Page 17 of Make Her Mine

As she slid down off of Esme’s desk in search of her own black thong and jeans, Nora winced. As hot as their escapades were, the fact that they were taking place in a broom closet was, quite literally, becoming painful. It simply wasn’t comfortable fucking in an IKEA desk chair or on top of a wooden desktop. To say nothing of getting dressed again afterwards! Esme had it relatively easy with her loose tops, flowing skirts, and slip-on sandals or Mary Janes. Nora was as dressed down as she ever got in her button-fly Levis, loose t-shirts, and sneakers. It was better than if she’d been showing up in her designer suits, but still not easy to get into when you were one of two women getting dressed in what was basically a furnished Target dressing room.

Nora wriggled her feet into her blue Tory Burch sneakers and grimaced as her left heel crumpled the back lip of the shoe. $300, and shoes never recovered from the heel being stepped on like that. Damn it. “We’ve got to find a better place to meet,” she announced, taking better care with getting the second shoe on.

Esme’s head popped through the neck of her top, and she looked at Nora wide-eyed. “What?”

“We can’t go on like this. Your office is charming, but very, very tiny.” Nora gestured around. “I’m taking ibuprofen every day for the aches and pains. I just wrecked my shoe. And I noticed you haven’t replaced the glass for that photo of Janelle Monáe you cracked with your head last week.”

Blushing, Esme stuffed her feet into her black pleather slides. “I’ve been busy.”

Nora chuckled. “Okay. But how have you explained it to anyone who asked?”

“Not many people come back here besides the staff,” Esme replied, her cheeks still pink. “Only Sasha noticed. I said it had fallen down, and she seemed to buy it.” She paused while tying her hair back into a low ponytail. “Wait. You know Janelle Monáe?”

“I didn’t know she was into women, but now that I think about it, that’s somehow not surprising,” Nora mused, grabbing her Lululemon jacket up from the back corner of Esme’s desk. “No, I met her at a Meta party a couple of years ago. She played here?”

“Mm, yes, about ten years ago? She was still kind of breaking into the wider public consciousness, did a set here, everyone loved it. She’s lovely and her music is so good.” Esme handed Nora her Hermès Kelly bag. “I’ll get the glass replaced this weekend.”

“I can pay for it,” Nora offered.

“No. You pay for all our dinners already and won’t take money from me.” Esme shook her head. “Glass isn’t all that expensive. It’s fine.”

Setting her bag down, Nora reached for the afflicted photo and pulled it off the wall. She carefully ran a finger over the unbroken parts of the glass. “You know, it might be less dangerous if we just met elsewhere.” She looked at Esme, wondering how she’d react to her next words. “You could come to my house in Pacific Palisades.” Somehow, she was more nervous suggesting this than she ever had been closing a multi-billion-dollar deal. “My bed is very comfortable. I don’t even know how high the thread count on my sheets goes.”

But Esme only stared at her, mouth slightly open. “W…what?” she eventually asked.

“Come… to my house?” Her nerves began to jangle a bit more. “I just think it will be more comfortable. We can relax. Spread out.”

Esme blinked, then let out a short laugh. “Ah, no. Thank you, but no. What we have here, between us,” she gestured back and forth. “This is fun, but this is not on a me-sleeping-over-at-your-place level.”

“I mean, you don’t have to sleep over if you don’t want to, I just thought it might be nicer to have space, cushioning.” She felt like she was being straightforward here. This wasn’t complicated; she just wanted to move all their great sex over to somewhere a little cozier, that was all.

“No. No.” Esme shook her head. “Going to your house changes things, and I can’t believe you don’t see that it does.”

Nora had expected some resistance, they’d only been hooking up for two weeks, but thought there might be a playful air to any objections Esme raised. Instead, Esme actually seemed almost horrified by the thought. “Okay, would you prefer we go to yours?”

“No! No, for God’s sake. I don’t want to change things from whatever they are now.” This time when Esme shook her head, her hair came loose from its ponytail, she was so vehement. “They’re complicated enough without getting comfortable. We shouldn’t get comfortable. We really shouldn’t even be doing this at all.”

“We are, though,” Nora pointed out. “And I was pretty sure we were both enjoying it. What’s wrong with enjoying it more?”

“I can’t…” Esme waved her hands around. “No. First, it’s fucking in your bed. Then you suggest we have dinner out somewhere for some reason, maybe just because you know somewhere you think I’d like, or you think we shouldn’t spend so much time sleeping together. The goalposts would keep moving.” Reaching over, she wrenched the office door open. “I go to your house, or you come to mine, the game changes. If you’re not happy with the way things are now, then maybe we should cool off.”

This was unbelievable. “I was suggesting comfort. Literal physical comfort. Not a relationship.”

“I’m not taking any chances. I have no need to allow further trouble into my life. And you’ve been trouble from day one. I need a break.” Esme swallowed hard. “You, me, this thing here, this is enough of a problem. Can you go now?” She pointed out the door.

Not knowing what else to do, Nora rolled her eyes and left. She still didn’t know what she’d done wrong, but it looked like she was about to have a whole lot of time on her hands to think about it

10

“Oh, damn it.” Esme lifted her knitting needles and squinted at the blob of fabric that dangled off of them. “I think I dropped a stitch.”

A peal of laughter rolled out from her laptop speakers. “That’s the fifth one today, Mom,” Holly chortled, with the slight Brisbane twang she’d picked up from her years in Australia and her sun-bleached blonde curls bouncing. She held up her own project, a crocheted bralette top in rainbow pastels that Esme was annoyed to see was already over halfway done after only two hours. “You sure you don’t want me to teach you how to crochet instead?”

“That’s never worked, any time you’ve tried, remember?” Esme peered more closely at the thing she was knitting, which was allegedly a “dishcloth” but which she was privately convinced was a demon sent straight from hell to torment her. “I should have taken up those diamond puzzle things.”

Holly threw her head back and barked out a belly laugh. “Sure, then you get to wrap pantyhose around a vacuum cleaner tube so you can suck up the stones after you drop a container of them all over the floor.” She winked and wrinkled her freckle-dappled nose. “Just stick to trying to knit. I know you’ll get it.”

“I wish I had your faith in me.” Esme ripped back the cotton triangle for the fifth time and wound the ball of yarn back up. Then, before she even knew what she was doing, she’d flung the yarn across her living room, knocked over a plastic IKEA fern, and burst into tears. She could feel her daughter staring in shock as she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

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