Page 30 of About that Fling (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #2)

“Along with ‘thou shalt not use company e-mail to transmit porn.’” Jenna felt her phone buzz and glanced at it, expecting an alert about her next meeting. Instead, she saw a text message from Shawn wishing her a good afternoon.

“Bad news?”

She glanced up at Adam. “What?”

“You looked at your phone and scowled. Just making sure it wasn’t bad news on the Belmont negotiation front.”

“No, it’s not. I mean—it’s a personal message.”

“Oh?”

Jenna couldn’t tell from his inflection if it was a question or a statement, and his expression stayed perfectly neutral. She knew she didn’t owe him an explanation, but found herself babbling one anyway.

“It’s Shawn. My ex. He invited me to some charity event next month and I told him I’d consider it. Purely professional.”

Adam quirked an eyebrow. “A professional date?”

“It’s not a date. Not exactly. Several Belmont administrators sit on the board of directors for the charity and?—”

“Jenna, it’s none of my business. You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

She nodded, then looked away. “I haven’t agreed to go. I’m thinking about it. Thinking about a lot of things, really.”

“Me too.”

Something about the softness in her voice made her meet his eyes again, and she felt her stomach twist into a tight, fizzy knot. The backs of her knees began to tingle, and she touched a hand to a chair to steady herself.

It was ridiculous. She’d fielded half a dozen calls from Shawn since they’d run into each other, and the ones she hadn’t ignored had left her feeling flat and unaffected. How was it possible mere eye contact with Adam could make every atom in her body flicker like twinkle lights?

She looked away, letting her gaze fall to her watch. “I have to get to a meeting over in the ER. I’ll see you in the next mediation session?”

“I promise to wear pants and leave my porn at home.”

“Good plan,” she said, giving him one last look. “It’s a pleasure working with you.”

“Likewise.”

She turned away, the formality of it all making her jaw ache.

The next morning, Adam made it a point to greet every member of the bargaining team—including Brett Lombard—with a smile and a handshake.

His ex-wife’s grasp was cool and familiar, and she pulled away quickly like she worried he hadn’t washed his hand after using the bathroom. Jenna was up next, and Adam held her gaze as he closed his palm around hers.

“Jenna. Good to see you.”

“You, too,” she said, and hurried past, leaving Adam with his fingers tingling.

As soon as everyone had filed in, he returned to his spot at the front of the room. “We’re going to start the next segment of the mediation with some training in nonviolent communication strategies.”

He took a seat on the table in front of the podium. As usual, it was vacant, with none of the bargaining team willing to occupy the front row. “Is anyone here familiar with NVC principles?” He scanned the room, making a point to meet every set of eyes.

Okay, maybe not Jenna’s. Or his ex-wife’s. And Brett Lombard looked away the instant Adam’s eyes caught his. Still, twelve out of fifteen wasn’t bad.

No one raised a hand, so Adam hopped off the table and picked up a pile of handouts.

He split the stack in half, handing one pile to Nancy Jensen on the far corner of the room.

Nancy took one and passed it behind her while Adam made his way to the opposite side of the room.

Halfway there, he realized Jenna occupied the far corner.

He tried not to let his hand brush hers as he handed the stack to her.

She looked up at him and flushed, but her gaze slipped away quickly.

Adam turned and retreated to the front of the room.

“NVC, nonviolent communication, is also known as Compassionate Communication. It’s a way of taking a conversation out of a framework of judgment and blame.

Can anyone take a guess what sort of response you generally get when you communicate with someone using judgment and blame? ”

The silence stretched out for a few beats, but Adam waited.

“Defensiveness?”

Adam nodded at Susan Schrader, trying not to imagine her admiring the photo of Brett’s junk. “That’s right. Anything else?”

“A punch in the crotch.”

Adam wasn’t sure who said it, but a few titters of laughter cropped up around the room, so he smiled.

“That’s right. Also known as a counterattack, either literal or figurative.

So instead of prompting that sort of response, we want to learn to speak and hear from the heart to create harmony and understanding.

We learn to express feelings and universal needs, as opposed to judgments. ”

In the right corner of the room, the CEO yawned. Adam stifled the urge to clock the guy in the head. It was always the ones who needed it the most who tuned out first.

“John, would you help me out with a little demonstration?”

The CEO looked up, his brow creasing in an expression Adam recognized as the reluctance of a man who would rather stick a hot fork in his eye and twist.

