Page 16 of You Rock My World

DORIAN

September—Present Time

I’m in the home office, sitting at the large meeting table with my team. Sunlight pours in from the French doors, pooling on the polished white surface. Everyone’s here except Josie. Her unoccupied chair across from me a gaping hole.

Victor, my ever-impatient agent, leans forward, glancing at his watch. “Should we start without PR and catch her up later?”

I check the time on my phone. “Let’s give it a few more minutes.”

I drum my fingers on the table, wondering why she’s late. Josie doesn’t strike me as someone who’d be tardy without a reason. Did something happen to her? Was she in an accident?

Just as my mind conjures increasingly absurd possibilities, Tessa’s phone buzzes. She glances at the screen, then at me. “The gate guard just pinged me. Josie has arrived.”

Relief sweeps over me in an oddly physical way, like stepping into the shade after hours under an unforgiving sun. But it’s joined by an aching anticipation that presses against my ribs.

Footsteps in the hallway make my pulse trip, and when the door finally opens, gravity forgets its hold on me for a beat, everything inside me suspended and weightless.

Josie rushes in. She tugs at the strap of her bag, wrestling it over her head in a flurry of movement.

She’s wearing one of her floral milkmaid dresses, flowy, kind of old-school but in a trendy way, with a blue floral pattern over an off-white soft fabric.

The sleeves are puffed up, and the neckline dips enough to be interesting without trying too hard, with these little strings tied in a bow in the middle that are as innocent as they’re maddening.

Her hair is half-up, half-down, same as the night we met. But unlike that night, when her skin was a constellation of freckles and flawless perfection, she has a black curly mustache drawn on her upper lip.

My own lips twitch as I trace the lines of the doodle with my gaze, both smooth except for the right curl that’s smudged at the end. At once, I’m intensely curious about the story behind the mustache.

Has she taken up morning theater lessons? Maybe it’s a new viral trend I’m not cool enough to know about. Whatever the reason, I’ll never guess because it’s Josie—delightfully chaotic, a riddle wrapped in humor and heart, impossible to pin down yet always what I need.

“Morning,” Josie says, out of breath. Her cheeks are flushed, and a few stray wisps of hair cling to her temples. “Sorry I’m late. Did I miss anything?”

Tessa shakes her head. “We were about to start.”

Josie nods, acting as if everything is perfectly normal with her circus-chic look. She slides into her chair, setting her bag on the floor. “Great. Go ahead, then.”

Glances dart around the table, a silent game of chicken to see who will address the elephant—or rather, the mustache—in the room.

Victor, predictably, caves first. He gestures vaguely toward his upper lip, his voice hesitant as he brings it up. “Are you aware that you have?—”

Josie doesn’t let him finish. “A curly mustache drawn on my face, yes, I’m aware.” She doesn’t offer any explanation.

Tessa clears her throat, clearly hoping to steer the meeting back on track, but it’s a futile attempt; all eyes remain fixed on Josie’s mustache. I lean back in my chair, fighting not to grin.

I follow the outline of that imperfect curl again before speaking. “What Victor meant is that we’re all going to have a hard time focusing on anything else unless you could maybe share why the mustache?”

Josie closes her eyes, taking a deep inhale in a sort of “finding my inner peace” way.

When she reopens them, she takes her notepad and pencil out of her bag and, without looking at anyone in particular, tells the group, “I had to take my niece to school this morning and learned last minute it was Bring Your Dad to School Day. Since Penny doesn’t have her dad, she asked me to go. ”

Josie doesn’t specify what doesn’t have her dad means, but that moment in the elevator when she broke down slams into me with vivid clarity.

Josie must mean that Penny’s father is dead.

Was he Josie’s brother? Her brother-in-law?

From what I remember of her saying how she didn’t have the right to break down because technically, whatever caused her pain hadn’t happened to her, I guess brother-in-law.

I will her to meet my gaze, but she doesn’t. She studiously keeps her head down as she fights a slight tremor in her voice. “Of course, I agreed to go. But Penny decided I looked too pretty to play the part of a dad.”

