A Deal with the Devil by Elizabeth O’Roark
31
Monday morning, I’m full of adrenaline and dread.
The trip home to LA yesterday was silent, and awful. He asked if I wanted to come to his place when we arrived, the question so forced it was painful to listen to. I told him I had to do laundry, and we haven’t spoken since.
When I arrive at Hayes’s house, I find him downstairs already, looking less pulled together than normal. He’s wearing scrubs instead of a suit, and his hair looks like he’s run his hands through it once too often. I want to ask him what he’s thinking, but I’m not brave enough, and he’s in a rush anyway.
He grabs his coffee as he rises. “How was your night?” he asks abruptly.
I swallow. “Good. Yours?”
“Fine.” His mouth closes, then opens, then closes again. “Can we talk later?”
My heart starts to hammer in my chest. Can we talk is never good. It’s like “no offense, but...” or “with all due respect...”: a warning you won’t like what you hear next. I give him the smallest nod imaginable in response, my stomach in knots, but I pull myself together quickly. I knew this could be Hayes’s reaction to our situation and for both our sakes, I have to accept his choice.
I’m not the same girl who was devastated when Matt cheated, nor am I the one who snuck out of Brad Perez’s house and ghosted him for a full month after. I can survive whatever Hayes has to say …but I’m glad I’ve got the rest of the day to psych myself up, because at present, the specter of it is making me a little sick.
I dump out my coffee and get on with my day. I’ve been at work for two hours when the doorbell rings, and I find Jonathan standing there with Gemma on one hip. In spite of my foul mood, I smile at the sight of them together. “You look like an old pro.”
“Old is the keyword, because I feel extremely old,” he says, putting Gemma down. She promptly runs in a wobbly toddler style for the stairs, and he lunges to catch up with her. “I’m aging about a decade per week. Keeping her alive is a full-time job.”
“Huh. Not water once in morning, prune weekly like you thought?”
“Ha ha,” he says without humor. “She has a death wish. She can’t go two seconds without pulling a chair on top of herself or trying to scale a bookcase.”
I scoop her up and bounce her on my hip while Jonathan sinks into the couch. “You don’t know how good it is just to sit,” he sighs. He closes his eyes. “I love her to death, but it’s exhausting caring about someone all the time.”
How exhausting is it?I wonder. Is it so exhausting that he wants to return to his job early? This was always his life, not mine, and I was lucky he let me be a part of it, but I really need time to set things right with Hayes.
“If you want to come back early,” I say quietly, unable to meet his eye, “I understand.”
He leans forward, pressing his elbows onto his knees. “It’s kind of the opposite. Now that I’m home with her, I can’t imagine working those hours anymore. In an ideal world, I’d come back part-time. I know you’re going home, but I wondered if you’d want to stay on part-time until you left.”
Would anything change between me and Hayes if I stayed on? Probably not. I’m still leaving at the end of August, and that’s not enough time to build something lasting. But already, I feel myself growing weak, longing for a shot at something I want, no matter how unlikely. My breath releases in a long, resigned sigh as I contemplate it.
“What’s going on, Tali?” he asks.
I meet Jonathan’s eye. He’s known me nearly as long as Matt has, and probably knows me far better. I’ll wind up telling him the truth eventually, if he doesn’t guess it outright. “I like him. I like him in the very way you warned me not to.”
Jonathan’s smile is soft. “I never warned you not to like him. I warned you not to bang him and sneak out like you did to Brad Perez.”
“Why would you care?” I ask. “You couldn’t have been worried that I would hurt Hayes?”
He hesitates. “Because I saw the potential in you both for more. And nothing could ruin that faster than another of your grisly one-night stands, or his. I wanted you to get to know each other first before one of you could hit the self-destruct button.”
“You almost make it sound like you did this intentionally,” I say. “Like that’s why you hired me.”
And in response, he is silent.
My gaze jerks from Gemma, toddling in front of me along the glass coffee table, to her father. “Oh my God,” I whisper, staring at him. I couldn’t understand why Jonathan had been so devious in hiring me, and now, at last, I do. “You hired me on the off chance that we’d fall in love? Did you even adopt Gemma, or is she just a prop baby you’re borrowing for this?”
He laughs. “I didn’t leave the country for two months solely to set you up with my boss. I’m not that much of a romantic. But, yeah, I thought there was a chance.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Why? I was a marginally employed bartender with a bad attitude about men, and Hayes is...well, he’s Hayes. The two of us together make no sense.”
He shrugs. “He was so smitten with you that night in the bar, and when I told him to back off because you’d had a hard year, he did. He actually cared about you, even then, more than he cared about himself.”
“So that really happened.” I whisper the words in disbelief. Sure, I heard Hayes say as much at the party…I suppose I didn’t want to let myself believe it was true. “But he doesn’t want a relationship.”
“From the sound of it, Hayes is already in a relationship.” Jonathan’s mouth tips into a smirk. “Laguna Beach, Tali? And before you claim you were just assisting him on vacation, let me tell you how many vacations I’ve taken with Hayes in the two years I’ve worked for him.”
I want, so badly, to believe him. But it will only lead to me being more crushed when I discover he was wrong. I need to protect myself. I’ve come a long way since Matt broke my heart, but with Hayes it would be so much worse.
