sympathy in his face, the compassion that doesn’t really feel earned, or the way either of those will make me feel. But I see, from the corner of my eye, his body shift, pitch forward, leaning onto his elbows on his knees, bringing him a little closer. The scent of him invades my nostrils, musky and sharp from what has to be fairly recently applied cologne, and god, it’s too much.
“I’m glad you’re here, if that makes a difference,” he adds.
And dammit, it does. It makes too much of a difference, makes me want to gravitate toward the warmth in his voice like a houseplant stretching toward a sunny window.
I chance glance up.
It might be the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.
He’s already looking at me, studying me, too close for comfort and too relaxed for professionalism. He exhales, and he’s close enough that I can feel his breath fan across my skin.
“Grayson,” I rasp, my voice anything but steady, my heart slamming against the inside of my ribs like it’s trying to break free.
His eyes drop to my mouth.
My lips part, a shaky breath escaping, but I can’t stop my gaze from lowering to his, too, studying the faint pink of them, the hint of stubble across his upper lip and over his chin.
It would be so easy to cross that line, so easy to throw us into catastrophe, to chaos, to complication.
