Page 27 of The Best Worst Mistake (Off-Limits #2)

Abby closes the gap between us, running right into me, the force of her knocking me back until the lower half of my body is pressed up against the office supply counter beside the printer.

It’s covered in staplers and paperclips, extra reams of paper and folders.

She reaches behind me, grabbing me by the belt, then spins us both around until it’s her back pressed up against the counter.

She hoists herself up onto it after clearing the papers off the top with one swipe, then wraps her legs around my waist, pulling my face down to kiss her.

And I let her.

More than let her.

I kiss her back, gently and hard all at once, forcing the anger I felt toward her out of my mind. Trading it for the quiet distraction of her lips, desperate against mine, doing the complete opposite of what she asked me to do here a few weeks ago.

She arches her spine, pressing the front of herself into me, her breasts straining against her shirt, hips flush against mine. I pull her buttons apart as she untucks the hem of my shirt, undoing the buckle of my belt before I can wrap my head around where this is going.

She unzips my pants, but before she can get her hand wrapped around my cock, I take a step back, gasping for air, putting my hands up between us, like I’m surrendering in a battle I’d rather die in.

We’re both completely out of breath.

She swallows, blinking at me. Confused.

I turn to tuck in my shirt, forcing my head to come to terms with what’s just happened, before spinning around to face her again.

She’s buttoning her blouse back up, sitting on the countertop, eyes burning. Searching for an answer as to why I just stopped us from doing something we both so clearly wanted to do.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her chest still heaving.

“You wanted space but everything you said, I . . .” She pauses, looking more bewildered.

Embarrassed. “God, I don’t know why I just did that.

It’s like your superpower. You drain every bit of self-control I have.

It happens every time we’re alone, doesn’t it?

I have a lot of self-control, but not around you. ”

I knead my temples, wishing so damn bad that I wasn’t still mad about how things ended between us in New York. Wishing I didn’t actually want more from this woman than what she’s apparently willing to give. It would make everything so much easier between us.

“You still want to talk about what happened after New York,” she says, nodding. “And, you’re right. We should.”

I run a hand through my hair. “Ah, yeah, about that . . .”

The printer beeps loudly, signaling that my print job is done.

We stare at each other, slowing our breathing, until the printer starts shuffling through another job. This one must be Abby’s.

“One hundred and twenty-seven pages,” she says, nodding toward the machine. “That’s how long we have until Brett starts wondering where I went. Possibly less, since yours took so damn long.”

She shoots me half a grin, then flattens her hair back down on top of her head from where I must have just pushed it out of place while we were . . .

Christ .

I force myself not to go there right now.

“Right. So we have one hundred and twenty-seven pages to lead this elephant out of the room real quick, don’t we?”

She looks past me at the locked door. “Unless he comes looking for me sooner than that.”

I stare at her, hoping she takes the reins on this one. I’ve said enough as it is until I hear where her head is at. I clear my throat.

Your turn, Abs.

“Everything you just said about me? You’re right,” she begins, “about all of it. I hope you can forgive me for being an emotionally stunted idiot. Your assessment of me is spot on.”

I wait for her to go on, but that seems to be all she’s got.

“Is there more of an explanation behind that apology? Or a suggestion of how to go about this . . .” I ask, giving her another chance to explain.

“Whatever this is between us is already so foreign to me. I don’t really know how else to say it.”

“Then say whatever you feel or think right now. Even if it sounds wrong,” I tell her.

“Nothing I say is going to sound like what you want to hear.” She shrugs. “I’m impossible. Even when I want something, I convince myself that I don’t. It’s like this bomb goes off in me whenever something feels like an emotional risk.”

I laugh a little harshly. “I’m the emotional risk?” I ask.

No matter how much I want her, how much I’ve always wanted her, I’m over her half-baked excuses. This time, it’s all or nothing.

She starts again. “I’m not sure how else to say it—”

But I stop her. “Abby.” She looks up. “I don’t want a perfect rebuttal from you. I want the ugly one. I want the horribly ugly reason why you only seem to run.” I wonder if any of this is getting absorbed by her, or if it’s just bouncing off her ears like a hailstorm.

“Everything you’re saying is fair.”

I study her face, wondering if maybe I’m just more invested in all this than she is.

Maybe I always have been. Second chances, Fate, and all that idiocy can be wildly confusing when it only leads to another dead end.

Some things are just impossible to push into working, and I’m starting to realize that Abby may be one of them.

I don’t know if it’s frustration from the last near-decade streaming out of my mouth, but whatever it is grabs ahold of me and it just starts pouring out, right here in the supply room.

“What if I’m just blind when it comes to you?

” I ask, holding my arms out to my sides.

“Maybe things between us — things that feel so fucking right to me — have always been one-sided. Me and only me believing that there’s something magnetic between us.

Something I’ve never felt when I’m around anyone else in my entire life, because no matter how hard I try to stay away from you, we’re like a pair of bookends with a whole lot of story left to play out before we get to be rightly smushed up against each other again.

With nothing left in the middle to keep us apart.

Whether either one of us likes it or not, the world just keeps shoving us back into each other’s lives, Abby.

And maybe this is me being naive, or stupid, or honestly just completely insane to want to see what’s still left to read between us.

