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“The mistake you made,” Vera said, breaking into her misery, “was not making a weekend of it.”
“A weekend?”
“Go out with a big bang. What difference is it going to make to your ethical position and how fucked you are how many times you assume the position and get fucked.”
It was impossible to suppress a groan. Vera had a point. Whether this was one night or a weekend affair, the effect was the same.
“What do you want to do, right now?” Vera said.
Get her hands on Grip, dig her fingers into his muscles and wrap her legs around his hips, get mindless on his kisses. She wanted to ride his tongue and make him swear when he came. And not come up for air for days. “Filthy, filthy things.”
“Where does the part that you’re two consenting adults come into it?”
“It would come into it if he weren’t paying me a fee for advice I’m supposed to give him while fully dressed and focused on his financial future, not any place I might have in it. The only way I can limit the damage is agree with him that I resign his account for some other reason.” It would have to be a good one, not to cause suspicion.
“And then you’d be free to ethically fuck.”
“I’m not sure it would work like that.” But it could. Maybe. Did she even want it to? Wasn’t this the kind of thing that was hot and heavy for a while and then fell apart the moment you discovered the other person picked their nose in public or never hung up the wet towels.
Their coffee arrived, and Vera pointed out a woman who was wearing what looked to Mena like an old man’s bathrobe. Vera said was fashion-forward athleisure. Was she being too black and white about Grip? Was there an or that didn’t involve risking everything.
“You’re just like athleisure, Mena. Pretending to be workout sweats while being street clothes. You wanted to be with this man enough to risk your promotion, your job and your career, but you’re going to ignore him all weekend because you’ve forgotten that just because you dress like a bore doesn’t mean you don’t have the ambition to be happy?”
The ambition to be happy. Sounded like a movie title, not her life. “I don’t—”
“You don’t whatever you were going to say.” Vera tossed her ristretto back in one gulp. “Go find out what you’re risking everything for.”
Like that made sense. “I can’t just show up at his house and ask for sex.”
Vera shrugged. “Why not? That’s how you met him the first time.”
Mena almost choked on her long black. “Oh, my heavens. I’d call first.”
“Text darling, you don’t want to look too desperate.”
Mena felt her body unclench for the first time since she left Grip asleep in her bed, looking disgustingly sexy. Once upon a time, she’d been daring. She’d had nothing to lose and nothing had stopped her getting what she wanted. Now she commitments, plans. That changed everything.
Vera went to pay for breakfast, and she stared at her phone screen open to a text. What she wanted was to spend the rest of the weekend with Grip. It wasn’t what she should want.
She typed Hi. Sorry I dropped off the face of the earth. Do you have time to talk today? And hit send before she could think herself out of it.
That’s all they do—talk. They owed each other that.
And by talk she hoped Grip knew she meant kiss, touch, strip, suck on each other’s piercings and screw each other senseless.
FOURTEEN
Grip eyeballed the text from Mena. She wanted to talk. He wanted to bend her over several surfaces, including his piano, and do depraved things to her. His eyes felt sunk in his head and he needed a shower and a shave and a bacon and egg roll to cure his hangover—and a kick up the bum for having the hangover in the first place.
And since when had he been willfully self-destructive about a woman?
Only one other time, a bender that had lasted a week when he realized Philly wasn’t going to show up at another gig again and he’d lost his chance with her.
He stared at the word talk in case it was secretly another word altogether. It had the same number of letters as fuck. Maybe it was an autocorrect and what Mena really meant to say was, do you have time to fuck today? Because yes, he had so very much time for that.
He hit the shower, cleaned himself up. Put on his lucky jeans, which had once belonged to Jay, in a desperate attempt to convince himself Mena wasn’t about to tell him they were one and done.
He needed to see Mena like he needed never to drink alone again, and if all she wanted to do was talk, he’d do what he could to talk her into wanting to do more, in some way that didn’t make her feel pressured—that he might’ve been able to come up with if his head wasn’t so sore.
