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My fingers flexed. “Nothing.”

“You don’t think it’ll happen again? She’s clearly attracted to you too.”

As stupid as it was, that perked me up. I hadn’t really thought about that. Anita had to be attracted to me as well. She’d made herself come again just watching me jerk off, which had been ridiculously hot.

“I mean, yeah, obviously she’s attracted to me, but…” I pulled open my fridge and absently stared at the neat rows of my prepared meals in their containers. “She said her boss has some rule about boundaries with clients.”

“Ah.” Laki took a drag on their joint. “Makes sense.”

My mouth screwed up. “Surely that’s not, like, legal or whatever. Maybe she can talk to someone about her rights.”

There was a pause. Laki sounded extremely amused when they spoke. “I mean, I doubt ‘You’re not allowed to bone your clients’ is written into her contract or anything. It’s probably just an understanding they all have.”

“I’m just saying, it’s pretty ridiculous, if you ask me,” I muttered, slamming the fridge shut.

Laki chuckled. “Well how would you feel if your firm had a big contract with an important client and you found out one of the junior architects working on it had started fucking the boss?”

I struggled to answer for a second. “I wouldn’t care.”

“Bullshit.”

“I wouldn’t, dude,” I snapped, even though I definitely would.

Laki snorted. “Sure. So she said it can’t happen again?”

“Yeah.” I wandered over to the windows and scowled at the blurred view through the stained glass. “I agreed, obviously. It’s not like I’m desperate for it to happen again and she isn’t. We were in agreement.”

“Okay. So what’s the problem?”

“Who said there’s a problem?” I snapped defensively.

Laki calmly said, “There’s a problem.”

“There’s no problem,” I shot back. “I just… called to let you know.”

Silence. Then, “You called to let me know you had ‘a little sex’ with your event planner, but you’re not interested in it happening again.”

My ears fluttered. “That makes it sound weird, dude.”

“If that’s all it really is, it probably could’ve been a text. Or even nothing. Nothing would’ve been fine. It’s not like I’m dying to know when my brother has sex and who he has sex with.” There was a faint hiss as Laki stubbed out their joint. “So let’s go through the progress your brain has made.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t go all zen psychoanalyst on me, dude.”

“You’ve admitted you’re attracted to her.”

“Physically,” I clarified.

“And you want to have sex with her again.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, but stayed silent.

“What do you think she wants?”

My instinct was to declare that of course she wanted to have sex with me again. Who wouldn’t? But I forced myself to go over our conversation in my head before answering.

“I think she… I think she’d want to if there wasn’t that stupid rule. She seemed kind of disappointed when she told me it couldn’t happen again.”

“Okay, so that’s something. It’s not like she’s going to be your event planner forever, is it? So just wait until the event’s over and ask her out then, if she does seem interested.”