Under My Boss's Desk - Under Him

Her head is already shaking before I am done talking.

“Look, he explained it all to me already,” she tells me. “I know you wanted your privacy so I didn’t ask nosy questions but he told me the whole story so that I would get you to talk to him. He knows you had nothing to do with it. Some guy named Tim hacked your computer to get into it for his own benefit and also to make it look like you were selling company secrets. Liam just wants to talk to you.”

Did she just call him Liam like they are best friends from high school?

Wait, Tim set me up?

“Have you been talking to him?”

The traitor has the nerve to smile.

“I have. At first, I wanted to know what was going on, but when he explained that it was just a misunderstanding, we started getting along.” When I keep looking at her like she has sprouted a second head she adds, “He is a nice guy and you are a snoop.”

WHAT?!!!

“Liam said I was a snoop?”

“No, but you picked up his phone without his permission. How are you not a snoop?”

The phone starts ringing again and we both stand there looking at it. Terry’s eyes are asking me if I am going to pick the phone up, but I don’t know if I can find the strength to talk to him now that I am not going to jail. I feel like an idiot. A relieved idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

Voicemail picks it up almost immediately.

“You feel hurt and I get that. But considering I fucked you on every surface in my house without any kind of protection, do you really think it is wise to just toss our relationship away as if it never existed?”

Oh no.

Terry is looking at me like I am a very interesting scientific experiment now and my brain is zeroing on the fact that he is right. We didn’t have any talk about pills or diseases when we started sleeping together.

It just kind of happened and now I might be pregnant by my boss. My cheeks flame red before Terry’s laughter pierces the air.

“Damn, Anna. You have been busy, haven’t you?”

Luckily, Terry and Robb have been trying to conceive so she lends me one of her kits so that I can check. Six o’clock finds me calling Liam on Skype and checking my emails on Terry’s phone as I wait for him to answer.

There are more than fifty emails from Liam alone, along with a few others from Ava and from my mother. He answers just as I am about to give up and my lady parts clench hard.

It doesn’t matter how pissed I am. Liam shirtless is always enough to make my thoughts scatter.

As he sits down, though, I can’t help noticing the changes in him. There are sleep circles around his eyes, making him look tired, and what appears to be the beginning of a beard on his jaw and chin.

He had shaved diligently when I was at his house, but I guess not since then. His hair is missed up so badly that it is standing in all directions on his head.

My heart clenches for him and I feel the venom in me drain away.

“I am not pregnant.”

I hold up the pregnancy kit in a Ziplock bag to the screen to show him the single line. The smile he gives me is small though and it doesn’t reach his eyes. He rubs the palm of his hand over his face, looking so impossibly tired.

“I can see that, Anna.”

There is a stretch of silence before he talks again. His voice is flat and so unlike the Liam I am used to. This Liam looks unsure and lost and my heart is bleeding for him.

“Why did you run?”

Isn’t it obvious?

“I didn’t want to go to jail.”

“Why didn’t you come to me? You chose to run away from me instead.”

“Would you have believed me if I told you I hadn’t done anything wrong?”

There is no hesitation when he answers, “Yes. I would have believed you.”

When I don’t say anything to that, he goes on, “We were a team, Anna, and I thought we maybe had built a bit of trust between us. The shock was on me when you ran instead of trying to tell me what happened so that we could solve this.”

Liam looks so hurt and heartbreakingly lost that I just want to hold him and take away his pain. In that moment, I realize he never hid things from me. All of the phone calls he took were in front of me, he never hid any documents, and he left me in the office alone sometimes with his computer turned on.

He must just have never gotten around to mentioning the security breach. Or maybe he wasn’t allowed to due to agreements with the board of directors.