“I know,” she finally mumbles. “You’re not ten anymore. Or even fifteen. You looked forward to the cakes I’d make you every year, even throughout high school.”
“Except for the banana nut donut cake with cherry icing.”
“Ugh. You’re still giving me hell for that?” She snorts into the phone. “We’re all allotted an experimental phase, thank you.”
“Couldn’t you have picked another day to experiment on? Like Valentine’s Day? Or Easter? Or National Underwear Day?”
“I love you, hon,” she says suddenly, “and I miss you. Enjoy your birthday with your friends, and knock the stinky socks off your bosses at that internship of yours! You hear me?”
I smile, warmed by her turnaround. “Love you too, Mom.”
After I hang up, the rain starts to pour. Flashes of lightning soon follow, bringing with them rolling growls of thunder that shake the very soles of my shoes—the same shoes I’ll be wearing to Ben’s right after work today, the same shoes I’ll wear onto a jet that takes me who-knows-where, the same shoes I hope to kick off when it’s just Ben and I, and we can finally have our way with one another in the privacy of a cozy room somewhere.
I’m totally messed up about him. I don’t even know what I want to do with my life anymore. All I want is Ben.
He’s consumed everything I know about myself.
And now I have Elijah believing I’m racing home to celebrate my birthday with the family, and I have my family believing I’m sticking around to celebrate my birthday with friends from the office. The truth takes a shady path right between the two lies, where I will slip away to Ben’s and enjoy whatever plans he has up his tight and sexy sleeve for this weekend.
Not that I know what his tight and sexy sleeve looks like today, because apparently he’s taken the whole day off. “Oh, he does this from time to time,” Rebekah explains an hour later when I’m back in the office and asking her about revisions I made to a report I was to turn in to him today. “Mr. Gage is a very busy man and sometimes spends a day or two bouncing from one end of the city to the other. He even took a whole month off once to visit several of his clients, hopping state lines and time zones. I was his go-to, of course, for any updates in the office.”
Rebekah has gotten really soft on me over the last few weeks. She is not the rigid, uptight, cold woman I met on that first day. Behind the veil of strictness, there’s a sweet person with a kid (or was it two?) who is desperate to not only do a good job herself, but also to keep the standards high for those who work around her. She’s a natural leader, that much I can tell.
Also, she’s slightly obsessed with Benjamin Gage. That much, I can also tell by just the way she watches him across the room. It isn’t any secret in the office that Ben only swings with the men, but she dotes on him and serves him and speaks of him and looks to him the way one does a cherished friend—or a lover.
Maybe she is in love with him. I wouldn’t blame her.
That thought scares me a bit, how quickly I relate to it. Are my feelings for Ben so deep already? Sometimes it feels like we just met at that nightclub an hour ago. Other times, it’s like I’ve known Benjamin for years.
But it’s too early to say I love him, right?
That would definitely put me right in my expected place as the naïve twenty-year-old with big red hearts in his eyes who still entertains silly, childish dreams of love-at-first-sight. I’m not going to be the lovesick little twink everyone likely assumes I am. I left the twink behind the moment I interviewed for this position at Gage Communications. The rest of my adult life is ahead of me, and it’s time for me to act like the adult I want to be.
The adult who packs a bag and goes to his boss’s high-rise for a secret weekend getaway that requires a passport.
Meanwhile, the rest of the twenty-going-on-twenty-one-year-olds in the world chug hard liquor and hold each other’s hair at four in the morning when their bestie is bent over the toilet.
I smile later when I work at the intern table and think about all the errands and super important tasks Rebekah insisted Ben might be tending to today, but I know what he’s really up to: he’s getting ready for whatever it is he has planned for us. Ben even told me I didn’t need to pack a bag, that he’d provide everything including my clothes. I blush as I think about what skimpy-ass sexy things he’s planning to put me in.