“That doesn’t mean he wants a relationship. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t freak out if he thought this was one. And I can’t just wait around for him to be ready, because that might never happen.”
He nods. “So, I should look into hiring someone else?”
I can’t stand that either. I can’t stand to imagine some knock-out who looks like Ella here in my place every day. I bury my face in my hands. “I can stay on part-time until mid-August,” I say. “And after that, can you only interview men?”
“Oh, Tali,” he croons, as if I’m a child who’s skinned her knee. “Maybe by then it’ll all have worked itself out, and it won’t even matter who I hire.”
I allow the tiniest part of me to hope he’s right, to trust in some future point, weeks and weeks away, where Hayes magically fixes everything or I find some way to fix it myself.
And then that hope dies when one of the nurses at Hayes’s office texts me, saying he’s sewing up right now and wants me to meet him in an hour.It’s best to never end things on the property, in case they refuse to leave, he once said.
Apparently, it’s my turn. The only surprise is that I didn’t see it coming sooner.
* * *
He glances upas I walk into his office an hour later. I see fatigue and reluctance in the gesture, which pisses me off. I did everything right. I never asked anything of him, and yet, here I am, being treated like some desperate girl with a crush.
“Hey,” he says. “Can you shut the door?”
My jaw grinds, but I do as he’s asked. He comes to my side of the desk and takes one of the two seats there, turning it to face mine.
His tongue darts out to tap his lip, searching for words. I’m half inclined to tell him not to bother.
“I was performing what is possibly the most complex surgery I do,” he begins haltingly, staring at his hands, “and I spent the whole time thinking about this. The thing with us. It’s stressing me out.”
My eyes close. “I never expected anything from you,” I say between my teeth. My throat swells, and I swallow hard. I refuse to cry in front of him, because really, it’s entirely my own fault. I gave him so much grief about the way he treated women, the way they might expect things from him, but they were all fine. I’m the only idiot he’s had to give this speech to. “I thought I made that pretty clear yesterday when I went back to my own place.”
“Exactly!” he says, pushing his hands into his hair. “You’re acting like I’m some creep you can’t get away from fast enough.”
I blink. I was expecting complaints about the way I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve and how uncomfortable it is for him...but not this.
“You didn’t say a word on the way to the airport,” he continues. “You wouldn’t even let me touch your bag. I ask you to come back to my place, and you say you’ve got to do laundry. I have no idea what you actually want. Based on the way you’re acting, I assume you want nothing at all.”
“Does it matter what I want?” I whisper. “You don’t want anything.”
“What have I ever said to lead you to that conclusion?” he asks. “I’ve spent every free moment I’ve had with you for months, Tali. I’ve gone out of my way to find excuses to spend time with you any chance I get. I’ve taken four days off this calendar year, and I spent all of them with you.”
I place my hands in front of my face. “I’m the person you hired to get rid of girls like me,” I whisper. “I was just trying to make sure you didn’t have to ask me to go. I knew what this was going into it. I didn’t want to put unrealistic expectations on you.”
He pulls me onto his lap, and I go willingly—straddling him, finding his mouth. And I don’t know how I can miss something I’d barely had until two days ago, but I know it deep in my gut: I’ve missed this. I’ve missed him, as if he’s a critical organ I was failing in the absence of.
“I can’t believe you’d still lump yourself in with them after this weekend,” he says, leaning back to grasp my face in his hands. I don’t answer, but simply pull his mouth back to mine. His lips slide, then, from my mouth to my neck, with soft, adoring kisses that wind me up in ways he can’t even imagine. We’ve barely begun and already I’m craving more—the scrape of his unshaved jaw against my thighs, him inside me.
I want him so tight against me that not a whisper of space can exist between us, and he is throbbing under his scrubs, which suggests I’m not the only one. I reach for his waistband.
“You were stressed about your talk. I had no idea if it had anything to do with me at all.”
“I don’t get nervous before speeches,” he says, sliding my skirt up my thighs to my waist, his fingers slipping inside my panties. “You said it, and I let you think it when really, I’d been tied up in knots over you all day.” His thumb moves in circles over exactly the right spot. “Shit. I don’t have a condom.”
“I do,” I say on a gasp, reaching for my purse without leaving his lap. He raises a brow—wondering why the girl who sleeps with no one has a condom. “Don’t judge me. I like to be prepared.”
He tears the wrapper with his teeth and rolls it on. “For now, I’ll just be grateful.”
Pulling my underwear aside, he lifts me enough that he can free himself from the scrubs and his boxers. I reach between us and grasp him. He’s heavy in my hand, hard as nails. My thumb brushes over that vein pulsing down his length, and his eyes squeeze shut. “I’m not going to last,” he says. “Again.”
I’m not quite recovered from the weekend. The fit is so tight it hurts as I slide down him, but it’s the best possible kind of pain, the kind that has you thrusting your hips forward for more.
His eyelids lower as if drugged, but beneath them, his eyes are fever-bright. His mouth falls open. “I’ve thought about nothing but this for twenty-four hours,” he says between his teeth.
Obsession like this is a fleeting thing, but I’m not going to worry about how long his interest will last. I’m just going to relish every minute of it while it does.