“Trevor, stop it.”
“I don’t want to just be your fucking intern!” I shout, my hand shaking. “I’m your boyfriend, Benjamin. I let you inside me. I gave you my fucking virginity and you want to minimize it.”
“Come on. You’re blowing this out of proportion.”
“And you’re reducing its proportion.” My words are quiet and cold now. “Minimize. Spin. Rewrite. How are you going to rewrite the weekend, Ben?” I ask. “Did you go to Mexico alone?”
“No. Babe, please …”
“I think you did,” I go on. “You went to Mexico alone. Maybe you picked up a cute boy in the bar—a Mexican nightclub—picked him up after staring lustily at him through the smoke and the mariachi music.”
“Trevor …”
“You wined and dined him, then took him out to the beach and popped your pecker in, just in time for the snap of an unseen camera. And where was I?” I ask coolly. “I was at home with my parents. I ate my mom’s birthday cake, calmly turned twenty-one, and I’m still a virgin.”
Ben has gone silent on the line except for his slow, measured breathing.
“I’m still a virgin,” I repeat, detached, staring off at nothing.
Then I hang up, slip into my room, and drop face-first onto my bed. I don’t want to see or hear or feel anything until the morning sun pours over my head like a bucket of warm water and this horrid day comes to an end.
42
Benjamin was once robbed at gunpoint, shat on by a pigeon, and broke his arm in the same day.
This day is worse.
The first thing I see when I enter my office is the smug face of the intern Brady, who rises from his seat and gives me a curt nod and a plastic smile. “Good morning, Mr. Gage.”
I give him a tight nod. “Morning. When Hawk arrives, make sure to buzz my office immediately. He arrives at four.”
“Will do. You can count on me.” He gives me another bright, million-dollar smile.
I pass through the office full of quick-moving bodies, giving the faces that look up an obligatory nod, a polite hello, and a tiny smile of greeting.
When I pass the intern table, I am surprised to find Trevor there. I don’t know why I expected him not to be—as if he’d quit overnight after the unfortunate tiff we had on the phone.
As if sensing my presence, Trevor glances up from his work. His eyes soften when he sees me. I don’t see anger in them, but I’m not sure I see anything inviting either. He makes no move to speak nor greet me. He just stares, distant and unemotional.
Despite that, I give him a nod of acknowledgement, then continue on my way to the office, ignoring the way my heart feels: crushed up like a beer can in my chest. My stomach feels as raw as a throat that’s screamed for hours on end.
I spend too much time in my office staring at the computer screen and reading the same sentences ten times. I can’t focus on anything. Nothing makes sense anymore. I don’t even know what I’m going to say to Hawk when he shows up. His image is a total disaster. The world only knows him as a self-indulgent, rebellious teenage pop star who keeps offending everyone with his social media presence and the totally awful, tasteless answers he gives during his TV and radio interviews. How the hell am I supposed to pour honey all over that and serve it to the internet?
But none of it matters. How can I focus on any of that when the real problem is sitting at the intern table outside my door? How can I bother to care about anything when the man I love just tried to rewrite history in the space of a phone call last night?
It pains me so much that, even in anger, he’d wash away all of that joy we experienced together. Doesn’t he realize that the first thing I thought of when I saw that article was how this might affect him and whether he was okay? Trevor was the first and last thing I worried about. I’m still worried about him.
I sigh, exasperated, then buzz for Rebekah. When she pops her head in, I tell her to get me an unoccupied intern from the intern table, someone to organize a filing cabinet. She disappears, and I wait anxiously, desperate to have an incidental excuse to chat with Trevor and sort my mind on the matter. We need to talk. But the next time there’s a knock at the door, it’s Jimmy’s bright red hair I see, not Trevor. I suppress an inward sigh, thank him for coming in, then set him to work on organizing the files, which totally don’t fucking need to be organized.
Twice, I give myself an excuse to leave the confines of my office and cut through the main floor. Both times, I discover that Trevor is either on the opposite side of the room or he’s busy with other interns at the computers. He’s never in a place where I can get to him.