Page 44 of The Interns

She smiled back. “Right.”

“So tell me something…” She rested her elbows on the table and leaned in closer to lessen the distance between them. “Did you ever end up going out for Thai with Lauren?”

“How long have you been waitin’ to ask that?”

“Oh God, like all day, every day. You have no idea how many hours of sleep I’ve lost over it.”

She was exaggerating, of course, but the truth is it had crossed her mind more than a few times while she was away living her life and he was down here living his. She wondered about him quite a lot, actually, and as if her impromptu sleepover invitation wasn’t evidence enough, her filter was pretty much shot at this point.

“You could have called and asked, then,” he teased, prolonging the reveal.

“I suppose I could have, but I didn’t, and I’m here now, so? Did you?”

“Yes,” he answered simply.

And a tiny little dagger pierced her heart. For some reason she was almost certain that he would have kept putting her off. Not that there was anything wrong with them having lunch, but she felt a hint of betrayal upon hearing that she had thought wrong.

She raised her eyebrows with casual interest. “Really?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t keep saying no.”

“So it was just a one-time deal?”

She caught him about to take a sip of his beer, and he grinned over the rim of the glass. “That’s personal, Hendricks.”

“We’re friends now, Reed,” she defended. “We’re allowed to be.”

“So I can grill you on how many dates you went on last semester and you wouldn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable?”

He seemed to enjoy giving her a hard time over this, meanwhile, she felt that tiny little dagger twist in her heart. “Date? Who said anything about a date?”

He held his hands up to assuage her. “It was a poor choice of words. We just went out for lunch a couple of times.”

She knew this was a completely irrational reaction given that she’d gone out on a few dates that went nowhere over the fall semester, but there was something about hearing about what went on in her absence that made her feel territorial. At King and Associates, Stanton and Hendricks were the team, not Reed and Lauren.

“Lauren gave her notice this week, by the way,” he mentioned as he idly picked at the damp paper coaster under his drink. “She finally got her dream job out in Los Angeles. She’s going to be working for Paramount.”

Maya’s eyes went wide, and she hurriedly swallowed the sip of beer she’d just taken. “By the way?” The table behind them gave her a dirty look in response to her too loud outburst, so she leaned in and lowered her voice. “Are you serious just bringing that up now?”

“I was gonna tell you, we got sidetracked.”

“That’s a huge deal, Reed,” she stressed as she set her drink down. “That means Al has a position for a junior associate opening up.”

“I know,” he answered, again, so nonchalant about the entire thing.

“Well, are you going to take it?”

“Me?” He laughed and shook his head. “No, you know I’m not cut out for this kind of work.”

“What are you talking about?” She reached across the table and squeezed his hand in lieu of slapping some sense into him. “Yes, you are. You’re doing it, and you’re really good at it. And Al already thinks the world of you. You’d be crazy not to take it when he offers it to you, and he will offer it to you.”

He smiled softly at her then looked down at their hands which she took as a cue to ease up on her death grip, but when she began to move her hand away, he curled his fingers around hers and gently pulled them back.

“He’s known from the start that my plan is to stay in Clayville and work in the district attorney’s office,” he reminded her.

“But you stayed here. There’s a reason you did.”

He opened his mouth, then hesitated and looked down at their hands again, his thumb gently tracing circles on top of her hand. “I stayed for us. To see our case through.”

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