Chapter Six
I picked up a pen and put it down again. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I pinched the tips of my fingers together and let them go again. Fuck. Fuck. Was he even coming at all?
I was hanging around in the office, killing all the time I could so I didn’t have to get out of here so soon. I had to pack up all my stuff and be out by the end of the day but that didn’t mean that I had to leave too quickly. I wanted to see if Nate was going to come down and see me off, and I had a feeling that surely he was going to put his head in to bid me farewell. But it was three in the afternoon and it was starting to look weird that I had been hanging out there for so long, packing and unpacking the meagre amount of belongings I had accumulated in the building since I had started work here.
“You doing alright?” Freda asked, bustling by my desk. She had been a little friendlier than usual since Nate had invited me out on what she believed to be my employee evaluation, obviously thinking that I had his ear and hoping that I would put in a good word or two for her. Little did she know that I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he put me in that cab after we shared that kiss in the street after what had passed for our date.
“Yeah, I’m doing well,” I nodded, mustering another smile to shoot in her direction. She had been nothing but utterly sweet to me in my time here and I wanted her to know how much I appreciated it, but I was having a hard time focusing on anything but Nate, but knowing that he was up there and that he knew this was my last day and that he still hadn’t bothered to say a word to me. Three days had passed since that kiss, long enough that I had almost forgotten what his lips felt like on mine, and I needed to see him once more, to sever this and remind myself what this had always been. Because right now, I was having a hard time remembering.
“Looking forward to getting back to college?” She continued conversationally, and I tried to keep my face neutral even though I was scanning the corridor behind her to see what was going on beyond.
“Yeah, yeah, for sure,” I replied without thinking. I just wanted her to leave me alone so I could get back on keeping an eye out for Nate. I knew I was being a little rude but she had already handed in my employee evaluation so there wasn’t much for me to worry about.
“How was your employee thing with Mr. Richards?” She asked, and it took me a split second to realize she was talking about Nate.
“Yeah, it went fine,” I replied, my mind flashing back to that moment in the bathroom, when he’d come inside of me, the look on his face, the overwhelming and intoxicating hit of desire. I blinked and pushed the thoughts from my head and managed a smile in her direction. She was regarding me with this odd expression, as though she was halfway to figuring out what I was thinking on.
“He spoke very highly of you when he signed off on the report,” she remarked. “I think you could have a job here later if you want it.”
“I’m not sure about that,” I replied vaguely, scanning the area around her in case he had appeared while I was talking to her.
“You haven’t liked it here?” She sounded a little surprised, maybe even hurt.
“No, no, it’s been good,” I assured her. “It’s just…personal stuff. You know how it is.”
“Right,” she nodded, pulling a face that told me she at least thought she knew where I was coming from. “Shame. We would have liked to have you back.”
Suddenly, I heard the elevator ding – even though the sound was distant my ears pricked up at once, hyper-sensitized to even the vaguest little bit of noise. I snapped my head around and saw – wait, I recognized her. I frowned, taking a moment to place her. That was Nate’s secretary, right? She caught my eye, waved, and made her way towards me and my heart sank. Oh. Oh.
She came through the door and I realized that my mouth had almost comically turned down at the corners. I quickly straightened my back and glanced around to make sure that Freda wasn’t here. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to hide my disappointment from her if this was going to go the way I thought.
“Hey,” The secretary greeted me, and I groped around for her name in the back of her head. Tanya? Tana?
“Hi,” I nodded to her.
“Nate sent me,” She explained. “He wanted to wish you the best in your future endeavors.”
“Oh,” I blinked at her for a moment, wondering if that was it. She raised her eyebrows at me, waiting for me to react.
“Well, tell him thank you,” I burbled. “And…uh, yeah. Thanks. Thank you for…everything.”
“No problem, I’ll pass that on,” she nodded, and I could tell from the look in her eyes that she didn’t know thing about what had happened between Nate and I.
“Thank you,” I mumbled again, averting my gaze to the floor. My heart was pulsing in my chest as I took a deep breath and tried to figure out what had just happened. Was that it?
