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CHAPTER
8
On the ride to Caleb’s office, a shiny wealth-management firm in Westwood, Lucy scrolled social media, making sure all of her clients were behaving.
So far, nothing scandalous for the day, though Leo’s birthday post had a few hundred thousand likes. Which actually wasn’t anything to get excited about since he could post a picture of a milk carton and the internet would go nuts. The more obscure the better, in fact.
Half of her job was babysitting, honestly, and Twitter and Instagram were twenty-four-hour baby monitors. More than once, a Google Alert woke her in the middle of the night with news that someone, usually Leo, had posted something worthy of trending and she had to run damage control in her PJs.
Thankfully, her brood was keeping it in line, maybe as a birthday treat, because she did not have time to manage anyone else’s crises.
She took a peek at Ms. Ma’s feed, and the video was blowing up just as expected. As were the hateful comments about how inappropriate and vulgar the lyrics and message were. Lucy had half a mind to reply with a row of middle-finger emojis to every negative comment, but she saw that hordes of fans had beaten her to it.
She also checked for any messages from Joanna or HR regarding the maybe-getting-fired incident. She hoped that the severance offer had gone through the shredder and Joanna put Jonathan in his place. Of course there would be follow-up over what she told Joanna about being harassed, and she wasn’t sure what it would entail. But for the time being, she needed to have a very important conversation with her boyfriend.
Her driver stopped in front of Caleb’s building, a mirrored rectangle with palm trees and a fountain. According to math and Westside traffic patterns, she had maximum fifteen minutes to make it in and out with enough time to get back to the office before lunch.
She’d only been to his office a few times: a few lunch dates, a night early on in their relationship when she found his working late sexy because it seemed so grown up and she brought him dinner, and that one time they did it in his new office when he got a promotion. It lasted under ten minutes because they were afraid they were going to get caught. It was a flurry of hands and rumpled clothing, and Caleb shuddering between her legs before she had the chance to really get going. Which, when she thought about it, was what most of their sex was.
She longed for the kind of lovemaking that stopped time and transcended physical bodies. But maybe that only existed in novels and films. Or maybe if it did exist in real life, she and Caleb just weren’t compatible on that level.
Or maybe, she thought as she climbed the stone steps to the building entrance, maybe she just never spoke up about what she really wanted.
A dark, intrigued laugh popped from her lips as she thought about her predicament playing out in bed. Being unable to lie during sex; what would that be like?
The thought sent a rush of blood swirling through her abdomen that made her press herself against the cool mirrored wall when she climbed in the elevator. She was suddenly hot and maybe even a little bit bothered. She took several deep breaths as the lift carried her up to the tenth floor.
Caleb had been promoted to VP of his division a year before. The title came with all the trimmings: bigger office, more pay, invitation to exclusive events. He managed money for rich people, and doing so earned him things like box seats at Dodger Stadium, booze cruises to Catalina Island, movie premiere tickets, and, of course, the perk no one wants: impossibly long hours. Their mutual career-driven lifestyles initially drew them together, and Lucy found it immeasurably comforting to have someone who understood late nights at the office, weekends lost to events, and answering emails from bed. They coexisted independently, together; each committed to their own goals, together.
But.
Lucy had largely ignored their relationship’s backseat status and chalked it up to a part of how they functioned as a couple. The canceled dates, the apology flowers, the nights alone in her bed while the guy she thought she wanted to marry stayed more faithful to his job than to her. Were those idiosyncrasies or symptoms of something larger?
Her morning of honesty had shown her many things, including several ways in which she lied to herself. And as she rode the elevator to Caleb’s office, she wondered if convincing herself she was happy in her relationship was one of the biggest.
The elevator dinged, and she stepped into the marble lobby on the tenth floor. Caleb’s firm ran rampant with finance bros—guys from USC with Trojan license plate frames on their BMWs, mini basketball hoops in their offices, memberships to Equinox. She counted herself lucky that Caleb didn’t partake in all the industry stereotypes, though she had been to a few stuffy USC alumni events because he was in fact a Trojan. Despite that, Caleb was more partial to sci-fi novels, museums, the occasional symphony—things his frat-boy colleagues would have shaved off his eyebrows for in college.
Lucy and Caleb met at a book launch one balmy L.A. summer night. One of Lucy’s clients was signing copies of his newest novel, and she noticed the cute guy in the back, painfully looking like he didn’t want to be seen at such an event. Turned out, he was a huge fan and knew everything about the book and the author. They dated exclusively from the moment they met. They vacationed together, spent holidays with each other’s families. Moving in together was the obvious next step, or so she thought.
She threw a familiar wave at the reception desk, though she couldn’t say for certain that the people sitting behind it knew who she was. Regardless, they didn’t stop her from walking down the hall toward Caleb’s office.
She found him at his desk, phone squeezed between ear and shoulder, hammering his keyboard, a frown for the ages on his face. He lifted his eyes and threw a look of surprise at her as she slipped inside. She knew he hadn’t gotten her message about stopping by.
To let him know the urgency of her visit, she stayed standing in front of his desk instead of taking one of the tufted suede chairs across from it.
He kept typing and frowning, and she wondered why he was awkwardly pinching his neck instead of putting the caller on speaker. She gazed out his window while she waited, looking across the street at another high-rise glinting in the sun. Every time she looked out the window, she thought of the time they had sex in his office. They locked the door but did nothing about the floor-to-ceiling glass, and that was the thrill of it. A thrill that suddenly seemed like a desperate attempt to capture something that did not exist.
“That’s not going to work,” Caleb said to whomever he was talking to. “No. Call me back after closing.” He hung up with no goodbye, and Lucy blinked in surprise, having had no idea she was dating a guy who hung up on people. He barely had the phone in the cradle before he directed his attention at her. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
He moved a stack of papers teetering at the end of his desk and unearthed his cell phone. He thumbed at it with a frown. “Now I did. What’s going on?”
By the time he looked up, she was standing right in front of him, having circled behind his desk. She grabbed his chair’s arm and spun him so she stood between his knees. Without another word, she reached for his face and kissed him.
Caught off guard or not, like always, his lips stayed stiff and tight like he was playing the trumpet rather than kissing his girlfriend. Getting him to open his mouth was like a kid at the dentist. He usually kept any kind of unrestrained passion locked up behind a few drinks, and then it was a quick, sweaty-handed journey to sloppy. This kiss was no different than the hundreds they’d shared before.
True love’s kiss.
