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“Coffee time!” Finn is back, setting cups on my desk with a flourish. Nic takes his with abbreviated thanks and disappears back into his office, leaving Finn looking curiously at me, and me with a mind full of questions and no answers at all.
14
FINN
The longer I’m around them, the more I’m convinced I’m right. Tiny hints of his feelings for her litter that office, so small they’d be easy to miss even if you see them every day. Maybe especially seeing them every day.
He knows what she’ll order for lunch before they’ve even decided on a restaurant. Her coffee order. He asks about Moira, her mother, and other mutual acquaintances I don’t know. When I first started working in their office, I thought the flowers on the coffee table in their tiny foyer were fake. They’re not. Natalie said the building manager ordered them for every office, and I bought it, too. Until I caught Nic placing the order himself one day.
I have the oddest urge to apologize to him, which is strange as fuck. He’s a grown-ass man, capable of making his own choices. Stranger still, I don’t know why I bother considering what he wants anyway.
Liar. You know why.
That voice in my head sounds a lot like Natalie. I don’t know what he wants, which is maybe why I keep flashing back to that day at the lobby elevator with Alex, before I met Natalie, before Nic’s blackmail, before any of this started.
That look he’d given me, the one that, loosely translated, said I want to climb you like a tree. I only saw that look from Nic once, and while I’m pretty sure he was just doing it to try to get a rise out of me at the time, I’m starting to think it might have been real. More than once lately, the memory of that look has, in fact, gotten a rise out of me.
It turns me on, and I don’t know what the fuck to do about that.
I’ve tried calling Alex because if anybody knows what the fuck is going on in my head, it’s him, but we keep missing each other. I could always talk to Sully, but… yeah, nah. He wouldn’t get it.
That leaves Weston.
We’ve texted a few times the last couple weeks, but we haven’t talked since that day at Hale House. Despite the radio silence, despite the gulf between us these last few months, I could talk to him. It’ll be weird as fuck now that he’s with my sister, but like Alex, West might actually get whatever’s going on with me.
Natalie’s got plans with her mother tonight, so West and I meet at some pub Sully likes named Rusty’s. West is sitting in a booth nursing a beer when I get there. I order a pint from the bartender and carry it over, sliding into the seat across from him.
“What’s up, man?”
“Not much. Long time no see.”
He looks straight at me. “You sick or something?”
“What? No.”
“Just, your text said you needed to talk,” says West. “And the last time you wanted to talk, it was all about the skeletons in your closet. I couldn’t figure out what the hell else you might have to say to me that you didn’t want Callie around to hear.”
Laughing uncomfortably, my face heats, and I take down about half the pint before I can answer. “Sick in the head, maybe,” I mutter. I scrub my face with my hands. Okay. We’re really doing this. “So there’s this girl?—”
West’s face lights up. “Shit, that’s all this is about? You fucking drama queen.”
“And this guy,” I say.
West doesn’t say a word. I don’t even think he’s breathing.
“Not fucking funny, Finn.”
“I’m serious, prick,” I say, glancing around to see if anybody heard me. I finally glance at West’s face. He’s skeptical, deeply so. About a five and a half out of ten on the about-to-punch-me scale.
“If this is about Lee and Callie?—”
“It’s not. I swear.”
Another pause. “Elaborate.”
I tell him about meeting Natalie on the balcony and that we’ve been seeing each other.
“Have you slept with her?” he asks. I narrow my eyes at him, but he just shrugs. “It might be relevant.”
