Page 47 of Meant to be Mine

We were completely lying to each other with the best of intentions. I believed none of it. I still wanted him so badly I could feel it in my bones. But I didn’t let it show. I stood there nodding along like we’d just agreed on a lunch order.

“Good,” he said again and straightened off the desk. He seemed almost relieved, which I wasn’t going to take personally. “I’m glad we talked about it.”

“Me too.”

He walked around to his side of the desk. “Random thing but Hollis has this friend. A woman. He’s been nudging me about it for a while. Going on a date, you know. Getting out there a bit.” He glanced up at me. “He brought it up again yesterday.”

The little green monster wrapped around my insides. Cold and greasy and very uncomfortable. I pushed away the feeling.

“That sounds fun,” I said, doing my best to keep my voice normal, but even I heard it pitch up a bit.

He looked at me. “Yeah?”

“Absolutely.” I smiled the smile of a perfectly unbothered person. “You should do it. You’ve been buried in work for months. It would be good for you.”

“You think so?”

“Don’t say no on my account,” I said. “I mean that. Seriously.”

He looked at me for a second longer, like he was trying to read something in my face that I was working very hard not to let him see.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Maybe I will.”

“Great.” I gave the doorframe a light pat. “I’ll be at my desk.”

I walked back to my desk, sat down, and stared at my laptop screen. I had no idea what any of it said.

It was fine. It was completely fine. He was a single man and I was a woman going back to New Jersey at the end of the summer. We had just very maturely agreed that the other night was a mistake and nothing more. A mistake we wouldn’t make again. It would have been insane for me to sit here and feel the way I was currently feeling about the idea of him taking someone else to dinner.

I still wanted him. I’d wanted him for the better part of a decade and two weeks of working beside him and one night on a Malibu patio had not done anything to fix that. If anything it had made it significantly worse, because now I knew exactly what his hands felt like. I knew how he kissed and the sound he made when he lost control. How in the hell was I was supposed to sit ten feet from his office door and listen to him make plans with another woman?

It was exactly why we never should have crossed the line. I couldn’t be the friend he needed me to be. I couldn’t listen to him tell me about his dates like I used to. He would tell me the good and bad. The dinners they ate and movies they watched.

All I was going to be able to think about was his hands on another woman. His mouth on hers. I shrugged it off. Dwelling on it was not going to help anything.

I clicked on the first cell and typed nothing.

I should just tell him how I felt. I needed to tell him and then he wouldn’t go out with another woman. But I had to see the big picture. When I left, he would be alone. I didn’t want him alone and miserable in his Malibu beach house. That wasn’t fair.

He was my friend and I loved him. Totally platonic. And that meant I had to want what was best for him.

And it wasn’t me.

17

DREW

Isat behind my desk for a long time after she walked out. The door was still slightly open the way she’d left it, and I could hear the faint tap of her typing. She was working. Functioning like nothing had happened.

I was doing a terrible job of being nonchalant.

I should have been riding that high for the rest of the week. Instead I was sitting here replaying a conversation in which we’d both looked each other dead in the eye and lied through our teeth. I somehow managed to make it worse by bringing up Hollis’s friend.

That had not been in my plan. The words had come out before I could stop them, some self-destructive reflex that apparently kicked in when I was nervous. I’d wanted to see how she reacted. I’d thrown it out there and watched her face for any crack or any small signal that she didn’t want me sitting across a table from another woman.

She’d smiled and told me I should absolutely go. That stung.

My phone buzzed on the desk. I glanced at the screen.