The Secretary and Her Boss

Chapter 15

When you are used to seeing someone in one particular context, it's hard to imagine them anywhere else, or to wrap your head around being with them anywhere else. It's like the first time you see your teacher outside of school, and you realize that they actually exist outside the classroom. You technically knew that. But seeing them at the grocery store, buying a family-sized bag of candy, teaches you things about them that you didn't expect to ever know. 

Like that your teacher, who you know lives alone, will for sure be eating that entire bag of candy by herself. 

I had imagined Laurence Royal outside of work in ways that left me blushing at night, but to actually be outside of the workspace with him felt alien. A thrilling and rattling taboo. We'd been around each other in a total of two places. Work, and that one time at a speakeasy where we had discussed work. Our overlapping lives had consisted of nothing but work up until now. And that one time we didn't talk about where I broke into his house... also for work reasons. 

"Have a preference?" Laurence asked as he started up his beautiful car.

After hiding in his office, confessing to being dumped, and then watching him throw my ex boyfriend out of his office, I was finding it a challenge to wrap my head around my current situation as I settled into Laurence Royal's car, the leather warm against my body after it spent the morning sitting in the sun.

I shook my head. "Just not Dash's coffee," I said my voice still uneven.

The leather seat was soft, a comfort. The smell of Laurence Royal's cologne filled the car, sandalwood, cedar and musk, wrapping me in a quiet place, surrounded by comforts that seemed to tug at the fragile wall of 'put together' I had managed to scrounge up.

The sun baked the car, warm, like a blanket across my skin. Laurence handed me a box of tissues out of his glove compartment seeming to register something I hadn't gotten to yet. Before I could ask what he was doing, the gesture seemed to poke a hole in my resolve and I fell to tears, mortified, but too frayed to stop the water works from bursting out of me like a broken pipe.

"I'm... sorry," I blurted, hiding behind several tissues. 

The reality of everything hit me. The audience to my ex boyfriend's arrival. My inability to see him, instead hiding in Laurence's office, begging him to get rid of my ex boyfriend. Forgetting who I was growing to become, and instead reverting back to a shy, insecure wallflower. It all made me feel like wet tissue paper, fragile under the smallest change. 

Have I grown at all? Am I honestly better and more confident than that girl Liam broke up with months ago?

"Why would you apologize?" he asked, voice unusually soft. "You didn't break up with him at a fast food place and then show up to his work to harass him."

I gestured to all of me. "For... crying," I managed between breaths.

Laurence pulled the car to a stop, staring out the windshield, his gaze unreadable. "Caring is not something you should apologize for."

He turned to look at me, eyes boring into mine. "Nor for expressing grief and heartache." 

"I can't believe I dated him," I muttered, wiping angrily at my eyes, wishing I could hide under all the tissues. 

"That surprises me too," he admitted. "You strike me as someone who would strive for someone kind. And he falls quite short of that standard. I would know, I have terrible taste in dates."

A garbled laugh sob fell out of me. "Your reputation is quite famous around the office."

He blinked, looking momentarily flustered.