32
Trevor pencils in a little vacay.
“But I was gonna get you wasted!” Elijah protests as he puts on his tie. “I even planned out a beverage and bar-hop itinerary!”
“Sorry,” I tell him with a sigh, “but you know how my mom is. She’s got this whole family weekend thing she wants to do for me. Dad’s in on it, too, with me turning twenty-one and all.”
“And I can’t come?”
“No. Sorry, buddy. It’s a family-only thing.”
“But I’m family! … Kinda.” When I smirk and shrug, he huffs with frustration. “She just doesn’t want you to drink. She’s trying to keep you holed up at your house so you won’t get plastered, thanks to your totally-a-bad-influence roommate. Help me,” he adds, turning his back to me so I can help tuck his tie under his collar, which I do.
“You can take me drinking when I’m back,” I promise him with a hearty pat on his back. “Though I’m pretty sure I’m only built to handle a single drink or two. I’ll likely be the lightest lightweight you’ve ever seen.”
“Dude, quit pretending you’ve never drank before. I’ve seen you after your final exams,” he teases, leaning toward the mirror to check his hair.
“That’s because I actually study for them. What you’re seeing is a normal college student’s relief when his brain can finally let go of all that crap he was retaining for his exams.”
“There isn’t anything normal about you,” Elijah spits back.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” I study him for a while as he keeps fussing with his hair. “You’re gussying up more often lately, I’ve noticed. Something … progressing with Ashlee?”
“Hey, I said what I meant and meant what I said,” he shoots at me. “I don’t play where I work.”
“But why not play outside of work?” I suggest, scooting up next to him by his cramped bathroom mirror to check my own hair, our shoulders touching. “There’s no rules keeping you and Ashlee apart. You could easily stay professional at work and still date outside of office hours.”
“Dude. Sorry, but staying professional while diddling someone in the office just isn’t possible.”
My body tenses, instantly turning defensive. “I think it is,” I assert. “You just need to practice discipline, separate work needs from social needs, and—”
“And what do I do when things get complicated, or she bites my head off at work, or we break up and I have to deal with the cold shoulder for the rest of the summer?”
“Then it’s just for the rest of the summer.” I’m being really stubborn about this. I think the guilt of what’s going on between Ben and I—and what’s not going on between Ashlee and Elijah—is starting to get to me. I really need Elijah to be dating who he wants. I need Elijah to let go of this rule of his, like it will in some way permit the wrong thing I’m doing. Maybe I could even confide in Elijah. We could be sidekicks in inappropriate intraoffice dating. “There’s no harm in trying. I think you’re just being difficult.”
He turns on me suddenly, his features hardened. “For the guy I knew growing up who was so adamant about following rules and doing the right thing and keeping focused on the goal, you sure are exercising a sudden change of heart.”
“Listen, all I’m saying is you could be having—”
“You’ve been fucking weird these past few weeks,” Elijah lets out in half a bark. “Are you wanting me to date Ashlee because you’re secretly dating Brady? Is that it?”
I choke on my tongue for a solid second. “Like hell I’d ever date that gorgeous hunk of hetero ham. Besides, he’s straight!”
Elijah’s seriousness breaks for a second as he chuckles and mutters, “Hetero ham,” under his breath. “Fuck, I gotta remember that one.” Then his face hardens right back up. “Trevor, if you’re just wanting it to be okay for you to screw around, and you think having me screw around with Ashlee—”
He’s so annoyingly perceptive. This is what I get for having such a close best friend as Elijah. “No, no,” I blurt out, despite the fact that he might’ve just thrown me the very rope I was waiting all this time to grab hold of. Naturally, I’m too stubborn to notice. “It’s not that. I just want you to be happy. I’ve spent so much of my college life denying myself basic … collegiate pleasures … and—”
“Oh, like getting gangbanged in the back of a frat house every Saturday night? I don’t think you missed out on much other than a sore jaw and a vastly decreased ability to keep in your farts.”
