Not Safe for Work(99)

“Yeah.” I kneaded the back of my neck. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it at all.”

Another silent moment went by, and all the while, his gaze was fixed on my fingers. Any other time, I’d have fully expected him to offer to rub my neck and shoulders for me, but he didn’t. I didn’t have to ask why.

All at once, he released a long breath, and his shoulders dropped. “Let’s…” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know if I can do this, to be honest.”

I wanted nothing more than to beg him to reconsider, but all I could do was push out a breath and slump against the counter. “I don’t know if I can either.”

Silence fell. It dropped itself between us, pushed us further and further apart with each passing second.

“So what do we do? About…this?” I asked after a while, and regretted it as soon as I did.

“Don’t ask questions,” my father had warned me when I was a kid, “unless you know you want the answers.”

Rick met my gaze. Immediately, my heart sank. Like so many times before, the answer was there in his eyes, clear as day, and I knew the words before he spoke them: “Maybe we should take some time. Figure out where to go from here.”

“So…a break.”

“I guess?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t really see any other way.” His eyebrows knitted together.

Yeah. There was another way. It couldn’t have been more obvious if it was written on the wall in flashing red neon.

But I couldn’t just walk away from my job. Get another job, tell the partners to go f*ck themselves—it was a lot easier on paper than it was in practice. Standing here in a kitchen that had probably cost more than my entire house, I was all too aware that replacing my income would be a drop in Rick’s bucket. And I cringed, mentally begging him not to make that offer.

Don’t go there. Please, please, don’t go there.

You could pay every bill I have a hundred times over, and I’d never be able to look you in the eye again.

If you really know me, you won’t go there.

A solid minute passed, and he finally lowered his gaze, staring at the marble tiles beneath our feet. “So I guess that’s it.”

“I guess it is.” My stomach turned to lead. I couldn’t decide if it was better or worse that he hadn’t gone there. Did he know me well enough not to suggest bailing me out financially? Or was he beyond considering solutions and had just resigned himself to this?

I cleared my throat. “I should go. I’ll, um, get my stuff from upstairs.”

Rick nodded, but he didn’t speak.

I went upstairs. He didn’t follow. While I gathered everything that had taken up residence here—a razor, a toothbrush, a couple of changes of clothes—and stuffed them in my overnight bag, he didn’t come into the bedroom. Packed and ready, I went back downstairs to the foyer.

In the foyer, I rocked from my heels to the balls of my feet. Did I go to the kitchen and say good-bye? Did I wait for him to come in here to do the same? Or did I walk out and hope he understood I just didn’t want to force either of us through more painful conversation?

Maybe I was a coward, but I took the last option. With my heart in my throat, I adjusted my bag on my shoulder and opened the front door.

For the first time since we’d been seeing each other, I walked out of Rick’s place without a promise of what we’d do next time, without a long kiss to back up that promise, and without looking back.

This wasn’t a split. Was it? There’d been no screaming or saying things we’d wish we could take back. No one had declared that this was over and we could never be in the same room—my workplace notwithstanding—again. I still had feelings for him, and had no reason to believe he didn’t still have feelings for me.

But I was leaving, and he wasn’t stopping me.

This didn’t feel erasable. This felt like “a break” the same way moving out fourteen years ago had felt like a “trial separation”—nothing had been set in stone yet, nothing signed or finalized, but there’d been an unspoken certainty that there was no going back.

As I drove away, refusing to even glance at Rick’s tree-shrouded house in the rearview, I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel, but numb didn’t seem right.

The motherf*ckers had won. They didn’t like one of their lowly modelers dating their top client, and even though they had too much business savvy and not enough power to stop that relationship, they’d zeroed in on its Achilles heel. Whether they’d understood or not how effective it would be, they’d figured out how to wipe their stink all over our relationship until it became unpalatable. Until Rick and I couldn’t touch or even look at each other without smelling the mood-killing presence of Mitchell & Forsythe.

At a stop sign, I leaned back against my seat and closed my eyes.

So it was over. This was how it ended.

And it was cold, cold comfort that I still had a job, because I had to go to that job today. Show my face, do my work, be ready to take orders from the people who’d found their way into my relationship and casually burned it to the ground. There was no way out of it. No way around it.

The only thing I could do right now was go home, get ready for work and do everything I could to keep myself out of the unemployment line.