“Carla!” Michelle pretended to be taken aback.
Carla wiggled her eyebrows. “Is it fantastic? Is that why you’ve been glowing lately?”
She brought her hand to her cheek, as if she could discover this so-called glow everyone kept noticing. “Am I glowing?”
Carla laughed. “No. But you seem happy. Truly happy, and I hope you are. And I also hope you’re having great sex. Because everyone should. Besides, isn’t great sex something to strive for in an intimate relationship?”
“I suppose it is,” she said, and she and Jack certainly had great sex in spades. They also had an intimate relationship. Which was a weirder thought because where she came from intimate relationships were more than just great sex. And that’s what she and Jack had to be about. The sex; only the sex. Nothing more.
Besides, these problems would all end in a few more days. The clock was ticking, unspooling minutes and seconds until their thirty days expired in a little more than one week. She fast-forwarded over the next ten days. She’d be spending half of them abroad. Without him. Which would suck royally because their plan was working, at least for her. Her heart was healing. Clay was in the rearview mirror. She felt like herself again. Like she could breathe and live and feel without the weight of all that urequited-ness yanking her down.
She didn’t want to miss a single second of her time with Jack. And she wanted to let him know how much she would miss him while she was away. When she walked back into her office fifteen minutes before her last appointment of the day, she returned a few quick calls to colleagues, then dialed Jack.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Too Far Gone
“I don’t want to fuck this one up.”
Jack tossed a Nerf basketball up in the air, catching it easily on the way down. He lay on his purple couch, feet crossed on the armrest, an afternoon coffee on the table. Casey lounged on the chair with her cinnamon dolce latte and an iPad, as they reviewed their plans for the upcoming charity gala. He also needed to talk to her about his meeting later this week in Los Angeles with the CEO of one of their online retail partners.
She shot him an inquisitive look, tilting her head to the side. “The charity gala? ‘Cause you’re good at fucking up a lot of things, but I don’t even know how you could mess that up,” she said, then the corner of her lips twitched playfully.
He threw the ball at her, but she caught it quickly. “Ha. Now I have your weapon.”
“To answer your question, no, not the gala. But things with Michelle.”
“Ah,” Casey said, and set down the iPad. “So you like her a lot?”
He took a deep breath, nodded several times and sat up. This was not a conversation to be had lying down. “I do. I really do. She’s . . ..” He started, but let his voice trail off. He shared more with his sister than anyone, but could he really say all the things that were forming on the tip of his tongue? Amazing, smart, beautiful, direct, open, lovely, funny, and absolutely perfect for him. “She’s great,” he said, and it seemed wholly inadequate, but when Casey flashed her winning smile he knew she understood all that was unspoken.
Casey drummed her hands on the coffee table in excitement. “You should bring her to the gala next month,” she suggested.
Jack narrowed his eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“What? How is it not like that?”
While he might run a sex-centric company with his sister, he didn’t want to dive into the finer details of his sex arrangement with Michelle. So he deflected. “That event will be crawling with photogs. She’s a prominent psychologist. I sell dildos. I should do my best to keep her out of the limelight.”
Casey laughed, then tossed him the ball. “Well, when you put it like that, you are kind of Captain of the Dildos.”
He caught it easily in one hand. “And you’re Queen of the Dongs.”
“I wear that title with pride,” she said. “So when do I get to meet the Princess of the Weiner Dealer?”
Jack cracked up, a deep, rumbling belly laugh. After his shoulders stopped shaking, he threw a question back at his sister. “Why are you so focused on my love life?”
She shot him a look, like he was crazy for asking. “Because I don’t want you to wind up like Mom and Dad,” she said, as if the answer were obvious, and when she phrased it that way, it was. “The last four years when you were already in college and I was still home were the worst. Dinners were painful. I’m just glad you were in school nearby.”
Their parents had met in college, married soon after, and then proceeded to drift apart for the next twenty-one years they were together. He swore they kept a calendar and marked with an X each day until they neared Casey’s high school graduation. Bitter, snippy, unhappy people, they simply didn’t want to be together anymore, but they clearly felt it was their duty to do so until they got Casey out the door. Jack had tried to come home on weekends as often as he could, to rescue Casey, take her to the movies, attend her swim meets, help her with homework and then college apps. As soon as graduation came, their dad walked out the door happily swinging his suitcase, and their mom threw a party.
Never had two people been so excited to sign dissolution of marriage papers.
“I’m glad I was nearby too. And I’d rather not end up like them either, but I think we’re safe in that regard, seeing as I have no plans to get married, or get serious, or anything like that.”
She rolled her eyes, huffing at him. “You’re already too far gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“You just said you didn’t want to fuck this up. She’s not just someone you’re dating. She’s someone you care deeply about.”
He didn’t want his sister’s observation to register, even though somewhere inside, it resonated, hitting a part of him he’d thought was broken irreparably. Michelle awakened feelings in him he’d thought were missing from his very DNA. Her vulnerability, her strength, her humor, and most of all, her openness with him on everything floored him, and had worked its way into his heart, that stupid organ that barely worked. He didn’t know how to handle all he felt for her—but his desire for her went much deeper than the physical.
“And that’s another reason why you should do the story with my friend,” Casey added. He arched an eyebrow in question. “The one at the New York Press. I mentioned it before. It would be good for you.”