Page 91 of Work with Me

“I brought you a sandwich. And a cookie.” She held up a white bakery bag.

“Not hungry.”

She set it on my desk. “You need to eat.”

“I said I’m not hungry,” I growled. I hadn’t felt like eating since that last night with Alicia. The Adderall I was taking to help me focus on work probably wasn’t helping.

“How about a walk? We can go to the park, and you can meditate.”

I’d tried that, too, but I couldn’t clear thoughts of Alicia out of my brain. “No.”

“The fitness center, then. Exercise always makes you feel better.”

“What the fuck, Marlee? Why are you trying to distract me?”

She made the mistake of glancing at my screen, the empty one with the time and date app in the corner. Four in the afternoon on December first.

December first. Two thousand miles away, the Austin office was hosting the launch party. For the product our team had produced. And they were doing it without me.

I should’ve been there. Except I didn’t deserve it.

Was she there? Was she looking for me?

The night before that Wednesday morning I’d been supposed to meet her, after four hours of furious silence on the company jet, after another eight hours of all-hands-on-deck solving Weston’s problem, Cooper had dropped me at my place. He’d knitted his eyebrows at me like he was worried. I guessed he’d expected me to rage at him, to argue. To sulk. To run.

I’d wanted to tear off my own skin while I was stuck in that conference room with Weston and our public relations team when I should’ve been back in Austin making plans for my date with Alicia. But I’d stayed. It was the right thing to do for my company. For Cooper, for Marlee, for everyone at headquarters and the entire team back in Austin. It was even the best thing for Alicia. If I could’ve told her what I was doing, she might’ve been proud. But I couldn’t. Not a word of the offshoring fiasco could get out into the media. Weston had shut us up tighter than his own asshole.

While Alicia’s testimonial hung in the balance, I didn’t dare contact her. Her text sat on my phone, torturing me. It was what I deserved after nearly ruining her business.

So she thought I was a douchebag. I’d have let her down sooner or later anyway. And in the back of her mind, she knew it, too. She’d known not to trust me with Noah. Too bad she hadn’t been so careful with herself.

Who was I to think I could be a man and step up as a parent to Noah? I couldn’t even keep my own shit together.

The next day, I’d blocked her number and then deleted it from my phone to avoid the temptation to call her back. And then I’d stomped down to the dumpster and tossed in the useless hunk of technology. It’d landed with a gratifying smash against the metal bottom. What the fuck did I need a phone for? I’d be a drone, shuttling back and forth between the office and my apartment. No temptations. No social life, no friends. No illusions I could be more.

Still, I couldn’t keep from torturing myself.

On my computer, I opened a browser window and pulled up a social media site.

“Jackson, don’t,” Marlee said, flexing her fingers like she’d stop me. “Please.”

“Did he ask you to keep me away from it?” I searched for the #SynergyLaunch hashtag. Photos of the familiar Austin office flooded the screen. People drinking champagne. Kevin and Amit at the buffet table. I almost smiled. I missed those guys. Upstairs, a group of posed employees, beaming.

“He said it’d only upset you.”

I barked out a bitter laugh. “Upset me?” How the fuck could I be more upset than I already was?

I scrolled through a photo of Cooper standing near our old work area with some suit. Cooper with some grinning employees. Same employees, no Cooper, though I spotted him in the background, scowling at—

I zoomed in. A hand, clutching a glass of champagne. Most of her was out of frame, and her face was obscured by an outflung elbow.

But I’d know that hand anywhere. Long and pale. I’d watched those slender fingers fly silently over her keyboard for weeks.

I scrolled through more photos. There she was again, in the background of a photo of the IT team. She had her hand on someone’s arm. Tyler’s. His face was blurry, but his tousled hair was the same as it’d been at the party at my place. A few photos later, I spotted them behind the glass of a conference room wall. They were out of focus in the background of another picture, but I knew the curve of her hip. The hip she’d revealed to me when she’d dropped her skirt. The hip I’d caressed, reverently, while I’d coated myself in her essence. The hip I’d cradled after she’d shown me what lay behind her shield, after she’d fallen apart.

In the foreground, Cooper smiled. Like he’d toiled for months in Austin’s summer heat to build the fucking software. Like he hadn’t swooped in at the end and shredded the first happiness I’d found in a long time. Like he hadn’t forced me to act like all the other men in her life and disappoint the best woman I’d ever known. Like he didn’t fucking care. Some partner he’d been.

“Jackson?” I’d almost forgotten Marlee was still there. “What happened in Austin? And why is there a chunk of ice wrapped in a sock in the employee freezer?”

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