“Absolutely,” John said. “Always happy to participate in anything that can help facilitate this valuable process.”

Bullshit, Adam thought, which was precisely the judgmental language he needed the group to avoid.

He slid back onto the table with his feet on a chair, bracing his arms across his knees. “Okay, let’s start off with a personal example, shall we? Tell us about something in your home life that routinely causes friction between you and another member of your household. It can be anything.”

The CEO frowned, clearly trying to decide how much personal information he wished to reveal. Adam half expected him to report that his life was devoid of personal conflict, but John surprised him.

“My wife is a neat freak,” he said. “Always straightening pillows and snapping at me if I leave a bowl on the kitchen counter. We’ve been married twenty-seven years, but we keep having the same fight over and over.”

Adam nodded, intrigued by this human side of the man who, just last week, had called members of the nurses’ union “whiny little crybabies.”

“Most couples have fights like that,” Adam agreed, trying not to let his eyes stray to his ex-wife.

In his peripheral vision, he saw her shift in her seat.

Discomfort, probably, though Adam couldn’t say if it was the pregnancy or the fact that the subject hit too close to home.

How many times had they had their same arguments until they could have tape recorded their lines and just played them at each other?

You’re always working late. It’s like you don’t want to spend time with me.

My job is very challenging, and I don’t need the added stress of you micromanaging how I spend my ? —

Adam cleared his throat and wiped away the memory of those bitter arguments.

“Okay,” he said, slapping his palms on his knees to focus his attention on the CEO. “Let’s do a quick demonstration of how the argument usually unfolds. Would you like to play yourself or your wife?”

John scowled, clearly displeased at the thought that he might empathize with Mrs. Conway to that degree. “I’ll be me.”

“And I’ll be Mrs. Conway.”

“Archibald,” John grunted. “Sharon Archibald. She kept her maiden name.”

“Great to know,” Adam supplied, trying to sound more positive about it than John had.

“Okay then, I’m Ms. Archibald. Ready?” Adam cleared his throat, and raised the inflection of his voice just a little.

“John, you left the bread out on the counter again. You know I hate that, and it’s so disrespectful when I have to pick up after you. ”

“She doesn’t allow bread in the house. Gluten intolerant.”

“Okay then, milk.”

“Dairy free.”

“Work with me here, John,” Adam said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s a food item we’d find in the Conway-Archibald residence that might occasionally be left on the counter?”

“Squash.”

“As in zucchini?”

“Yes.” The CEO frowned. “I say it can be left on the counter; she says it goes in the crisper.”

“Good, that’s good.” Adam cleared his throat and tried his Sharon Archibald voice again.

“John, I keep telling you the zucchini goes in the crisper drawer, not on the counter. I feel like you never listen to me, and it’s so disrespectful when you leave things lying around the house that I have to pick up. ”

John scowled and sat up straighter in his chair. “Stop nagging me. I just worked a twelve-hour day while you sat around fluffing the pillows in the living room. You want to talk about disrespectful, I?—”

“Good,” Adam said, cutting him off before he could take it too far. A blue vein bulged on the CEO’s forehead, and Adam wondered if he’d picked the wrong guy for this exercise.

“What you just demonstrated so well for the audience,” Adam began, careful to stroke the guy’s ego, “is the sort of defensiveness that results from using judgmental language. Nice work, John.”

John nodded, and Adam looked around the room. “Can anyone here identify the parts of what I said that were especially judgmental?”

He looked around, curious to see who’d been paying attention. Jenna was watching with an uneasy sort of alertness. Beside her, Mia sat biting her lip and scribbling notes on a spiral notepad with a blue cover.

“Disrespectful,” Jenna said, surprising him. Then again, it was probably good for her to speak up. It would look suspicious if the two of them avoided each other altogether.

“Good. Exactly. Disrespectful is definitely a judgment word. Anything else?”

“Nagging.” Nancy Jensen crossed her arms crossed over her chest. “I hate that word. Men use it all the time when they want to degrade a woman or dismiss whatever she’s saying as petty and annoying.”

“Hey,” called Brett Lombard, scowling. “No generalizations about how men always do this or always do that.”

“Good, this is good,” Adam said, scrambling to divert the conversation back to the example. “You guys are doing an excellent job of modeling the sort of language we don’t want to be using.”