Page 11 of I Love You, I Hate You
My best childhood memory is probably singing in the kitchen with my mom while she made me macaroni and cheese and hot dogs.
@Lukethebarnyardcat
Wait did she make you macaroni and cheese sometimes and then hot dogs other times or did you eat that TOGETHER
@Noraephronwasagenius
Shut up you heathen it’s delicious.
Chapter Five
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
You have my phone
Victoria read the email twice to be sure she wasn’t hallucinating, and then dug her own phone out. She hit the home button and was startled to see two sticky-faced little girls—nieces, she assumed, since as far as she knew he didn’t have kids—with blonde hair and familiar jawlines pulling faces for the camera. The case was not her gold bumblebee but a black insignia she recognized as belonging to the Rebel Alliance inStar Wars. Owen must have left his phone next to hers while they were packing up and she’d been trying so hard tonotthink about the moment in the stairwell she hadn’t so much as glanced at the phone she grabbed. There went her plans of messaging Luke—she would never use company property for something that personal—and she felt strangely naked without her phone. Plus, Owen’s phone being vaguely nerdy reminded her of Luke and that only served to annoy her further, because howdareOwen be anything like Luke.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Then come get it. Office 2721. I’ll leave your name at security for a guest pass.
She was agitated the rest of the day, even though the deposition had gone as well as could be expected. Smorgasbord was in a grey area with their manager policy, which Victoria was aware of firsthand thanks to all the long shifts her mother had pulled there over the years. Owen had a better case than Smorgasbord cared to admit, in her opinion, but she wasn’t getting paid for her opinion. There was just enough wiggle room she might be able to pull this one off. She didn’t like it when things were this precarious, however, and it got under her skin.
Owen didn’t respond with an ETA, annoying her further. And he’d probably done so specifically to bother her, which made it worse. The hours ticked by and he still hadn’t shown. His phone buzzed with a text and instinct made her pick it up. She instantly wished she hadn’t.
Ashley
When are you coming over? Haven’t seen you in way too long.
Great. Of course. He’s got someone else.It wasn’t that she cared, or that Victoria even expected he had any feelings for her aside from lust and hatred, but to see blatant proof of another woman bugged her more than she thought possible.
He didn’t even have a last name for Ashley, which meant one of several things: she was a long-term girlfriend, rendering last names superfluous, or she was a random hookup and he didn’t know her last name. A sister was a possibility too, but limited though Victoria’s experiences were with siblings, the text seemed tooniceto be from a sister. A long-term girlfriend was obviously the worst option, but the more she thought about it, the less likely that seemed. There had been zero sign of another woman’s presence in his house, and if he did have a girlfriend, bringing a not-so-drunken hookup back to his own place—after Victoria had offered hers—would be an unnecessary risk, and he didn’t seem like the careless type. Obnoxious and self-satisfied and irritating and entirely too sure of himself and a dozen other synonyms for those qualities, yes, but careless? Not really. That left another random hookup, which was the less crappy option, but somehow made her feel worse.
It meant she was just one of several. Which, okay, that was hardly against the rules, of which they had none anyway, but it pissed her off. She wondered if Ashley knew he was seeing other people, and for half a second she considered texting back herself to find out. Instead, she sat down at her computer and called up his email.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
By the way, Ashley misses you and wants to know when you’re coming over. Make sure you don’t disappoint her.
Victoria hit send with far more force than necessary and stood up, only to immediately sit back down and hitrefresh. Nothing.
Well, of course there was nothing. He’d barely had time to read it, much less respond. She stood up and told herself she needed to go for a walk and get a goddamn grip, but then her inbox showed a new message and she sank back down into her chair.
From: [email protected]
To: Victoria.
Noted
Noted.Noted?What the fuck kind of response was that? She paced back and forth behind her desk, relieved that the glass facing the hallway was thickly frosted enough to keep her movements private. She wanted to vent to the group chat, but without her phone she couldn’t. She considered simply driving to Owen’s house and throwing the phone at his stupid face, but that risked missing him on his way to Smorgasbord. She once again considered responding to Ashley just so the poor woman knew where she stood with him, but Victoria was loath to hurt another woman even if doing so would stick it to Owen and his stupid face. Ugh, everything about him was so frustrating it made her want to scream.
Especially because she couldn’t forget the way his breath fanned across her neck in the stairwell. It was borderline malpractice—or at the very least an ill-advised proposition—to have sex with her opposing counsel, no matter what the girls said. He got under her skin, and she hated it. It made her feel weak and exposed, and even worse, shelikedit. If he’d kissed her this afternoon she would have kissed him back, absolutely no doubt about it. She would have clawed open his shirt and fucked him right there, because whatever there was between them—aside from unadulterated hatred—was powerful beyond belief.