I pulled myself together on the T and tried to act as normal as I could when I exited the elevator and walked toward my desk.
There he was, pastry bag and cup of coffee waiting for me. I walked right past it, into my office and shut the door. I hadn’t eaten this morning, but I didn’t feel like it. I hadn’t eaten last night either. This was one of those times when eating your feelings wasn’t going to work.
My phone rang and I checked the caller ID before I picked up. It was Lucah and I didn’t answer. Instead, I turned my computer on and started answering emails.
My phone rang again. Nope. Wasn’t answering him. He couldn’t harass me in the office, not without blowing his cover, so that was another good reason to be in the office.
Then he started blowing up my cell phone, so I put it on silent and kept working.
Ten minutes later, there was a knock on my door.
“Who is it?” I said. I didn’t want to ignore it if it was someone important.
“It’s me,” Lucah said. He couldn’t really beg me to open the door without arousing suspicion as to why he would be begging me to open my door.
“I’m busy,” I said and waited to hear him move away from the door. Then something slid under the door. I waited until I was sure he was back at his desk before I got up to retrieve the note. I couldn’t read it right now, so I shoved it in my purse. I’d read it on my lunch break. If I could handle it.
I hunkered down in my office the entire day, leaving only to retrieve coffee and pee. I avoided eye contact and small talk with everyone. No one really seemed to notice, except Mrs. Andrews.
“How are you, dear?” She ambushed me in the break room, so I had no escape. There was only one way out and she was blocking it. Once again, I wished for a sinkhole, or maybe a secret portal to open up and suck me into another dimension. A dimension where the man I loved hadn’t done what he did.
The absolutely insane thing was that I knew I was being horrible to him about it. I knew he had secrets. He’d told me. I’d said I accepted it. And then, when he’d been forced to tell me about it, I’d gotten mad at him. I was mad at the situation and I was taking it out on him. Besides, if Dad knew, then Mrs. Andrews had to know. So she might have been lying to me as well. Something I couldn’t comprehend.
“I’m fine. Just busy.” She patted my shoulder, then glanced to make sure we were alone and closed the door.
“Did you and Mr. Blaine have a falling out? I sensed some tension between you two.” Yeah, I bet. I was surprised more people hadn’t felt it.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I’d gone into it with Sloane, but I couldn’t break Lucah’s confidence further.
“Oh, Rory. Work it out. Don’t let that boy get away from you. He’s one of the good ones and they don’t come around very often. You’ve got to grab onto them when they do and make sure you keep ‘em. My husband was one of the good ones and once I knew that, I wasn’t letting him go and I never did.” Her husband had died a few years ago from a heart attack, and she hadn’t remarried. I’d never asked her, but I figured it was because he was “it” for her.
She patted my face and gave me a sympathetic look.
“Ah, sometimes youth is wasted on the young.” She laughed and then opened the door and went back to her desk. I grabbed my coffee and went back to mine, avoiding looking at Lucah, even though I could feel his gaze burning my skin. It was different than when he looked at me when we were naked. That made me feel beautiful. Now it just made me . . .
Sad? Angry? Frustrated? Negative. It was all negative.
But yet . . . I was still head over f**king heels in love with him. He might be a liar, but he was my liar. He was my Lucah. Despite not knowing his real name, I knew other things.
I knew what he looked like when he woke up first thing in the morning. I knew what he wanted to hear when we were having sex. I knew where all his freckles were. I knew the curve of his shoulder and that he liked Bugs Bunny cartoons and truffle pizza and s’mores. Were those more important than what I didn’t know?
I left the office at lunch and took the letter with me as I sat outside at a café with an iced tea and a ham and cheese croissant. I was finally hungry again.
I opened the letter and saw Lucah’s neat handwriting had covered pages, front and back. I started to read and I realized it was more of a list than a letter. A list of all the things I didn’t know about him.
When I was twelve, I had my first kiss with a girl named Cassidy. It was during Spin the Bottle at my first boy-girl party. She tasted like bubble gum and our noses bumped.
My first girlfriend was Annie. We started dating when I was fifteen and we stayed together for six months. She started dating my best friend a week after breaking up with me, and they dated all through high school and then got married. They have three children and still live in my hometown.
I lost my virginity to a girl at my first party. I was sixteen and I have tried to remember her name, but I can’t. She was from another school and we were both drunk and I don’t actually remember much except that we definitely had sex and it definitely lasted about thirty seconds.
I’ve never really loved a girl the way I love you. I thought I had, but I had no idea what it was before you. I’ve told exactly five women in my life that I loved them. You, my mother, my nieces and Annie.
I can’t stop thinking about you, even if I wanted to. I never believed in fate, and I didn’t believe in love at first sight either, but I have no other way to describe the feeling that went through me when you walked down that hallway and I saw you for the first time. Oh, yes, there was lust. I knew I wanted you, and I wanted to be inside you. I also knew that I shouldn’t pursue you. It is very, very against the rules. I’d been with other women when I went undercover before, but that was different. Those were strictly physical no-strings.
He went on to tell me so many other things, some I wanted to know and some that were hard to read. Like his parents, and how it felt to lose them. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what that had been like for him, but I kept reading, even as tears started to fall down my face and the page became blurry.
Lucah had poured his pain and his past into this letter, and the only way it wouldn’t have affected me was if I didn’t have a heart. Well. I’d had a heart but I’d given most of it to him. That was what love did to you. Made you give parts of yourself to someone and they could do whatever they wanted with them and there was nothing you could do about it.