Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
But before I could finish the thought, she was gone.
12
SELENA
The next day, my head was so full of thoughts of Dominic that nothing else fit. I turned on the Keurig machine and ran it without putting a cup underneath. Christi helped me clean it up, laughing about how she was supposed to be the one with pregnancy brain.
I smiled weakly and sat back on my heels as the paper towels soaked up the hot, dark liquid. I hadn’t told my sister about the kiss yet, but she sensed something was up.
“Did you have fun last night?” she asked casually, gathering up the mess of soaked-through paper towels and dumping it all in the trash can. “I heard you come in, but by the time I got out of my room, you were in yours.”
That had been deliberate. It wasn’t even nine when I got back, so I knew that Christi would still be awake. And I knew if she saw my face, she’d know something had happened. And knowing my sister, she’d pin it down to Dominic pretty quickly. Now, though, I’d had some space. I could cloak it better, I thought.
“It was fun,” I said, keeping my voice equally casual as I dampened a paper towel and ran it over the linoleum before they could get sticky from coffee residue. “I had a little too much to drink though.”
“What, a half a glass of wine?” Christi teased. I was a notorious lightweight.
“Two full glasses,” I said, remembering the wonderful haze of it. The way it had almost given me a kind of second sight. I’d known what I was doing when I baited Dominic. I’d known he would come after me. That we would kiss. My knowing hadn’t stretched beyond that. Maybe if it had, I would have gone straight home.
But even as the thought occurred to me, I knew it wasn’t true. There was nothing in the world that could have kept me from being in the office when Dominic burst out of the elevator, his control finally frayed to the breaking point. The wine had given me the courage, but the desire had been there all along.
Christi was watching me. I could feel the prickle of her gaze between my shoulder blades even as I refused to look back. If I did, she would see it in my eyes. I’d been wrong when I thought I could cloak what had happened with a few more hours of distance. It was all over me, just below the surface of my words. It was the flush that kept rising in my cheeks. The heat that kept creeping between my thighs. The glitter in my eyes.
“Selena, did you…” Christi started. I heard the frown in her voice as she tried to out her finger on what exactly it was she thought I might have done. Had I had sex? No, there was no way. “Something happened between you and Dominic,” she said, landing on it with such certainty I couldn’t deny it.
I glanced over my shoulder at her, the wet paper towel still pressed between my hand and the yellowing linoleum that honestly couldn’t be any worse off if we’d just let the coffee soak into it. I didn’t have to confirm her suspicions. My silence was enough.
“Oh wow.” Christi’s voice was gleeful. “Wow. You have to tell me everything.”
She made me sit at the bar while she made me another cup of coffee–she actually remembered the cup. “Gather your thoughts,” she ordered as she fished out my favorite Keurig flavor from our motley collection. “Then tell me every single detail, okay?”
I tried to do as she asked, but my thoughts were like marbles spilling out of a bag, going every which way. It was hard to think when everything that had happened was so tied to feeling, and the feeling of what had happened tied my stomach up in knots. Some pleasant, some not so much. By the time she slid my steaming mug in front of me, the milk still blooming across the inky black surface, I was no closer to knowing where to begin than I had been when she started.
“Okay, start from the beginning. How did you end up at the happy hour anyway? I thought you were skipping it because you had to meet Mrs. Kloss.”
“Now I have to meet her today,” I said, even though have to made it sound like it was something I was dreading instead of something I was eagerly anticipating. I couldn’t wait to be absorbed by Mrs. Kloss’s exacting idea of how the Christmas ball should look. The sooner buffets vs sit down dinners and live bands vs DJs drove Dominic out of my head, the better.
But Christi made me relive every minute first. When I got to the end–throwing myself into the elevator while he glowered at me from across the office space–she clasped her hands together and sighed dramatically.