“Later,” he said, hooking his arm around her waist and bringing her in for a kiss. He hadn’t kissed her at all today. They’d spent the day together but he hadn’t touched her, hadn’t acted like there was anything between them. She was surprised by how much she’d missed it.
“Definitely.” She moved away from him and went into the kitchen and started rifling through the produce drawers in her fridge. “Stir-fry?” she asked.
“I didn’t imagine that you would cook.”
“I have to eat.”
“My mother didn’t cook.”
Lily laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Neither did mine.” She put a head of cabbage on her cutting board and began to slice it. “I learned when I moved out here. Otherwise I existed on frozen pizza and whatever my friends’ parents fed me when they felt sorry for me.”
“Do you have any family here?”
“No. I left home at seventeen. My main requirement was that none of my family be where I went,” she said, hearing the bitterness edge into her voice.
“And you wanted to be near the ocean,” he said.
“Yes. I did.”
“Did the men your mother dated hurt you? Is that why you avoided relationships?”
She took a breath and tossed the sliced cabbage into the wok on the stove. “They didn’t hurt me in the way that you mean. But my mother was so dependent on them, and most of them were terrible. She let them control everything she did, and by extension, everything I did. We always lived in these tiny little houses with no privacy. I could always hear them fighting, or making up. I’m not sure which was worse.”
She put the rest of the vegetables and some precooked chicken into the wok and pushed them around vigorously with a spatula for a few minutes before turning the burner off.
“Not all relationships are like that,” he said.
“Not all of them are like your parents', either.”
He didn’t say anything to that. Conversation turned back to business, and she was thankful for that.
She served their dinner in the dining room and Gage sat in the chair next to her, instead of sitting across from her, his hand on her thigh, stroking her absently. It was very domestic, the two of them eating a dinner she’d cooked. It certainly didn’t fit in to the parameters of an affair.
Neither did sharing the gory details about a dysfunctional childhood. But Gage had always made her want to open up. It had always been easy for her to say too much to him.
They ended up watching a movie in the living room before heading to her bedroom and making love. It was amazing, like it always was, and, like always, she felt a little piece of the wall around her heart crumble when she came apart in his arms.
And when he gathered her against him she felt tears trailing down her cheeks again, all of the emotion rising up inside of her again, needing a way to escape.
She didn’t know what it was that made her feel this way. Not for sure. She had a suspicion, but she hoped, more than anything, that she was wrong.
* * *
They drove to the office together the next day, despite her protests. She also conceded to packing an overnight back, just in case. She shouldn’t have. She shouldn’t have left it open. She should be ending it. They’d had an agreement and they weren’t sticking to it.
The relationship, because it was growing into that, was now beyond her control. She wanted to be with Gage almost more than she wanted her next breath, but she didn’t want to want it. She didn’t want to want him.
She was sitting in her spot in his office, notebook in hand as he briefed her on a new resort property in Goa, India.
“Any concerns regarding the location?” she asked.
“Not that I can foresee. It’s an older resort, and basically we’ll be renovating it and bringing some more tourism into the area.”
“Excellent. I love it when you make my job easy.” She looked up at him and her heart fluttered in her chest.
There was no compartmentalizing. She had thought that Gage, her lover, could be someone different in her mind than Gage, her boss. After all, she’d always been able to set everything aside and focus on her work. But it wasn’t possible. Whenever she looked at him she was flooded by memories of them making love, of him looking at her, his expression tender.
“And I don’t do it very often,” he said.
“You’re getting better.”
“Don’t let that get out.”
She smiled. “I won’t.”
Gage stood from his desk and walked around to where she was sitting, coming to stand behind her before leaning down and kissing her lightly on the neck. “You’re a terrible workplace distraction.”