Whatever it is, whatever block there is in your mind, I wish you’d just try. ”

I’m spent by the time I get to the end of my tirade, but I had to say it.

I’d never been sure what Abby’s life might look like behind closed doors.

What this girl was like when no one else was around to see her.

But going to her place for the first time — seeing the way her home was overflowing with life, but none of it coming from her, just existing around her — made me realize something I’d never thought about before.

She has a wall up that I’ve never been able to break through, sure, that’s the part I’ve always known.

However, what I didn’t know for sure until recently — having experienced what I saw and heard that night, and thinking through my conversation with Ryeson about who she may or may not have in her life — is that Abby’s walls have absolutely nothing to do with me.

Those walls have everything to do with whatever it is that she’s gone through in her life. And I care too much about her to let her go without at least trying to help break them all down.

If not for me in the long run, then for her.

And if I’m not the one to help her do it, then who?

I tighten the hinge of my jaw, forcing the silence to linger, refusing to add another word from my end, until finally, she clears her throat.

“Am I the head side or the tail?” she asks, sniffing lightly.

“What?” I ask. Annoyed that she isn’t responding to anything I’ve just said.

She talks louder. “Am I the head of this bookend or the tail side? As you were talking, I was imagining us as a pair of bookends with all these adventures and stories left unread between us. Though, in order to be two incomplete sides, we’d have to be some type of body-based pair — maybe a horse, or a fish, or a tiger — something that needs both ends back together in order to make any sense, right? ”

I frown, wondering if I’m hearing her correctly.

“I think, given the circumstances between us, that I can safely call dibs on the head-portion of our bookend metaphor, sweetheart,” I say, allowing my voice to become soft.

She snorts out a laugh, her face brightening.

“That’s fair.” She nods, grinning. “Which makes me the ass portion, I suppose. Fitting.”

I purse my lips, trying not to laugh.

“Your words, not mine,” I tell her. “We can call you the tail portion, though. Maybe it’s a horse-shaped bookend or something. With the ears and nose on one end and the tail and back hooves on the other. Jumping through a mess of books and stories in the middle, or something ridiculous.”

“I think that suits us pretty well,” she says, smiling as if she knows this entire metaphor is a little more than absurd, if not deeply fitting.

“I may not embody the most poetic end of the whole thing, but as you said, given our history, I admit that I deserve to be the fairly blind back side of it all, sure.”

She begins to laugh, quietly at first, but before long, the sound fills up the whole room. I wonder whether anyone outside can hear us, but a bigger part of me has already stopped caring.

I love that laugh so much that I laugh, too. Aware that regardless of the outcome of this, I’m still going to have to face this woman in a conference room for the biggest deal of either of our careers, with the future of hers on the line.

Still, I wait for a beat to see if I can hear anyone coming down the hall, then I decide to go for broke.

“I’m crazy about you, Abby. But I’m not at a point in my life where I want to chase my tail any longer than I already have. I want . . .”

I pause, trying to take this whole notion out of our horse bookend metaphor, and put it as plainly as possible. But, before I can finish, she does it for me.

“You want someone who will run along beside you, not have you spinning in circles anymore,” she says, nodding. “I get that, I really do.”

“Getting it and being it are two entirely different things,” I say, gently.

We pause, hearing someone walk outside the room. Just when I think they’ve passed, the handle on the door starts to jiggle.

I look at Abby as the color drains from her face.

“Fuck,” she hisses, looking around for somewhere to hide.

I pull open a closet door beside the counter. It’s full of cleaning buckets, extra boxes of office supplies, and a vacuum.

I pull her into me by the waist, then give her a quick peck on the lips, wishing I could just drag her in with me.

“This isn’t over,” I say, lightly.

“No, it isn’t,” she says, before pushing me inside. Then she closes me in.

The closet is pitch black, but I can hear the sound of her heels tapping across the floor, then the door to the main supply room swinging open.

“What the fuck is taking so long? And why is that door locked?”

It’s Brett’s muffled voice.

Christ . That was close.

“Oh, the handle must have been locked before I shut the door,” I hear Abby saying. “Didn’t want the other team peeking over my shoulder at these pages.”

A stack of papers gets shuffled off the print deck.

“Damn straight, Torres, but you’re taking forever in here. I shouldn’t have to come babysit you in the supply room. Get back in there. You’ve been distracted as fuck since you got back to L.A.”

“No, I—” Abby stutters.

Back to L.A.?

Brett’s voice gets louder, not giving her a chance to answer.

“Don’t tell me the idea of spending time in your sad little hometown has gotten you all up in your head, because I can get someone else from the New York team to replace you out here in under twenty-four hours if you can’t handle being back.”

Back? Hometown? I thought Abby was from New York.

“That’s ridiculous, Brett,” Abby says, her voice growing farther away, like she’s leading him out of the room. “Of course I can handle it.”

“Good. You better get your head in the game, because I don’t give a shit what happened here before you—”

The supply room door closes heavily behind them.

Two pairs of footsteps set off, while Brett’s voice grows more muffled until I can’t hear them anymore. But, instead of freeing myself from the tiny closet, I press my forehead into the door, needing just another minute to myself.