The Ex Talk

I’m still gaping when Kent disappears down the hall.

“Did you—you realize what just happened there, right?” I manage to ask Dominic. Another entry for the Kent O’Grady misogyny playbook. I’m more positive than I’ve ever been that that’s what it is.

“Fucking prick,” he says under his breath.

I have to hold in a laugh. “Thank you,” I tell him. “For being on board with it.

“It’s going to be a good show.” I’m about to head back to our desks, but what he says next stops me in my tracks. “I think we, uh, accidentally swapped phone chargers over the weekend,” he says, eyes darting around the hallway as though making sure we’re alone. “Would you mind swinging by my place tonight so we can switch back?”

I must not have noticed. “Sure, or we can do it tomorrow at work.”

“I need it tonight.” He steps closer, a hand reaching out so he can brush a thumb across my hip. His voice drops another octave. “Or are you going to make me say that I want to see you?”

“I don’t hate the sound of that,” I say, biting back a grin. Even if this is a thinly veiled booty call, I decide I don’t mind. I have to be alone with him again—every cell in my body is crying out for it. “That is, if you’re saying it.”

He smirks. “I’ll see you tonight.”

24

Dominic’s apartment smells incredible. “Welcome,

” he says, holding open the door. He’s changed out of his work shirt into a soft flannel rolled to the elbows—holy forearms, Batman—and his jeans hang low on his hips.

I take off my jacket and slip out of my shoes, trying not to look like I’m examining his apartment. It’s a design aesthetic I’d call IKEA chic but tasteful: clean white furniture, a few succulents on the coffee table in his living room, that lantern floor lamp everyone has owned at some point in their lives.

I hold up my charger. “I brought this,” I say. “But I’m guessing I probably don’t need it?”

“Not very smooth, was I?”

“I’m here, so I’d call that a win.”

As I follow him into the kitchen, his fingertips graze the small of my back. It’s criminal, the things those small touches do to me.

Dominic’s cast-iron skillets hang from the ceiling. “I restored the skillets from this weekend yesterday evening,” he says. “And one of them is right in there.” He gestures toward the oven.

“Pizza?”

“The best pizza of your fucking life,” he corrects.

“This is a considerable step up from that Hot Pocket.”

He shrugs. “It’s not very fun cooking just for myself. And I figured I owed it to you after the pasta incident.”

This feels like a date. This cannot feel like a date.

“Right. So that and the phone charger—those are the only reasons I’m here?”

Pink creeps onto his cheeks. “Pizza’s almost ready. Can we eat first and then talk? I wanted a place where we could do it that wasn’t at work.”

“Sure,” I say, but the knot of dread in my stomach tightens. After dinner, he’ll break it to me gently that we can’t have a repeat of this weekend, and I’ll be so enamored with the pizza that I won’t mind. That has to be his strategy.

He takes the pizza out of the oven, and it’s bubbly and fragrant and perfect. Honestly, his strategy might work. He throws together a quick salad, bagged lettuce with those little carrot slivers, a dash of oil and vinegar. Then he grabs a bottle of wine from the top of his refrigerator, grimacing at the label.

“Tonight’s wine pairing is a vintage bottle of Two-Buck Chuck,” he says, fishing two wineglasses from a cupboard. “I hope you can handle that level of extravagance.”

We sit down at his white IKEA table that has only two chairs.

“What do you think?” he asks, waiting for my assessment before he digs in.