I’m surprised when he’s the one who takes the conversation to safer terrain. As I plate up sliced apples and start on the strawberries, he builds sandwiches in the kitchen. “Why’d you choose PR?” I give him the look, you know, the wide-eyed ‘you’ve been asking about me, huh?’ and he rolls his eyes. “Beau told Miller you used to work for the Brutes in PR, and Miller wanted autographs.”
I smirk. “Oh yeah? From who? I could probably still get them.”
His voice drops an octave, I swear. “You're still good friends with those men, huh?”
As much as I want to be playful and tease him, maybe even torture him a little in the rare event that Atticus Winters is actually jealous, I can’t. I just can't smile and laugh about those assholes. Not after what they did to me.
“No. No fucking way. Never, ever again.” My eyes grow warm as my veins fill with rage that never seems to go away. Not with any permanency. A moment later, he’s knocking my hand out of the way and setting a plate down in front of me.
“Talk with your mouthful. I don’t care. But eat. And tell me why those fuckers are on your shit list.”
You know, outside of Beck, I don’t think anyone has asked me this. I always assumed that everyone who worked with me knew my character–that I’d work hard for the team until the end. But when everything went down… they treated me like an outsider. A complete stranger. And not a single soul made an attempt to pull me aside and find out what had happened. Not one.
Atticus is asking, and for the first time ever, I really want to tell someone. I really do.
But I choose my words carefully because as fun as this weekend has been, I’m not getting shit twisted; he’s Beck and Beau’s friend, and I’m Beck and Beau’s friend. That’s our link, and that’s likely all. Wine and masculine scents aside, we’re not long-lost soulmates, and there isn’t some unspoken fate tying us together. We’re in a cabin, and our friends didn’t show.
That doesn’t give me a free pass to dump the deepest, darkest secret of my life on this man. Not at all.
I take a bite of the sandwich and talk around it like he ordered. “First, I feel weird talking with my mouth full,” I say, smiling around the best-tasting bite of sandwich I’ve ever eaten. “Second, I live above a deli, and I have to say, this is maybe the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten.”
Atticus swallows a bite and washes it down with a gulp of water. The way his Adam’s apple bobs with his drink makes me pull my legs together. The way he makes me horny and desperate while also giving me this sense of security, like it’s safe to be vulnerable, all the while being so truthful with me that I get my feelings hurt? It’s so wild. It’s raw and real. And that’s just him. He’s just so… brazen.
“The baseball team. Get back to that.” He dips his sandwich into mustard, and I arch a brow.
“Why don’t you just put it on the bread like a sane human?” I ask, reaching across to dip my sandwich in his mustard, too.
He dips his again, too, and talks with his mouthful. “If I don’t finish it, it gets soggy and nasty.”
I swallow my bite, trying to imagine a situation where this house of a human leaves food on his plate. “You sometimes don’t finish?” I ask, surprised.
His face is expressionless and his tone deadpan when he says, “baby, I always finish. Just not my sandwiches. If I get busy at the shop or somethin’ and I gotta save it, it’s better without the condiments.”
Baby, I always finish.
My belly flutters but not nearly as much as my pussy does. I feel the heat climb my neck and settle into my cheeks, but if he notices, I don’t care. He says be real. Well, I really want him, and whether it’s fleeting or a bad idea, I can’t hide it. So I let my face glow as I say, “you finish while you’re watching, or are those two separate things?”
I don’t miss the way his jaw pauses for a second as he processes my words, swallowing his bite a second later. “Sometimes they’re one and the same. Depends.”
“On what?” I ask, realizing there’s maybe a reason he’s not meeting my eyes. Maybe he’s as afraid as I am that if we look at each other this second, these sandwiches will be on the floor, and I’ll be on my back on this table, legs spread.
“Who I’m with. What she wants.”
We eat a few more bites before I add, “I didn’t leave on amicable or favorable terms to answer your question.”
“Sounds like you got a story to tell,” he says, and the thought crosses my mind again to tell him everything that happened. It could be cathartic; Atticus doesn’t know my ex or any of the staff at the Brutes, so maybe spilling my guts to an impartial third party would be good.
Then I think of what happened. All it takes is imagining a few key, life-changing moments in a split second and I’m already clamming up again. Purging to Atticus could feel good right now, but then I’d be carrying that story around all day. The rest of the week, even. And it would do me more harm than good, I decide.
“A story for another day, maybe,” I say, stuffing another bite of toasted salami and provolone into my mouth.
“Can I hold you to it?” he asks, grabbing a pickle from his plate and downing it in a single bite.
“Do you really wanna know why I lost my job? I mean, usually, people don’t want to know about someone’s worst time of their life.”
He arches a brow, and it’s a look I’m coming to be familiar with. “Worst time, huh?” And I can sense the words “it’s just a job” right there on his tongue, but if I’m right and that’s what he’s thinking, he doesn’t say it. And I’m so glad he doesn’t say it. Because it wasn’t just a job to me, it was so much more. My forever, or so I thought.
I nod. “Yeah, but it goes a little further than the job itself. But, like I said, a story for another time.”