Page 19 of Grumpy Boss's Secret

Have you ever hooked up with a girl and not spoken to her afterwards? I recently hooked up with a guy, and he seemed sweet, but the next day he completely ignored me like I was a stranger. He wasn't drunk, so I know he remembered me. Have you ever done something like that? What makes guys do shit like that?

Then I returned to the top of my email and added: No worries! I'm busy myself.

I read it over a few times and then sent it.

"Well, time for another twenty-four hours of suspense," I said, placing my phone on my night table. I smirked. "Or an eternity of it. What will he think of me when I go from 'I love "my cat" and "she" doesn't know it and also please meet with me' to 'Wow, men are such jerks. I just had sex with someone, and I want to tell you about it?"

Still, he’d always been my question-answerer. Maybe he wouldn’t think anything of it.

"Oh, I'm a garbage fire," I mumbled, turning off my bedside lamp and nuzzling my face against the pillow.

My heart hurt. I lay there in the dark, listening to the sounds of the traffic outside. Somewhere in the living room, Potato meowed. My phone vibrated. I opened my eyes, seeing the screen light up, and cast a white glow across my lamp and the wall beside my bed. I picked up my phone gingerly.

An email from Kirk. I clicked on it, sitting up rapidly.

Yes, I have done something like that. Recently I had sex with a girl without planning to at all. She's beautiful, but we're not together in any way – never even went on a date. We just sort of found ourselves together unexpectedly and sleep together. The following day, I felt terrible about it. Since I don't plan on dating her, I feel like I used her even though I didn't mean to. The next day, I didn't talk to her much, and she was upset. Sometimes men don't know how to handle our emotions, so we just close off. As Anderson says in Seventh Midnight, "Women are like a light source to men. Too often, we see them as something too far-off, like stars. Something we see from a distance but don't really understand. We forget women's Derealization, more like candle flames–and slept sensitive and just as humanly vulnerable as we are."

I held my phone tightly. A flurry of thoughts and emotions raced through my brain. I loved that quote. I loved that quote. Seventh Midnight was one of my favorite Kirk Green novels. I'd always thought that it wasn't something he really meant – that he'd put it into the book because it sounded romantic. Now here he was, quoting it to me as genuine life advice.

Not to mention the fact that it sounded like he was still single. My heart rose at the realization, but sank again after a moment. Maybe he was falling in love with this girl he'd slept with. Perhaps that was why he didn't want to meet with me.

And what he'd described sounded just like my hookup with Ian. If Kirk had done something like that and liked the girl, then maybe Ian had wanted me too. Perhaps he still did.

But he was dating someone else. Right?

I lay there for a while, staring into the darkness and thinking. My heart didn't hurt anymore. Even if I couldn't have Kirk or Ian, Kirk still respected me. And maybe Ian did too.

"I am not a garbage fire," I avowed firmly. "I am a star. I am a candle flame. I shine, bringing men towards the splendor of my light."

I grinned at the words. It was a joke–but also it wasn't. I felt better. Men really were jerks sometimes, but a lot of the time, they didn't actually mean to be. That made me feel better. It made me feel like not every man I fell for would be unavailable. Someday, someone would get close enough to understand and love me, like a man approaching a candle flame in the darkness and observing how it moved.

I wasn't ready to reply to Kirk tonight. I'd respond sometime tomorrow. I felt restless, filled with fresh energy. I was still processing. Absent-mindedly, I opened Instagram and scrolled for a while.

I wondered about Ian. Maybe he wasn't really dating someone. Perhaps those were just photographs he had already had or found online, and he was just being poetic. It could be all art, not necessarily posts about his life. I knew that was a stretch, but my fingers clicked on his account anyway.

A new post: a photo of the city at night. A few buildings, their windows aglow, and the stars glittering above them. He'd edited the photo somehow, making the dim city stars look like glittering sparks of light. One of the stars was brighter than all the other ones. I read the caption. My heartbeat seemed to slow down and then pick up again.

“Women are like a light source to men. Too often, we see them as something too far-off, like stars. Something we see from a distance but need help to understand. We forget women are more like candle flames – sensitive and just as humanly vulnerable as we are."

"Oh, that's too weird," I whispered. I checked the time stamp. I returned to Kirk's email and fit when he sent it. Ian had posted this photograph seven minutes after Kirk had sent me the email.

“That’s so weird,” I whispered again. “It’s like a sign or something.”

A sign of what?

Chapter Nine

That night I dreamed of wandering through a library, looking for something, but I didn't know what it was. I was getting lost. Specks of dust were floating through the air, glittering in the light like tiny stars. I turned a corner and went around a bookcase to find Ian sitting in a dark corner. He was holding up a lipstick tube to the light. I somehow knew it was old – like an artifact he was contemplating.

I walked up to him, took the lipstick tube from his hand, and spread it across my lips. It burned wonderfully – like I was tasting fire without getting hurt. Then I sat down on his lap and kissed his lips. He responded, touched by the fire in my mouth, and we began to make love. Right in the middle of a tangle of naked limbs and heaving bosoms, I woke up with a start.

I rolled over and turned off the obnoxious sounds of my alarm. I groaned.

We had another staff meeting at work that day. I hadn’t seen Ian much since we had gotten back from Greece. I felt nervous. I felt like if he looked at my eyes, he’d be able to see through me like glass. See how much I’d been thinking about him. See the echoes of that dream I’d just had.

"Oh, it'll be fine," I mumbled, hitting the snooze button. I drifted back into sleep, trying to climb back into the dream about Ian. The warm feeling of tangled limbs and fiery lips. I had almost made it – I could feel his skin again – but when I looked at his face, it wasn't Ian anymore. It was Kirk, wearing a white mask over his face like the Phantom of the Opera.

My alarm went off again. “Shblork,” I mumbled. I rolled over and lay staring at the ceiling.

---