He’d looked at me like he didn’t know me at all.
I stand from the desk and walk to my door, peeking out before I close it to the small, dimly lit lobby outside. Carol won’t be in for another hour, and Jasper—who is always here before me—still isn’t in his office across the way.
I take a deep breath. “Kel, I messed up.”
I try giving her an abbreviated version: a long day, a jolt of adrenaline, a huge achievement, a kiss I shouldn’t have initiated, an awkward parting.
But I should’ve known that wouldn’t work on my sister.
“Oh my Gooooooooooooood,” she shouts, and I wince on her behalf. It’s barely six a.m. in LA right now, and no way are Malik and their two kids out of bed yet. I shush her on instinct, but this doesn’t work either.
“Freaking finally! What was it like?”
I can’t say Christmas morning, obviously, unless I want Kelly to know how far gone I am, how far gone I’ve been. “What do you mean, finally?”
“Please. ‘Jasper this, Jasper that.’ He’s all you ever talk about.”
“We work together. We’re business partners. Of course I talk about him.”
She ignores me. “Plus he looks like a cologne ad come to life. God. Does he still have that scar at the corner of his mouth?”
“Uh, yes? Why would he not have it anymore?” I stifle the urge to tell her what that scar—a small, upward curving line that makes the right side of his mouth look slightly upturned, a tease for the smile he so rarely gives out—felt like against my tongue. I love that scar.
“Who knows. People here get stuff like that lasered off, or whatever. Anyway. What. Was. It. Like.”
I slump into my chair again, turning it out to face the window. Early morning light bathes the glass-and-steel buildings of downtown Houston. Even from up here I can hear a swish of traffic on the surface streets below. It’s supposed to be sixty-two degrees today. It doesn’t feel like Christmas morning anymore at all.
“It can’t happen again.”
“Oh. You’re going to play it this way, are you?”
“Kel. This is our business. We’ve worked so hard to get here. Being with Jasper—it goes against everything I know about professional life.”
Kelly sighs, and I know part of her—the part of her that finished her law degree two years before I started mine, the part of her that spends ten to thirteen hours a day doing contracts for the second largest studio in Hollywood—knows exactly what I mean. Before Jasper and I started this firm, I spent five years working alongside him at a massive materials conglomerate here in Houston—him part of a scouting team for new tech and the talent that produced it, me doing human resources contracts for the hires he and our former colleague Ben would bring in. When I wasn’t doing contracts, I was negotiating conflicts within the company—and more than a few of them came from romantic relationships turned sour. In my head there’s a looping echo of things I’ve said to Jasper over the years—the frustration I expressed over two people in accounting whose relationship had gone so wrong that we’d had to rearrange the whole floor to prevent worse fallout. The anger over a VP who’d promoted a woman he’d been dating over someone far more qualified. It’s too messy to do these things at work, I’d say, and the worst of it was, part of me knew I was saying it almost as a way to convince myself. To talk myself out of the things I already thought about Jasper.
“You’re not his subordinate,” Kelly says. “And he’s not yours. You’re partners.”
“You know it’s more complicated than that. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Maybe you were thinking you’ve been half in love with him since the day you met him.”
Wrong. I’m pretty sure, much as I’ve tried to deny it, that I’ve been whole in love with him. Since he looked me straight in the eye, shook my hand, and asked me bluntly if I could help him write a restrictive covenant for a new hire on my first day of work. But I’ve never let it get in the way before.
Not like I did last night.
“I need to apologize to him. I sort of did, last night, but he couldn’t leave fast enough.” He hadn’t even picked up his suit jacket. It’s probably still draped over the back of his chair in the conference room. I press a hand to my forehead. “How could I do this? He’s my best friend.”
“Hey,” Kelly says softly, hearing the quiver in my voice. “I’m your best friend.”
I offer a small, wet laugh. “You know what I mean. He’s my best friend here. We do everything together.”
“No. You work together, and work has been your everything for too long.” I can sense her changing her tactic. A born lawyer, Kelly is, and I always thought I was, too, until I started getting the itch for the recruiting side. “Maybe you’re just getting your wires crossed. You’re around him so much that you get confused sometimes. Like a work husband kind of thing.”
I try not to feel a shudder of delight at that word—husband—in any way connected to Jasper. I try instead to cling desperately to what Kelly has said. Yes, maybe that’s it—maybe these last months especially, when we’ve been working so closely to get this firm off the ground. The scouting trips we’ve taken and the close quarters in this office. Dinners and drinks with clients that sometimes stretched into wrap-up sessions between the two of us, my place or his, late-night desserts and laughter and the occasional baseball game . . .
“Maybe,” I say, unconvincingly.
“Today’s your last day, right? Before the holiday?”
“Yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s a great point.” Ugh. What am I, on a conference