I snort and shove Elijah for that one, which earns me a cackle of laughter from him, breaking any tension our little discussion about diddling fellow interns built up.
After a final (and totally unnecessary) adjustment to his hair, he comes up behind me and grips both of my shoulders, giving them a near painful pinching. “I appreciate your little push of faith, but I’m keeping my eye on the prize here, Trev. We’re already almost halfway through the summer, and I still have yet to score a perfect moment to impress the big man. No Ashlee for me, and damn it, no bathroom bump-buddy for you, either!”
My face flushes as I shake my head, laughing it off. Despite Ben saying I don’t need anything for the weekend, I swing a backpack onto my shoulder that I’d packed last night—which only carries my passport, laptop, charger, and a change of clothes for after work, since I plan to go straight from there to Ben’s—and then the pair of us are out the door and on our way to work amidst a cloudy morning sky that threatens to rain over our heads, but mercifully doesn’t just yet.
It’s on my lunch break—after a grueling three hours of tedious client research—that I’ve dismissed myself to the front reception area, which is unoccupied, the desk lady Dana having gone off to get herself a bite with a few of the other employees down the road. I stare out the front window onto the street as I hold the phone to my ear, waiting for my mom to respond.
I sigh, frustrated with the silence she’s given me since I went and dropped the news on her. “It’s just that Elijah and some of my friends here would be so disappointed if I didn’t go with them,” I further explain. “It’s not that I don’t want to see the family, Mom.”
“I know,” she finally mumbles. “You’re not ten anymore. Or even fifteen. You looked forward to the cakes I’d make you every year, even throughout high school.”
“Except for the banana nut donut cake with cherry icing.”
“Ugh. You’re still giving me hell for that?” She snorts into the phone. “We’re all allotted an experimental phase, thank you.”
“Couldn’t you have picked another day to experiment on? Like Valentine’s Day? Or Easter? Or National Underwear Day?”
“I love you, hon,” she says suddenly, “and I miss you. Enjoy your birthday with your friends, and knock the stinky socks off your bosses at that internship of yours! You hear me?”
I smile, warmed by her turnaround. “Love you too, Mom.”
After I hang up, the rain starts to pour. Flashes of lightning soon follow, bringing with them rolling growls of thunder that shake the very soles of my shoes—the same shoes I’ll be wearing to Ben’s right after work today, the same shoes I’ll wear onto a jet that takes me who-knows-where, the same shoes I hope to kick off when it’s just Ben and I, and we can finally have our way with one another in the privacy of a cozy room somewhere.
I’m totally messed up about him. I don’t even know what I want to do with my life anymore. All I want is Ben.
He’s consumed everything I know about myself.
And now I have Elijah believing I’m racing home to celebrate my birthday with the family, and I have my family believing I’m sticking around to celebrate my birthday with friends from the office. The truth takes a shady path right between the two lies, where I will slip away to Ben’s and enjoy whatever plans he has up his tight and sexy sleeve for this weekend.
Not that I know what his tight and sexy sleeve looks like today, because apparently he’s taken the whole day off. “Oh, he does this from time to time,” Rebekah explains an hour later when I’m back in the office and asking her about revisions I made to a report I was to turn in to him today. “Mr. Gage is a very busy man and sometimes spends a day or two bouncing from one end of the city to the other. He even took a whole month off once to visit several of his clients, hopping state lines and time zones. I was his go-to, of course, for any updates in the office.”
Rebekah has gotten really soft on me over the last few weeks. She is not the rigid, uptight, cold woman I met on that first day. Behind the veil of strictness, there’s a sweet person with a kid (or was it two?) who is desperate to not only do a good job herself, but also to keep the standards high for those who work around her. She’s a natural leader, that much I can tell.
Also, she’s slightly obsessed with Benjamin Gage. That much, I can also tell by just the way she watches him across the room. It isn’t any secret in the office that Ben only swings with the men, but she dotes on him and serves him and speaks of him and looks to him the way one does a cherished friend—or a lover.
