“Alright.”
I’d expected there to be more resistance.
He turned back to his paperwork.
I didn’t mean to undercut Lily, but it made more sense for me to handle these things for him since we had a much stronger relationship than they did. On top of that, she wasn’t fond of him, so would you want someone who wasn’t fond of you handling your messages? “How was the lab today?”
“A nightmare, really,” he said with a sigh. “The day was wasted because Jerome forgot to adjust the piston baton accelerator…” He continued on, talking in terms I didn’t understand whatsoever.
“You’ll get it right tomorrow.”
“We’ll always get it right. I just wish it didn’t cost time we don’t have.”
“Time you don’t have? Is there something on the schedule?”
“I just mean it’s a finite integer that we can’t change. You can always add more fuel, more safety functions, more anything, but you can never add more time because we’ve all got expiration dates.” He flipped through his papers, like he hadn’t just said something deep and profound.
I stared at the side of his face for a while, finding him to be the most fascinating person I’d ever met. He was rough around the edges with a difficult personality, but when you looked past that, you saw qualities no one else possessed. He was a flawless diamond covered in soot. But once you polished all that off…he shone with brilliance.
We hadn’t discussed the difficult conversation about the therapist since it happened. The next day had been a little tense, but we’d fallen back into our old relationship like nothing happened. I had an appointment lined up, but I was only going to give him a day’s notice. Otherwise, he would psyche himself out.
We pulled up to his building to drop him off.
“Thanks, Ronnie.” He got out of the vehicle and swung his satchel over his shoulder. Then he turned to me. “Goodnight, Emerson.”
“Goodnight.”
He shut the door and walked to the double doors of his building, a strong man with a strong core, strong enough to carry that big brain of his. Ronnie waited for traffic to disperse before he got back on the road, so I watched Derek open the door and step into the lobby, his jeans tight on his chiseled body.
I forced myself to turn away because my attraction to him needed to end for good. Once I’d thought about him like that, it was hard not to, especially when he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen—and his good soul only made him more irresistible. But he was my boss, my friend, and nothing more.
Ronnie dropped me off at home, and I entered my apartment.
Lizzie sat at the dining table with her binder on the surface, along with some textbooks. She liked to wear tight ponytails high on the back of her head, so tight it would give anyone else a headache, but it kept the hair out of her beautiful face.
And she had a very beautiful face.
When she reached the age where boys would become a problem, I knew those years would be the hardest of my life. I just hoped she was smart enough not to get stuck with a loser guy and have a kid at sixteen…like I did. “Hey, sweetheart.” I set my bag on the table near the door.
“Hey, Mom.” She didn’t look up from her schoolwork.
I’d told my mom I was on the way home, so she’d headed back to her apartment. I wanted Lizzie to be surprised, but I also wanted her to get used to being alone, attaining more independence instead of relying on family to always be there. “What are you working on?”
She stuck out her tongue. “Math…I hate it.”
“I hate it too, so don’t ask me for help.” I went to the fridge and pulled out items to make dinner.
“I thought you went to college?”
“For literature. Not math.”
She adopted a British accent as she teased me. “For literature…” Then she rolled her eyes.
I kept a straight face and wouldn’t allow myself to laugh, even though I did find my daughter hilarious. I arranged everything on the kitchen island and glared at her.
She smirked then turned back to her work. “Isn’t your new boss some kind of smarty-pants?”
“He’s not a smarty-pants.”
“Is he a dummy-pants, then?”
I started to prepare dinner for the two of us, getting the chicken breasts ready and washing the vegetables. “Lizzie.”
She chuckled and used her pencil to work out her problems. “He’s an astronaut or something, isn’t he?”
“An aeronautical engineer.”
She turned back to me and made a face. “A what?”
“He builds rockets and other things for space, like satellites and other instruments.”
“Wow…he’s super smart.”
“That’s an understatement.”
She abandoned her homework at the table and joined me at the kitchen island. Without being asked, she finished washing the vegetables and patted them dry before slicing them in preparation to go into the pan. “You think he’d help me with my math homework?”