He gave me a suspicious look. “I thought you said you didn’t want to fight.”

“I don’t. But if you want to hit me, if you think that might make you feel better, then go ahead.” I’d always considered Jonathan a friend. No, we didn’t see eye to eye on everything, and we had different interests, but we’d known each other for so long, and we’d been through a lot. It hurt to think that the whole thing had been a façade, that he’d just been biding his time, wanting to get back at me for something I didn’t even realize that I was doing.

“You’re saying I can hit you.”

“Yeah. Wherever you want. Well, maybe not the balls. Go on. Punch me in the face if you want. I’m ready.”

He didn’t say anything right away, and I thought he wasn’t going to do it. At least I had offered.

But then he spun around and caught me right on the cheekbone with a thunderous right hook. Any harder and my cheekbone probably would have cracked; as it was my head snapped to the side and I felt something in my neck pop, though that sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant. The whole left side of my face though, felt like it was on fire. A giant pulsing white hot fire. My initial instinct had been to fight back, but I clenched my jaw and stood there, not doing anything. My eye started to water. Jonathan flexed and released his fist.

“Jesus,” I said, half-expecting him to jump on me and start hitting me again, but he didn’t. “That’s some fucking arm you got there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been working out, remember? That’s where I met Daisy.”

Touche.

“Thanks, though,” he said. “That did make me feel a little bit better.”

“Well,” I said, bringing my hand up to the side of my face and gingerly touching my cheek. “Now that you’ve got that out of your system . . .”

“I’ve been giving it some thought, though, and I think it’s time for me to move on.”

“Move on? From the company?”

“From the company, from the city, from this state. Maybe even the entire country. I don’t know. I want a change. Not just a change of job, but a complete change of environment. I think it would probably do me some good.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding, though I wasn’t quite sure what to think about the whole thing. My cheek was still throbbing. “It sounds like you’ve thought it through, so I’m certainly not going to try to change your mind. And hey—maybe it would be good.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe it will.”

That night, Daisy came over and we ordered take out because neither of us felt like cooking. I told her about my conversation earlier with Jonathan.

“So just like that, he’s leaving?” she asked.

“Just like that.” I pulled one of the cartons out of the paper bag and opened it. “I think this one’s the kung pao chicken.”

She peered into the container. “Yeah, it is. Wow. That surprises me. About Jonathan.”

“I know. I was surprised too.”

She looked at me, a piece of chicken held in between the two chopsticks. “Was this before or after he hit you?”

“After. Pretty much immediately after. I let him hit me though. Just so we’re clear.”

“Yeah, I’m still not quite sure I follow the logic in that one.”

“It was sort of . . . cathartic for him, I think. It’s not like we got into some sort of crazy brawl or anything. Which is what I think he wanted to do at first. So we talked about the whole leak thing, and then he hit me, and then he seemed to feel better and told me that he was going to be leaving. He didn’t say where he was going, though.” I shrugged. “Maybe it’s for the better. I know I’m going to have to eventually talk with Martin, and have to listen to him tell me I told you so, in regards to whose side the leak came from.”

“It might be better that he leaves,” Daisy said. “You wouldn’t be able to completely trust him again, would you?”

I shrugged as I opened up another container, this one containing egg rolls. “You know what’s weird is that I feel like I still could. Even after all that stuff he said, I still feel like if he wanted to stay, that we’d just move past this. But if he wants to go, I’m not going to stop him. It does kind of feel like it’s the end of an era, though.”

She set her container down and looked at me. “This can be the start of a new one, then,” she said. “For us, anyway. And I really believe now, more than ever, that as long as we stay true to our feelings, then that is what’s most important. Because if I had done that to begin with, we could have probably avoided a lot of the stuff that we’ve been through so far.”

I thought back to the day she first showed up in my office for that job interview. If you had told me then that I’d be sitting here now, feeling how I did toward her, I never would have believed it, but there you have it. Things sometimes worked out in ways that you couldn’t even fathom.

“We have been through a lot,” I said, “but honestly, Daisy, there’s no one else I’d rather go through it with.”

Tags: Claire Adams Erotic
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