Page 37 of Mostly My Boss
I didn’t knock, just opened the door to find Ethan on the floor doing push-ups. He was facing away from me, so I don’t know if he knew I was in the room or not. I closed the door behind me and leaned on it.
I’d counted to fifty-two before he collapsed to the floor in a sweaty mess. It was strange—the back of his shirt was drenched and I could see the angles of his shoulders. It should have been gross, but instead I found myself wanting to trace the bones with my fingers.
He turned over, released a breath, then lifted his head to look at me.
“You heard?”
I nodded. “You failed a class.”
He fell back on the floor. “You disappointed with me too?”
“No, we’ll just have to work harder to make sure that doesn’t happen again,” I said.
“Think you can save me, Jules?”
“Know I can, Ethan. But…don’t keep things from me. I don’t like it.”
He sat up with a groan. “I couldn’t tell you I failed. I couldn’t.”
“No, I’m the person youcantell.”
It was strange. I’d been in his dorm room late at night any number of times. We’d even slept together. But now here, in the aftermath of his father’s wrath and Ethan’s physical exertion, it felt tension between us. Like some force had crept up that hadn’t been there earlier this evening.
Ethan stood up and I should have turned around and gone back to my room. We weren’t this. We weren’t tension and thick feelings. When he got closer I could smell him and…I liked it.
“Jules,” he whispered. I thought he was going to reach for me, the way his hand moved away from his body. But then he pointed to the door. “You need to go back to your room.”
I nodded and left. Because we weren’t…whatever that was.
7
Therapy
Ethan
“Okay,” Carol said as she gracefully crossed her legs. “Now, let’s take that pin out. From Julia’s earlier remark, I gather you two have been intimate.”
I nodded. “It’s complicated. Three years ago… at our friend’s wedding—”
“But we don’t talk about that,” Jules snapped. “We agreed to never talk about that.”
“Jules,” I said trying to contain my frustration with her stubbornness. “Isn’t now the time to talk about all of it?”
“We were drunk,” she told Carol. “It was a stupid, drunk hookup at a wedding that we agreed meant nothing. Why do we have to talk about that now?”
Carol looked at us both, and for the life of me I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. Other than that she was looking at us like she didn’t believe us.
“And you never spoke of that night again?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
Jules shook her head.
“There was nothing to talk about…I thought,” I said. “In hindsight, I think we were both in denial about what it meant. At least, I know I was.”
“Hmm. But then it happened again as recently as a few months ago…and that did seem to have an impact on your relationship. You weren’t able to compartmentalize it, were you?”
“That was different,” I explained. “To give you some context, my father had passed away. Unexpectedly of a heart attack. We didn’t have…our relationship was difficult. But we’d been trying. Talking. Losing him that way meant I was never going to be able to fix what I thought I’d broken.”
