Page 20 of Tempted By the Safety
“Figuratively, Milo.”
So I start from the beginning, and I tell her all of it except yesterday, because that particular chapter is staying locked in a vault I intend to bury at sea. I tell her about the parking lotand the guy who seemed like an enormous stalker and was also offering me the best job I’ve ever had.
“Wait.” Emily puts her drink down. “Let me get this right. Some guy watched you get fired, waited for you in the parking lot, and offered you a job on the spot?”
“That’s the short version, yeah.”
“And you took it.”
“I had fifty bucks to my name, Em. I wasn’t exactly negotiating from strength.”
She laughs, but it’s the easy laugh, the one that’s been part of every shift we ever worked together. “Okay, fine, so who is this guy? Some finance bro? Please tell me he’s not, like, forty and married.”
“He’s not forty and married.” I turn my glass a slow half circle on the table, working up to it. “He’s… Spencer Rhodes.”
Emily blinks. “Wait. As in—”
“Yeah.”
“TheSpencer Rhodes? Knights, strong safety, Spencer Rhodes?”
“Please keep your voice down.” I glance at the two tables nearest us, neither of which is paying us any attention at all, but I say it anyway, because saying his full name out loud in public feels like setting off an alarm.
Emily leans in across the table, voice dropping low, eyes wide. “You’re telling me you’ve been living in Spencer Rhodes’ house?”
“For two weeks, yeah.”
“As his personal assistant?”
“That’s the job title.”
She sits back against the booth, staring at me like I’ve informed her I’ve secretly been a foreign dignitary this whole time, and then she leans forward again, elbows back on the table, grin spreading. “And you have a crush on your very famous, very straight NFL star employer.”
“Yeah,” I say, before I can stop myself, before I remember that admitting it out loud, even to Emily, even in a bar where nobody’s listening, makes it a real thing instead of a thing I only think at three in the morning.
Emily bursts out laughing.
Not a polite laugh, either, not a little exhale through the nose. A full, unhinged, head-back laugh that has her gripping the edge of the table, and it goes on and on, a solid minute of her wheezing while I watch her lose it. Two guys at the bar turn to look at us, and the bartender glances over like he’s trying to figure out if he needs to intervene.
I wait her out, arms crossed, saying nothing, because there is nothing to say to someone in that condition.
Finally, she wipes under one eye with a knuckle, breath still hitching, and says, “Okay. Very funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“That. This. The whole thing you just did.” She waves a hand at me, still grinning. “Very good bit, honestly, ten out of ten delivery. I almost believed you for a second there.”
“I’m serious, Em.”
She looks at me the way she used to reread a ticket when an order came out wrong, checking for the tell. I let her see what’s sitting on my face right now, and whatever it is, it takes the grin off hers.
“Oh my God,” she says slowly. “You’re serious.”
“I told you I was serious.”
“You have a crush on Spencer Rhodes.”
“Yeah.”
