Page 50 of Secret Baby Daddy

“Everything alright?” he asks.

“Working on it,” I tell him, which is, for once, the entire truth.

14

DOMINIC

Jealousy, I am learning tonight, does not require two separate people.

It only requires one man foolish enough to fall for both halves of the same woman before he’s ready to admit they were never separate people to begin with.

I walked the thirty feet of hallway back to my own room slower than necessary tonight, now that the east wing has finally cleared and Piper and I have doors of our own again, and I catalogued the ache of putting distance between myself and a door I have started, against every professional instinct I own, thinking of as somewhere I would rather be standing outside of than away from.

I tell myself this is fatigue.

I have told myself a great many things this week that did not survive close examination.

I log into Blackline a little after midnight.

Atlas: Long day. How’s the case going on your end.

Cassandra: Complicated. The colleague situation has escalated.

Atlas: Escalated how?

There’s a pause longer than her usual rhythm, long enough that I picture her deciding whether to type the next sentence or delete it, the way I’ve watched her hesitate over a press statement when the stakes finally matter more than the optics.

I have learned to read her pauses almost as fluently as her sentences, the rhythm of hesitating over something true versus something merely inconvenient.

This pause belongs to the first category, and I brace for it the way I’d brace for incoming fire.

Cassandra: I think I’m attracted to him. Not in the abstract, professional-tension way I’ve been complaining about for a year. Actually attracted. The kind that makes it difficult to stand three feet away from him in a room and pretend I’m thinking about the case.

I read the sentence four times before I let myself respond, because some petty, undisciplined part of me that I do not recognize wants, for one absurd moment, to be jealous of myself.

Atlas: That’s a significant shift from “insufferable” and “concrete.”

Cassandra: He’s still insufferable. He’s still made largely of concrete. I didn’t say the attraction was rational.

Atlas: Does he know?

Cassandra: God, no. And he’s not going to, because the case isn’t finished and because I don’t currently trust my own judgment enough to hand it to a man who thinks every emotion is a liability to be managed.

I sit with the ugly little thrill of being told, by the one person I’ve trusted completely for a year, that she wants a man who is, undeniably, me; and with something far less flattering underneath it.

I am jealous.

Not of a stranger.

Of myself, split cleanly into two men she hasn’t realized are the same one, one of whom she trusts with everything and one of whom she is only now admitting she wants.

There is no rational framework for being jealous of yourself, and I have spent my entire career building rational frameworks.

I fail, tonight, to build one.

Atlas: Tell me about him. The real him, not the caricature you usually give me.

Cassandra: Why?