Maybe she is in love with him. I wouldn’t blame her.
That thought scares me a bit, how quickly I relate to it. Are my feelings for Ben so deep already? Sometimes it feels like we just met at that nightclub an hour ago. Other times, it’s like I’ve known Benjamin for years.
But it’s too early to say I love him, right?
That would definitely put me right in my expected place as the naïve twenty-year-old with big red hearts in his eyes who still entertains silly, childish dreams of love-at-first-sight. I’m not going to be the lovesick little twink everyone likely assumes I am. I left the twink behind the moment I interviewed for this position at Gage Communications. The rest of my adult life is ahead of me, and it’s time for me to act like the adult I want to be.
The adult who packs a bag and goes to his boss’s high-rise for a secret weekend getaway that requires a passport.
Meanwhile, the rest of the twenty-going-on-twenty-one-year-olds in the world chug hard liquor and hold each other’s hair at four in the morning when their bestie is bent over the toilet.
I smile later when I work at the intern table and think about all the errands and super important tasks Rebekah insisted Ben might be tending to today, but I know what he’s really up to: he’s getting ready for whatever it is he has planned for us. Ben even told me I didn’t need to pack a bag, that he’d provide everything including my clothes. I blush as I think about what skimpy-ass sexy things he’s planning to put me in.
The way he commands me and takes charge of everything is so insufferable at times, and yet little bombs of excitement burst within me despite myself. His strength turns me on. His bossiness turns me on. That arrogant glint in his eyes when he looks down at me and smirks superiorly … it turns me on so much that I have to squeeze my legs together through half of my workday.
I can’t stop thinking about Ben.
When the clock hits five, I slip into the bathroom and lock myself in a stall—the very same one Benjamin pulled me into—and change into the clothes I’d brought: some loose jeans and a t-shirt. After shoving my dress shirt, slacks, and tie into the backpack, I come out of the stall and stare at myself in the mirror, then grow lost in thoughts of Benjamin and what the hell is happening to me.
It’s not just the assertive man in a suit who I know. I am also vividly aware of the laidback, gentle person who can slip his arms around me on his couch and hold me tightly against him, cuddled, as the TV emits its soft glow over our half-naked bodies.
I’d give anything to have another night like that.
Maybe that’s what this weekend will be all about: nights like that.
I know the man who whispers in my ear as he tells me stories of when he was a lost kid, unsure what to do with his life. I know the man who can be as vulnerable as he is intimidating.
I think I’m starting to think about that man too much. I fear I’m starting to fear what’s happening inside me when all my thoughts turn to Benjamin Gage. I feel I’m starting to … feel … too much.
“Time to go,” Elijah notes when I come out of the bathroom, changed. “Sure you don’t want me to drive you to your parents’?”
“I have a ticket for the bus.” That’s the twenty-ninth lie I’ve told my roommate Elijah today, who I never keep secrets from.
“Alright, man. Only if you’re sure.”
I give him an unexpected hug before we part ways outside the office, where the sun has finally come out to push away the clouds and cook the evening air into a humid soup of summer sweatiness. “Thanks for understanding. See you Monday, and we’ll get drinks and complain about our super lame weekends. How’s that sound?”
“You better tell your mom I said hi, and if she doesn’t send your ass back with a container full of her homemade cinnamon rolls, I’ll disown her as my adopted mother-in-law.”
I laugh a touch too hard at that. It’s just my tightened nerves and overflowing excitement chasing their way up my body. I am so ready to get my ass to Ben’s place and start this weekend.
And as I watch Elijah walk off into the sunlit mugginess, my phone dances with a text in my pocket. I pull it out at once and let my eyes feast on the words.
B
I’m all ready for you, intern.
Is your cute ass ready for me?
I grin. You bet your beefy cheeks I am, boss.