“You’re really going to go out with another man? After what we just did together?”
“One experience”—I still shy away from using the word orgasm in conversation with him—“doesn’t give you any rights over me. Or vice versa. ”
“What if I want rights over you?” His voice is still soft, but there’s a menacing edge that provides a definite warning.
Fear blooms in the pit of my stomach, makes me sweat. Makes me shake. I clench my fists, refusing to give him the satisfaction of knowing just how easily he can intimidate me. “Tough luck. No man will ever have the right to tell me what to do. ”
“You don’t think so?”
“I know so. I’ll never give a man that much power over me. ” Not ever again.
“What about this date you have tonight? He doesn’t get to claim any rights over you?”
For a moment, just a moment, I think about letting him go on thinking that I have a date. And that I plan to keep it, even after what we just did together. Or, more accurately, what he just did to me. If he thinks I’m the kind of woman who dates one guy while getting off with another, I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. Ethan’s obviously the possessive type, and I doubt that possessiveness lends itself to sharing.
And that’s what I want. For him to lose interest. Not just because of the work thing, but because I can’t handle the intimacy of what we just did together. Already I feel broken. Cracked open. The pain I work so hard not to acknowledge seeping back into the surface of my consciousness.
Yet I can’t ignore the way he’s looking at me. The hold he’s exerting over me with little more than a narrowed gaze.
“It’s my roommate. ” I blurt out the words before I have a clue I’m going to say them. “We’re doing a girls’ night tonight. Dinner and a couple rom-coms. We have standing Tuesday-night plans. ”
The tension is gone as quickly as it came, and I feel my shoulders slump in relief. But just as quickly I’m exasperated again—with myself more than him. Yes, Ethan is pushy, but he wouldn’t be in the position he’s in if he wasn’t. Head of one of the fastest-growing—and most lucrative—biomed companies in the country. A forerunner in research that saves the lives of soldiers in combat theaters. A self-made almost-billionaire who’s used his brains and business savvy to go from being the orphaned kid of a U. S. Special Forces soldier to a world-renowned CEO.
No, it’s not his pushiness I’m upset with. It’s the way I constantly want to yield to him. The way I cave to his wishes even when I have no intention of doing so. I haven’t been that girl in years, don’t want to be her ever again. The fact that Ethan can so easily bend me to his will is disconcerting. Worse, it’s alarming.
“Let me walk you to your car, then. ” He takes my briefcase from me, slings the strap over his shoulder. Grabs his own. Then, taking a firm—but not too firm—grip on my elbow, he guides me out of his office and through the two reception areas to the bank of elevators.
“Good night, Dot,” he calls to the dragon lady, who is still manning her post. Except when she looks at him, she looks much more like a doting mother than a dragon guarding the entrance to a cave.
“Good night, Ethan. I’ll see you in the morning. ”
The elevator comes before he can say anything else, so he simply shoots her a smile and a little wave. We step on, mere seconds after he called it, and I can’t help being disgruntled. It seems like I’ve done nothing but wait for elevators all day, but the second Ethan presses the button, one magically appears. Almost as if it knows who’s waiting on the other end and wouldn’t dare let the CEO of Frost Industries wait for anything.
As he walks me to my car, Ethan asks me how my summer is going. What my favorite class was last semester. If my roommate and I liked the strawberries he sent.
The last question throws me off my game. I’m good at small talk—I like the organized, predictable rhythm of it—and his gift so doesn’t qualify as small talk. Not when you consider everything that has happened today because of that damn gift.
I start to tell him so, that I don’t appreciate the strawberries any more than I did the four-hundred-dollar blender. But again, it’s like he has some kind of magic hold over me that makes me tell the truth, because what comes out is, “I would have returned them, too, but my roommate’s already eaten half of them. It seemed churlish to return only the uneaten half. Kind of like, ‘I’m going to give this back to you, but only after I take everything I want from it. ’ So not okay. ”
Much to my surprise, Ethan laughs at my explanation. “I’m okay with you giving the strawberries back—especially if it gives me another chance to get yelled at by you. ”
I glance at him from under my lashes. “Like getting yelled at, do you?”
“I don’t, actually. At all. You seem to be the singular exception to that rule. ”
I’m not sure how I feel about that—or how I’m supposed to respond. Thank God I don’t have to. We’ve made it to my car. “Well,” I say, stopping in front of the Mini Cooper I bought used when I got to UCSD three years ago. I call her Phoebe, after Lisa Kudrow’s character in Friends, because she’s fun and cute and loaded with eccentricities. Unlike the real Phoebe, however, not all of my Phoebe’s oddities are endearing. Like her propensity to break down at the least convenient moment. Or the way her air-conditioning only works in the winter. I’m a pretty decent mechanic and have managed to fix a bunch of her problems myself, but some of them refuse to be fixed. She’s stubborn that way.
Tori is after me to get a new car, but I love Phoebe. She’s the first thing I’ve owned that’s really mine. Bought with my own money and with my name only on the registration papers. It was an important step for me, helped me create the distance from my parents that I so desperately needed when I was eighteen. And the fact that my father can’t just take her from me—when he needs the money, when he’s in a mood, when he wants to punish me for some real or imagined slight—means even more.
Plus, she’s already paid for, which is very important to me. With tuition at UCSD as expensive as it is, plus living expenses, making ends meet is always a challenge. Doing it in the summer, when all I’ve got is a nonpaying internship, is even worse. Like the free rent I’m getting at Tori’s, no car payment makes this current dream job of mine possible.
“This is me,” I say, popping the trunk and loading my briefcase into it.
Ethan doesn’t look impressed. He doesn’t say anything, though, which is all that matters. After the day I’ve had, I’m not really in the mood for another argument. And we would have one, because I always defend Phoebe from the naysayers. Always.
“Go out with me tomorrow,” he says after I close the trunk and walk around to the driver’s-side door.
Shit. Why did I think he wasn’t going to push this? Just because he took tonight’s plans gracefully—once he realized I was planning on hanging with Tori—doesn’t mean that he’s willing to back off. But that’s what I need him to do. What I want him to do. My stomach clenches sickly, and to be honest, I don’t know whether it’s because I think he’ll take my refusal well…or because I think he won’t. Either way, I’m not going out with him.