Page 72 of A Break in Communications

She sighed, hard, and she studied me for a minute—long enough that I started feeling itchy—before she smiled oddly. “I hear you found out about Granny Charlotte in the hospital and dropped everything in the middle of the workday to go take care of Lucy, make sure she was okay.”

“Ugh… where’d you hear that?” I looked away, feeling my face prickle.

“Put it together from various things I’d heard. You do know you’re in love with her, right?”

“Yeah… yes, of course I do,” I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. She looked at me incredulously.

“Of course you do?As if that’s normal, when you’ve been the most clueless idiot on God’s green earth about her for years?”

“Okay—shut up.” I hunched over my drink. “Yeah. So? Like I said… one of us is going to be supervising the other.”

She studied me a second before she said, uncharacteristically seriously, “That’s definitely a problem. Butit’s just the temporary situation of things, isn’t it? You and I both know that the kinds of feelings you have aren’t going to just go away because they’re not in line with company policy.”

I stared down into my drink for the longest time before I said, in a far-off, quiet voice, “Yeah… I know.”

“So?”

“So… I don’t know,” I mumbled. “I’m still… figuring this out. There’s a lot going on right now.”

“Can’t use that as your excuse forever.”

“I know. But I’m using it right now.”

She laughed. “You and Lucy have something amazing. I’m serious. Don’t ignore it. She loves you like I didn’t know it was possible to love someone. I’m starting to think you actually love her just as much. Make it work out.”

“Easy to say from the sidelines. You make your thing work first.”

She looked away. “Ugh—everything with Kelcey is behind me.”

“It’s not behind Kelcey, though. And you care about that, don’t you? Despite your best efforts.”

“Fuck off,” she laughed, good-natured, sipping her hot chocolate. “I’m flaky. You and I both know that.”

“Uh-huh.” If that was what she needed to tell herself right now… I’d get her to at least apologize to Kelcey and smooth out some of the hurt. My sister would probably never find the maturity to ride off into the sunset with a woman at this point—she’d be lucky to have the maturity to stick with anybody—but I’d take what I could get. “Well, thanks for the hot chocolate, Veronica.”

“I’ll be out of your hair soon enough. Just wanted to say hi and steal your hot chocolate. I’m sure you want some privacy to sext your girlfriend.”

I wondered if Lucy would be down. But if that was on the table, maybe I could have just driven off to her place and made love to her well into the night, wake up slow and do it all over again together. “I absolutely do,” I said, mostly just because I was tempted by the offer of Veronica leaving.

Or maybe it was because I didn’t see the point of denying that I was in love with Lucy and every part of my life revolved around her.

But wanting Veronica to get out of my apartment already was still probably part of it, at least.

Chapter 20

Anna

Lucy and I didn’t acknowledge that evening the next day we were in the office together—at least, if you didn’t count the sly smiles she sent my way from across the room, even though my heart was counting every one of them.

Still, with the press release tomorrow, we put our heads down and focused—even with everything done ahead of schedule, there was so much nervous energy in the air that none of us could focus on anything but tomorrow, especially since it was Friday before the Christmas weekend. Everything was done until the new year, and I knew the promotion would be decided then too, and I should have been doing everything in my power to keep Lucy out of that office and keep my name on it.

All of a sudden, though, I didn’t care. The problem was that the office door was going to be between us, no matter whose name was on it.

But when the end of the day rolled around and most of the office filtered out, I was thinking of Lucy. Wondering if we could call this our last day to act like there were no problems with us. And when the door cracked open, I got my hopes up, and they sank again when it swung open to Kelcey, striding in with her laptop held close to her chest.

“Hi, Boss Anna.”

“Please do not call me that. What do you need, Kelcey?”

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