Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas, #2)(25)

I stare at him, stupefied. This is . . . He’s not supposed to be saying any of this. He’s supposed to . . . I don’t know. Double down. Defend his own shitty actions. Make me loathe him even more.

“For the future, we can probably work out an agreement. Something about not pursuing your potential clients. I don’t know, but I’ll talk it through with Gianna.”

Excuse me? “I doubt your partners will ever agree to that.”

“They will when I explain the situation to them,” he says, like it’s a decided matter.

“Sure, because you’re one of them.” My anger is back. Good. Perfect. “Another lie from you, by the way.”

This time, he . . . Is he blushing? “I didn’t lie.”

“You just omitted. Nice loophole.”

“That’s not it. I . . .” For the first time since I met him, this self-possessed, severe man seems vaguely embarrassed, and I . . . I can’t look away. “I wasn’t sure whether you knew. Most people I meet seem to know already—yes, I know how that sounds. And then over dinner you told me about how different working for a firm was from academic life. How much you missed your friends. I figured me bragging about how I graduated and got to make that transition with my friends could wait a couple of days.”

“That sounds really . . .” Believable, actually. Kind of thoughtful, if in an oddly misplaced way? “Sketchy.”

He lets out a laugh. Like I’m being ridiculous. “Sketchy.”

“I just—” I throw up my hands. “Why are we even doing this, Erik? It’s obvious that you had some ulterior motive for asking me out. You even tried to offer me a job!”

“Of course I did, Sadie. I’d do it again. I will right now. Do you want to come work for me? Because that offer stands and—”

“Stop.” I raise my palm, put it between us like the most useless wall in the world. “Please, just . . . stop this.”

“Okay.” Erik takes a long, deep breath. When he talks, his voice is calm. “Okay. This is what happened, and interrupt me if I’m wrong: you thought, based on what you were told by someone you trusted, that I slept with you to steal a client and get back at Gianna for not selling, which maybe sounds a little far-fetched, but . . . I get it. It’s where the clues pointed. Is that correct?”

I nod, silent. There is a prickly, heavy pressure behind my eyes.

“Okay,” he continues patiently. “That’s your side of what happened. But I’m asking you to consider mine. Which is that even though I absolutely fucked up by sending your work to my team, I didn’t know about the consequences of it until about five minutes ago. Because I called you, but you never picked up. And when I came upstairs to talk to you, Gianna said that she was sure you didn’t want to see me. And I like to think that I’m not the kind of asshole who would keep calling a woman who asked him not to, so I stopped. But I also wasn’t exactly able to quit thinking about you, which had me desperately looking for the reason you pulled back, to the point that I’ve been replaying what happened between us that night every day—every . . . single . . . day—for the past three weeks.”

“Erik—”

“I’m not exaggerating.” This would be so much easier if his tone were accusatory. But no. He has to sound reasonable and logical and earnest and sincere and I want to scream. “I tore apart every minute, every second of every interaction, and after slicing all of it into pieces, the only conclusion that I could reach was that whatever I did wrong must have happened after you asked me to take you to my place, which only really left what we did there.”

“That’s not—”

“And I’ve been scared, scared like never before, that I’d hurt you.” He lifts his hand. Curves it around my cheek. “That I’d left you in some—any kind of pain. That I couldn’t make amends. Which, let me tell you, is no fun when you know in your lizard brain that you’re about five minutes from falling in love with someone.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe past. Can’t really tell.”

They make the floor shift and shake, Erik’s words. They make it fall hard and fast from under my feet, they flood my brain with a blinding flash of light, and they . . . wait.

Wait.

“The power’s back,” I say with a gasp, realizing that the elevator is working again. Erik must have noticed, too, but he doesn’t look surprised, nor does he make a move to shift away from me. He keeps holding my eyes, like he’s waiting for an answer from me, for an acknowledgment of what he’s said, but I can’t, won’t give it to him. I turn away from the hand on my face and grab my bag, slipping out of the corner where I wedged myself.

“Sadie.” When the doors open on the first floor, I dart out of the car. Erik is right behind me. “Sadie, can you—”

“Erik!” someone calls from the other side of the lobby, the voice echoing across the marble. There is a small group of people chatting with two men in maintenance uniforms. “You okay?” I’m almost positive (from hate-researching ProBld after our falling-out) that he’s another one of the partners. A late-working bunch, clearly.

“Yeah,” Erik says without moving in their direction.

“Were you stuck in the elevator?”