Page 30 of Shades of Grey & Gold

I set the phone down.

It buzzes thirty seconds later, and I think my heart actually skips a beat. Like a middle school boy with a crush.

Max: I know. Goodnight, Reed.

I look at the message for a moment longer than is necessary.

Cal: Night, Sims.

I press send and go to bed.

1.cornicello —known as the Italian horn, the cornicello is a traditional protective charm believed to shield its wearer from the evil eye (malocchio), ill fortune, and unwanted negative forces.

Chapter Twelve

Max

Fridaynight’s‘dinner’hascrawled into my head and won’t leave.

I’m aware of this because it’s Monday morning and I’ve been lying in bed for twenty minutes staring at the ceiling instead of getting up, which is not something I do. I’m a morning person. I have always been a morning person. I find morning people annoying too, but it’s a character flaw I’ve accepted.

Bart is stretched across the foot of the bed because he wants me to know that he was here first and my feet are an actual imposition.

I stare at the ceiling some more.

Cal’s hand on my back. The small circles. The way my shoulders came down at his touch like my body knew before my brain did that it was safe to relax. The restaurant, the pasta, the argument about Halbrook that he let me win—let me win because I was right, but he knew it and the look on his face when he realized it was maybe the best thing I’ve seen in years.

If you want me to call it a date, Sims, I will.

I make a sound into my pillow that Bart finds alarming enough to jump off the bed.

“I’m fine,” I reassure him.

He puts his head back down. He doesn’t believe me. I don’t believe me either.

I’m aware this is a completely reasonable and adult thought to have at seven in the morning while lying in bed making teenage shrieking sounds into a pillow. I want to call it a date. I want to call every lunch we’ve had for the past month a date retroactively, so they all count towards whatever this is.

I want to go back to the bar outside Wildhorse and kiss him instead of letting him decide not to kiss me. I want to walk into that office this morning and lean on his desk and sayhey, you said if I wanted to call it a date…

And then the grossest thing happens inside my brain.

Patrick’s face appears in my head, uninvited and unwelcome, wearing the expression he had in the elevator when he looked at Cal’s hand on my back.

I groan.

I don’t want to think about Patrick’s feelings. I don’t want to consider what it looks like from his perspective or how uncomfortable it might be to watch the woman he cheated on find something that looks like happiness six feet away from his glass office. I don’t want to be the kind of person who factors in the feelings of the man who spent five years treating me like a decorative object.

But I’m apparently that kind of person at seven on this Monday morning, which is deeply annoying. I make a gurgled, frustrated noise.

And I sit up.

“Why,” I ask myself very seriously, “should I give a single solitary fuck about Patrick Ellison’s feelings?”

I can’t come up with an answer. Bart can’t either, judging by his expression and wagging tail.

I throw back the covers.

And the doorbell rings.