I silently agree. Josie is too pretty for everything. Too pretty to make sense of, too pretty to keep my sanity as she sits across from me, impossibly beautiful even with a silly doodle on her face, too pretty and so fantastically unaware of it.

“So, Penny insisted I let her give me a mustache as camouflage. Only instead of using what she promised was washable ink, the little monster thought it’d be funny to use a permanent marker.

” Josie beats her pencil nervously on the notepad.

“Once I realized, I could either spend hours removing the damage and miss the meeting, or arrive mostly on time and keep the mustache.”

I’m equal parts charmed and gutted. I admire her for going to such ridiculous lengths to make her niece happy, for letting herself become the person a little girl can count on.

I can picture Josie in that classroom, standing tall with that absurd mustache, playacting.

She has to carry not just her grief but someone else’s too, to hold herself together while making space for another’s sadness.

Stepping in where a parent should have been, keeping the smile on a little girl’s face through a sure-to-be-hard day.

It takes strength to fill that absence, and it’s as beautiful as it is devastating.

I give Josie what I hope is an encouraging smile as I thank her for sharing with the group.

Turning to the others, I ask, “Any more questions?”

They mutter negative responses, so I nod at Tessa, asking her to go ahead with the day’s agenda.

But as the meeting progresses, I don’t listen to a single word of what anyone says.

My focus is on Josie bathed in the sunlight streaming through the windows.

In this setting, her amber irises are so much more striking than they were under the fluorescent lights of the elevator.

Yeah, those neons didn’t do them justice, and yet, her eyes were already stunning enough to bring me to my knees.

Now, I’m not even sure where I stand. In a puddle on the floor?

Every additional detail I discover about her is a prize worth more than all the Grammys I have in this room.

It’s not only her beauty that captivates me, more the essence of who she is.

It’s the way she fills the space without even trying, how her presence electrifies the air, making every word anyone else says irrelevant.

I finally recognize the emptiness I’ve been carrying these past months: I’ve missed her.

Ever since that night, there’s been a Josie-shaped void I couldn’t fill no matter how hard I distracted myself with work or music.

And now that I’ve got her back in my life, it’s all I can do to keep from grinning like an idiot.

I’m giddy, downright lightheaded, my entire body is buzzing knowing that she’s mere feet away from me.

Her laugh, her quirks, her ridiculous fake mustache—they’re everything I’ve been starving for in the past year. And like a man breaking a fast, I’m terrified of overindulging, of rushing her with too much too soon.

I yearn to touch her, to brush that stray tendril of hair from her cheek. But I clasp my hands tighter under the table, reining myself in.

Slow and steady, Dorian. Don’t spook her.

When I met her, a barrier stood between us, a truth I wasn’t ready to share. But now, I’ve finally razed that wall. I’m done with my failed marriage, with the shambles of my old life… She knows I’m unattached. And I’m free to go after her.

But that freedom is still laced with fear.

Fear of saying the wrong thing, of moving too fast, too slow, of letting her slip through my fingers again. I don’t even know if she’s seeing someone. Fuck, if she has a boyfriend I’m going to lose my shit. How did I wait an entire year? Would’ve been more if Missy hadn’t had her medical emergency.

I feel stupid for having wasted all this time. But Josie has told me more than once that I was too married for her. I needed the relationship with Billie to be over in every sense—emotional, legal, public—before approaching Josie. I just hope I haven’t waited too long.

My first instinct is to leap over the table and kiss her, but I need to tread carefully.

Josie isn’t someone I can chase recklessly.

She’s the breakout song in an album, one I have to compose with intention, every note considered, every lyric meaningful.

She’s a melody that got stuck in my head, and I have to take my time, let each chord fall into place naturally, with the care I’m still learning how to give after my marriage imploded so spectacularly.

Still, as I watch her in my house, with my people, the need to prod overcomes everything else.

I’m only human, and today, I won’t let her slip away like she did at the photoshoot yesterday. Not again.

This time, I’ll give her a reason to stay.