AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was strange. It was almost like he was pulling away.
I didn’t understand why, and it was pissing me off.
I was brooding over this when I received a phone call from one of the last people I wanted to hear from. My mother.
And against my better judgment, I picked up the call.
TWENTY
NICK
Five minutes.
I tried to distract myself with work for as long as possible, analyzing project after project ad nauseam. I made sure to keep moving, not giving myself time to get distracted. My door became an endless rotation of Simon and Hannah, who kept bringing me more documents to review and going over the rest of our tasks for the week, as well as the recent analytics.
But I only made it five minutes before I was thinking about Lisa again and imagining her face sitting across from me, her smile, and the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she got nervous.
I sighed, leaning back and tossing my pen in frustration after realizing that I had failed once again not to think about her. I’d thought about her at least fifteen times in the last hour. Some of it was simple questions like wondering how she was doing, if she’d eaten, and what she could be doing at this very moment. The rest of it was images, flashes of her smile, her cocked eyebrow when she was annoyed, and especially the way her face flushed in pleasure. All of it played in a recurring loop as if the universe had conspired to bring her to mind no matter what. And no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
And I’d been trying the whole damn week.
I’d purposely kept myself from seeing her this long just to prove that I could. As childish as it seemed, I needed to know that I could maintain a distance when it came to Lisa, but it seemed the more I tried not to think about her, the more relentless the thoughts became. I’d even begun dreaming about her, and they weren’t at all what one would expect. Sure, some of it was us having sex, but most of it was just us talking. The way she would sometimes say something cheeky or sarcastic or unexpectedly hilarious, the way she would hold Violet gently when the girl was feeling sleepy, and the way she smelled like sunshine and roses.
The thoughts were starting to drive me up the wall because here I was, obsessing over a woman like a love-sick puppy. And it wasn’t really love, thank God. I would never allow myself to fall in love, but I was feeling something for her, something that scared the bejesus out of me because it was bordering too close to the L-word for comfort.
“Come on, man,” I muttered to myself, rubbing my face. “Get it together.”
I didn’t want to ever fall in love because if there was one thing life taught me, it was that love ultimately led to pain after loss.
Last weekend was enough of a warning.
It terrified me to even member that moment in the parking lot. When I saw the car speeding toward her, I nearly lost my mind. I was frozen in horror for a moment there, and if I hadn’t snapped out of it the second I did, she would be dead. She would no longer be here.
And that would have destroyed me.
That thought bothered me the whole way home. I shouldn’t be destroyed by the thought of her not being here anymore. Yes, I should care about her as a person and as my child’s mother, but this was way beyond that. I wasn’t sure I would be able to function if I lost her. Even remembering it made my heart clench in my chest. This feeling was way beyond a hook-up or someone I was fond of or anything like that. I’d never felt terror like that before.
Not since I was a little kid in the backseat of an upended Prius.
I took a deep breath, suppressing the flashback. There was no point in reliving the day my parents died, just like there was no point in reliving Lisa’s near accident. She was right. It was over and done with. I needed to just forget it and continue with my life.
But I couldn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I just fucking couldn’t.
Finally sick of my thoughts, I got up. Just as I was about to begin pacing, the door flew open, and a determined Carson stormed in, followed by a haggard Hannah.
“We need to talk,” he declared firmly.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Hannah explained behind him. “I tried to stop him, but he just pushed his way in—”
“It’s fine, Hannah,” I said, holding up my hand to stop her hurried words. “You can leave us alone. I wanted to talk to him anyway.”
“Are you sure, sir? I could call security if you want.” And from the look she shot Carson, she very much wanted to utilize that option.
“Yes, I’m sure. Leave us alone, please.”
Carson shot her a triumphant look of his own. With a final glare that was uncharacteristic of Hannah, she turned and stalked out of the office. Then, I leaned against my desk, watching the anger overtake his expression.
“So,” I began. “To what do I owe this displeasure?”
