Page 83 of Bad Girl
I let it sit for a moment. Let her have the perhaps without pushing at it.
Then, with the distinct brand of casual I deployed for things that were not remotely casual—
“I could ask my parents to fly over.”
The choking was immediate and genuine.
“Dear god, no,” she gasped, one hand coming up.“No. Absolutely not. No.”
The laugh came from somewhere real—not the boardroom version, not the carefully measured response, just something that rose up without permission and filled the car entirely. I reached across and patted her hand.
She slapped it.
Then held it.
Her fingers settling around mine with the quiet certainty of something that had decided, in the space between one breath and the next, to stop pretending it didn’t want to.
Neither of us mentioned it.
I grinned all the way to her apartment and didn’t try to hide a single second of it.
Chapter 40
Nika
It was a Wednesday.
Midweek. Nothing distinguished it from any other Wednesday except the fluorescent lighting and the usual rhythm of a floor that had settled back into its routines. Andy was in a managerial meeting—the kind that ran long and achieved little. Francis was describing her date in elaborate detail, ostensibly for my benefit but really for the pleasure of telling it, pausing at strategic intervals in the hope that I’d offer something in return. Something about a certain CEO perhaps.
Carla was pretending to work.
Graham had the permanent thousand-yard stare of a man who had survived something he couldn’t discuss in polite company and was simply getting on with things.
A normal day.
Except for the thing that hadn’t been normal for the last week.
It had started quietly—the way most significant things did. A low persistent warmth in the pit of my stomach that I’d filed under stress, then under disrupted sleep, then under the general category of things I was choosing not to examine too closely. Bad Girl had refused to acknowledge it entirely, which told me everything I needed to know about what it actually was. She never ignored things that didn’t matter.
The nights had gotten worse.
I’d wake in the small hours from dreams I couldn’t hold on to—fragments that dissolved the moment I reached for them, leaving behind only heat and damp sheets and a restlessness that had no outlet at that hour. I’d lie there in the dark feeling like something was pulling at me from the inside, something that had been patient long enough and was running out of patience.
I wasn’t on my period.
I knew what this was.
I’d known for days. Bad Girl had known longer. Neither of us had said it out loud because saying it out loud made it a thing that was happening rather than a thing that might be happening, and there was a significant practical difference between those two positions.
Today the cramp arrived.
Not sharp—a deep rolling pressure, low in my stomach, the kind that gathered and held and made the ambient noise of the floor feel suddenly too loud, too close, the voices merging into a single undifferentiated hum that pressed against the inside of my skull.
The scent in the air was wrong.
All of it wrong—the coffee, the cleaning products, the accumulated humanity of eight teams doing their Wednesday things. None of it right. None of it what my body was demanding with increasing and non-negotiable clarity.
I knew who could make it right.