I went to pack up the last few bits in from my desk, in kind of a haze. He wasn’t even going to come down to say goodbye? Not even going to drop me a message? I pulled out my phone and refreshed it, checking my email and my texts to make sure that I hadn’t missed a message from him. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Maybe this was part of some game of his, where he would call me up to his office to sneak off for one last hook-up?
My heart was clenched tight, and I realized that I was near to tears as I threw the last few pens and notebooks back into my bag. It was over between us. But things had been going so well between us, up until a couple of days ago. Had it been that kiss? He had kissed me back, his hand on my back, drawing me closer – and now he wasn’t even going to speak to me. I hated the way I felt right then, the polar opposite of how I had felt at that end of the night we had spent together. The anticipation, the wonder, the what-if that had seemed to consume me over the course of those few hours was gone, leaving an ugly hollow in its wake that reminded me that he didn’t even care enough to come down and see me off. He could have put his head in. He called have called me up. He could have invited me over to this place for last night together, something to remember him by. But he hadn’t. He had sent down his secretary to do it for him. His fucking secretary. It was enough to make me wonder if he had ever really give a damn about me in the first place. Had I just been some naïve little thing he’d been using to fulfil his fantasies?
But that night, at the restaurant. That wasn’t something you pulled off with someone you barely knew. You didn’t take them out to the most exclusive place in town and spend the whole evening talking to them, touching on the stuff you loved and the stuff you hated, with someone you had no intention of keeping in your life.
But maybe that was just him, I conceded as I picked up the box of my stuff and headed for the door. There was a reason he had been so successful as a businessman, and perhaps that reason was because he was so adept at getting people to feel special, to feel adored and important. Maybe I had just been the focus of that for a few weeks. While I was still fresh and interesting and new to me. I remembered that handshake in his office, and wondered if I’d been anything more than a business deal to him. An acquisition. And now that he had had me, he was bored. He was done.
I scooped my bag over my shoulder and headed for the door. I had said goodbye to everyone I had worked with over the past month or so already, and I was ready to get out of here. Every step I took, everything I saw, was a reminder of what I had shared with Nate up until only a few days before; I even passed his secretary on the stairs. She avoided my gaze, probably awkward at the thought of saying goodbye all over again, but in my head it was because she felt sorry for me, because she knew. I lowered my gaze. I felt humiliated. Hadn’t this been a bit of fun when we’d started, a way for me to get my mojo back after everything that had happened with Matt? And now here I was, feeling as though I’d been kicked in the teeth and forced to accept the fact that I would likely never see this man again. I mean, I could go to his house or blow up his phone with calls, but I was determined not to be that crazy girl who couldn’t let go of a guy she barely knew in the first place. I would just have to forget everything I felt for him, everything I’d clung to, and mark this one down as a loss on my part.
I made it out of the building and on to the street and the cold air immediately burned in my lungs. I realized the lump in my throat was starting to pinch, threatening to send me to tears right her in the middle of the street. I tipped my head back and looked at the grey afternoon sky, more reflective of my mood than I would have liked to admit. I wasn’t going to cry here in the middle of the street. I wasn’t going to be that girl. I wasn’t.
Patricia’s words curdled in my head. She’d warned me about this. She’d told me that this was how it would go, that I would pour all that stray love and affection into him and that I would end up down and out like this while he went on, probably with barely another thought for me. And she had been right. But for a second there – just a moment, just as long as our lips touched on that busy street – I had convinced myself that this thing went both ways. That we could make a go of it. I couldn’t get that feeling out of my head, my brain replaying the moment over and over again, searching for a crack in the armour, something that would admit to the fact that this had all been my imagination. But it wasn’t there. It simply wasn’t. For that second, I had fallen for him, and that had been all it took to throw me straight back down this pit into wanting him more than I ever should have.
I arrived back home, dropped the box of my things at my feet with a clatter, and headed straight for the bedroom. I needed to sleep for a day and a half and hope that when I woke up, this would all be over for me.