Dirty Headlines

He’d pressed his thumb to my lower lip and pushed it down, licking the inside of it. “My father thinks women should stay in the kitchen and global warming is a hoax. Let’s try not to take him too seriously.”

“Célian…”

“I don’t hate you, Judith,” he’d said. “And that’s more than I can say about the rest of the world right now.”

We’d stumbled back to our hotel suite and had enough sex to repopulate an entire continent—if that was how sex worked. It was angry and sad and intimate. It felt like we’d risen together in the air and evaporated somewhere else safer, better. But in the back of my mind, I still remembered that I was an obstacle to Célian.

That all of his professional issues could disappear if I stepped out of the picture.

He could marry Lily. Or at least stay engaged forever.

He could save LBC.

He could have everything he’d worked for, for many, many years, and still be the detached bastard who picked up strangers at bars to satisfy his physical cravings.

Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Simple. Just the way he liked it.

That Sunday afternoon, I pushed the door to my apartment open and froze on the threshold, my heart dropping to the pit of my stomach. My suitcase fell to the floor with a thud. No.

My father was sitting at the dining table, having what appeared to be a pleasant conversation with Milton over my favorite Manhattan donuts and cups of coffee. My ex-boyfriend laughed wholeheartedly and pushed something over the table, and that’s when I noticed they were playing Scrabble.

Fan-freaking-tastic.

“Oh, there you are!” Milton clapped and swiveled his body toward me in his chair, his face glowing with a genuine smile.

He looked handsome in a polo shirt and new haircut, but in a generic way. Not only did he not hold a candle to Célian, he didn’t even hold a damp match. Not that beauty had anything to do with the fact that my room service breakfast was threatening to come up my throat for another puke-fest. The other thing Milton ate Célian’s dust at was being faithful—even when we weren’t technically together.

“Hello.” I threw my keys into the ugly bowl Mrs. Hawthorne had given us by the front door, looking between them. Dad put his letters down and turned in his seat.

“JoJo! Milton told me all about your weekend in the Hamptons. You shouldn’t have gone straight back to the office when you returned. You could have at least come back here and dropped the suitcase.”

Milton grinned sadistically, arranging his letters on the board in front of him. “Deceiver. D-e-c-e-i-v-e-r,” he spelled the word out loud. Goose pimples ran down my arms, making the little hairs stand on end.

“That’s a good one.” My father clapped. “Smart as a whip, son.”

“Thank you, sir. Baby, can I offer you a heart with a hole?” He grabbed a heart-shaped donut from the open white box on the table, motioning for me to take it. He referred to me as baby, even though I’d spent the weekend doing very grown-up things with someone else, and he knew it. Milton had also known when to come here, which set off the alarms in all of my internal systems. My mouth dried up.

This is bad.

“It’s okay. I really stuffed my mouth while I was on vacation.”

The smile on my lips felt like clay. I hadn’t been planning to tell Dad about Célian when I came back anymore. After the disastrous conference call, I’d felt like I was walking on a tight rope, about to fall from grace and into the arms of heartbreak.

I knew what would set my lover free of his father’s claws. But it hurt like hell, the concept of letting him go so he could save the one thing he loved.

But wasn’t that the essence of caring for someone else? Hurting so they wouldn’t have to?

“Then how about a walk?” Milton perked up like a doting grandmother. “The weather is nice. We haven’t taken a stroll in your neighborhood in a while.”

That’s because you decided to screw your boss while I was busy running around Manhattan looking for a job.

Whatever. Getting him out of here wasn’t a bad idea. I hitched a shoulder. “Sure. Let me get freshened up.”

After a quick bathroom stop, during which I stared in the mirror and promised myself I wasn’t, in fact, going to throttle my ex-boyfriend, I walked out and kissed my father goodbye.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I assured him. I. Not we. The devil was in the details, and I hoped my own mini Satan overheard it while he waved goodbye to my father.

Milton and I stepped out of the building and took a right turn toward the main road, as we had many times before. I waited for him to talk, because I wasn’t entirely sure of the extent of his knowledge about my love life.