Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 60864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 304(@200wpm)___ 243(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 304(@200wpm)___ 243(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Not that I thought I was in love. Just that I liked having her around in my space. More than I had anyone else. By a long, wide margin. Whatever one would call that.
We sat back and watched the show, occasionally laughing or chatting until her eyes began to droop, and she put her nearly empty third glass down on the coffee table.
“If you will forgive me,” she said, “I think I need to get to bed.”
“Yeah, I should probably hit the sack too.” I turned off the TV. “You can leave the glass. I’ll take care of it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure,” I said. “Get on to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She smiled.
“Good night, Derek,” she said, standing.
“Good night, Jodi.” I refrained from saying anything else about the night. About the kitchen. About us.
Instead, I watched her walk down the hall, stumbling a little as the whiskey hit her and delighting in the little giggle that bubbled up as she righted herself and opened the door to the office that I had begun to think of simply as her room.
18
JODI
I’d broken my rules about getting involved with people I worked with. And I had broken them big-time. I hadn’t just gotten too cozy with a coworker at work or started getting used to having dinner together at the same restaurant every week. Those were the kinds of things I told myself I wasn’t allowed to do. It would get me too comfortable with a location and distract me so I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings. It would make me vulnerable. So, I avoided them.
That would have been a bit of a hiccup. But no. I’d gone for the big time. I slept with my boss. At work.
Apparently when I did things, I did them big.
I would have thought something like that would have thrown everything off, and the next morning would have been a cloud of awkwardness and discomfort. It might have even included attempting to sneak out of the house to get the vineyard with as little contact with Derek as possible.
It turned out not to be necessary. In fact, the next day started out perfectly normal. It was like nothing had changed when the alarm on my phone opened my eyes. Except, of course, that I’d gotten a really good night’s sleep for the first time in as long as I could remember.
In those first few moments after waking up, I let my mind drift back to what happened the night before, waiting for the bad feelings to come. They didn’t. Even as I got up and headed for the shower so I could start getting ready for the day, I only had a little bit of guilt about having sex with Derek.
It had been fun and a fantastic stress relief. When it was all done, there was some awkwardness to be sure. We both seemed to have that moment of realization of what just happened, that it wasn’t just fantasies or daydreams, but we actually had just gone at it with no self-control in the kitchen of his restaurant.
Humor managed to break that, and over the rest of the day, we managed to get comfortable with each other again. Spending time together at the house let us get to know each other more, and it felt like there had been a shift between us. By the time the day was over, we’d gotten past the initial weird phase and headed to bed separately without any awkwardness.
That welcome reaction continued when I got out of the shower and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee to get the day really underway. Derek was already sitting at the table with his mug of coffee. It seemed his taste for actual physical reading materials didn’t extend past books because he had the morning news pulled up on a tablet sitting on the table in front of him.
He glanced up at me and smiled when I walked in.
“Am I ever going to beat you into the kitchen in the morning?” I asked.
He took a gulp of his coffee and shook his head. “Nope.”
“I’ll just have to set my alarm earlier, then,” I teased.
“Wouldn’t help. I sleep right here in this chair. Somebody has to guard Gandalf and make the coffee.”
I took a mug from the cabinet and filled it with hot coffee from the carafe. It was another unexpected little detail about Derek I found myself really liking. Rather than having one of the trendy single-cup coffee makers and a sprawling assortment of individual pods gathered around, he had a traditional machine that offered up an entire pot of dark, steaming deliciousness. It was perfect for the moments in the morning when I just didn’t have the patience to fiddle with the process of the single-cup makers.
We sat at the table, drank our coffee, and munched our way through croissants before heading to our respective rooms to get ready to head back to work. It was like nothing ever happened, and I was perfectly fine keeping it that way.