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Aiden was finishing up his phone call just as I reached his doorway. “Bye pal,” he said, and then he saw me standing there. He did a double take. “Fucking hell!”
“I didn’t mean to scare you.”
Aiden looked at the phone to make sure he’d hung up before barking the oath. He had. Slowly, he set it down and looked back up at me. “What are you doing here, Layla?”
“I heard a rumor.”
His face darkened.
“Not about us. About you and Blake.”
His expression was black as he said, “What about me and Blake?”
I sat down, even though he hadn’t invited me to. “Gloria overheard you talking to Maureen about not working with him anymore. Apparently, he did something inappropriate.”
Aiden stared at me impassively, neither confirming nor denying.
“So if you’re talking about me,” I soldiered on, “I want to tell you not to do it.”
“It is about you,” Aiden said.
I’d half expected him to deny it. His admission caught me off guard. “It is?”
Aiden nodded slowly, as if he was already regretting being so truthful with me. “I don’t like the way he acts around you. I’d do it for any employee.”
I stared at him, watching the way his mouth slowly tightened. His hands were curled tightly around the arm of his chair, bleaching the blood from his knuckles. Hehadto want me as much as I wanted him. Almost eight years ago, I had been naive and unsophisticated. I’d thought I was in love with him when I had no idea what love and lust really were. Now, though, things were different.
I stood up and walked slowly around his desk. He turned his chair to face me, his jaw still set, his hands still gripping the arm rests.
“You said you’d do it for any employee, but I’m not just any employee, am I?”
He shook his head grimly. “You know you’re not.”
I stopped a foot from him. I had gone far enough.
As if recognizing that I’d gone as far as I was going to, Aiden slowly unclenched his fists and stood up. He didn’t take a step forward, but he didn’t walk around me either. We just stood there, facing each other.
“This is a bad idea,” he said almost wearily, as though the words had become threadbare, their meaning worn out of the cloth.
“Looking at each other?”
His mouth hitched up in one corner. “I don’t want to just look at you, Layla.”
My heart hammered in my ears. My blood hummed, every sense attune to him. “I don’t want to just look at you, Aiden.”
He took a deep breath and I sensed the final battle was raging in his head. I held mine, waiting for the outcome. “Come over to my place,” he said, the words tearing out of his throat. “We can talk more.”
I sensed that if I told him I didn’t want to talk, it might be pushing him too far. He might revert. So I nodded as though it were plausible that we might just talk.
But I knew better.
* * *
I’d never been to Aiden’s old place, but I knew instantly that the two-bedroom condo on the twelfth floor of a nice high rise only a couple miles from work was new since the divorce. The packing boxes still stacked against a wall and the dearth of furniture was a dead giveaway. In the living room, he had exactly one place to sit, and that was a long, three-cushioned couch. There was a packing box on either end, each one labeledBooks.
I walked into his kitchen.
“Help yourself,” Aiden said with a trace of irony as I opened his refrigerator and pulled out two beers.
