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But for the sake of trying to be polite, I chuckle along with him and say, “No shit?”
Another knock at my door interrupts us, and I call out, “Come in. ”
Mac comes walking in, and as per my usual regimen when I first see her, I feel the thrum of my pulse fire up as I check her out. She looks sensational, of course, but I immediately notice that her lips are drawn flat and her eyes are ice cold.
Now my pulse really starts hammering because I know Mac well enough to know… she is pissed. And I mean, really pissed.
“I need to talk to you,” she says, while pinning me with a look that says, And don’t even try to f**king put me off.
I try to put her off though, because whatever her problem is right now, I just don’t know if I have it in me to deal with it. “Can this wait until later? Rob and I were just in the middle of something. ” Yeah, talking about Kylie Wynn getting drunk and dancing on tabletops last night, but Mac doesn’t need to know that.
Mac closes her eyes and I can see her lungs drawing in deep breaths, which tells me she’s on the verge of losing her shit. When she opens her eyes back up again, they are filled with resolution. “I’m sorry. It’s urgent. ”
My stomach drops because I’m not sure if Rob catches on, but I can clearly hear that she is deeply hurt about something.
“I’m sorry, Rob,” she says as she cuts him a quick glance. “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t really important. ”
“No problem,” Rob says as he stands up. He gives me a wave before turning away. “I’ll catch you later, Matt. ”
I watch Rob as he retreats out of my office and when the door closes, I finally turn my gaze back on to Mac.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her quietly.
She doesn’t answer me right away but rather walks straight up to my desk. As she gets closer, her eyes lose the shards of ice and instead start filling up with heat. By the time she’s leaning over my desk and slapping her palms down on the wood grain, flames are practically leaping out. “I want to know why you lied to me last night. ”
Just f**king great! The day hasn’t even really gotten started, and she’s already heard that Kylie was out with us last night. I could wring Rob’s f**king neck right now for inviting that woman.
“How exactly do you think I lied?” I hedge for time.
“You told me you were going out with the boys last night, and I get that. It’s good to have a boy’s night out, even if it did hurt my feelings a little that you wouldn’t rather be with me. Still… I let it go. Except I come in this morning to find out that your boy’s night wasn’t such a boy’s night after all. It appears you invited Kylie to go with you and, from what I can tell, she doesn’t have a dick swinging between her legs. ”
As Mac ended her tirade, her words were shrill and accusatory. I note her hands are shaking as they rest on my desk. She’s itching for a fight… I can tell. But I’m not about to give her one. Not here… not at work.
“I didn’t invite her,” I say calmly. “One of the other guys did. ”
“Then how come you didn’t invite me once you realized she was coming? Once you realized it wasn’t just a ‘boy’s night out’?”
I wince internally, because she’s got me good and nailed to the wall now. “I couldn’t invite you, Mac. People can’t know we’re together. ”
“Bullshit,” she seethes. “I’ve been in your presence plenty of times around other members of this firm, and we both could have had fun last night without ever giving anything away. But the truth of the matter is—you just didn’t want me there. You wanted space from me, and I want to know why. ”
“Mac,” I say delicately, trying to bring a level of reason to the conversation. “It’s not a big deal—”
“Tell me the truth,” she practically cries out to me, her voice imploring me for something.
“You’re making this—”
“TELL. ME,” she yells as she raises her hands up and slams them back down on my desk with a bang.
Adrenaline spikes through me as I realize that Mac is on the verge of really flipping out, and I can’t have that happening. “Calm down. Do you want everyone to know about us?”
Sadness fills Mac’s eyes and her voice is awash in such sorrow that my stomach starts to roll. Her voice is very, very soft when she says, “Know what, Matt? What is there exactly to know?”
Fuck, oh f**k. Mac may have just been asking me a question… “What exactly is there to know?” But what she is really doing is making a statement about the status of our relationship. She’s finally figured it out that I’m not on board and have been sabotaging everything that we’ve built up together. She’s actually laying it out on the table, because I’ve been too much of a pansy ass to actually talk honestly about it.
Leaning back in my chair, I scrub my hands over my face and sigh. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mac. I’ve been trying. I really have. But lately… it just seems like a lot of work. ”
“I seem like a lot of work?” she snaps. “You mean… it’s a real chore for you to have to get it up for me?”
“NO!” I blurt out, because… fuck… no! “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m insanely attracted to you. You have to know that. ”
“Then why is it work?” she begs me to enlighten her.
“Because… because you wanted more than just sex, and I tried to give it to you. But lately… it just seems too hard. Ever since…”
I don’t finish that thought because I don’t need to. Mac knows exactly the moment when things changed for me. She can pinpoint it to the second, I’m sure.
“You mean ever since Marissa came over to your apartment that day. That was the day she reminded you that you’ve been screwed over and all women must therefore be the same as her. Thus, none of us are good enough to get the great Matthew Fucking Connover’s full attention. I mean, if we’re lucky girls… he’ll f**k us and f**k us good, but he’ll never let us into his heart. No woman is apparently good enough to warrant that type of attention from you, right? Because poor little Matt had his feelings hurt, and now he wants to wallow in misery. Boo f**king hoo, Matt. Boo f**king hoo. ”
Okay, now wait a f**king minute. I think this was a little more than having my feelings hurt. I was f**king crushed my wife cheated on me and my best friend was one of the ones who banged her. I was devastated when my marriage ended, and I spent a lot of time building up some protection around me to shield against this type of pain. You’d think Mac would give me a little f**king credit for trying.
Standing up from my desk, I lean across it toward Mac and growl, “Don’t you think you may be trivializing what I’ve been through just a bit? This isn’t easy on me, you know. ”
I expect her to attack… to call me out… point out all the ways that I’m a pu**y and can’t handle the work it takes to make a relationship work. Hell, if I was Mac right now, I’d tell me to f**king grow a pair, man up, act like I got a dick swinging between my legs. Because when it boils right down to it, the only thing holding me back is fear.
I know that.
Mac knows that.
And I wait for her to attack me with it.
Instead, she stares at me a moment more, then the heat dies out of her eyes. Her gaze drops from mine, she looks at the desk for just a second, and then pushes away from it. She turns from me… turns her back on me and this conversation, and walks toward my office door.
I don’t know what to do. Do I call her back and have her finish this argument? Do I let her walk away from me for good and go back to flying solo, because that’s what I really want anyway, right?
Fuck if I know, but before I can do anything, Mac turns back around and knocks my legs out from underneath of me. “Cal didn’t initiate sex with Marissa. ”
Turbulent fury bubbles and boils within me that she would dare even bring that up. That’s none of her f**king business, and I certainly don’t want it to be any of my
f**king business. “I don’t want to hear this. ”
“He was drunk at her party,” she says, rolling right over the top of me, not even slowing down. “I understand you were out of state and your plane got delayed, so you couldn’t make it in. Marissa offered him the guest room, and he accepted. ”
“Enough, Mac,” I grit out as I step around my desk and start advancing on her.
“He was really, really drunk… on the verge of passing out. In fact, he thinks he did pass out for a little bit, but when he came to—”
“Get the f**k out,” I bark loudly at her, because I’m so angry right now that this shit is being put into my brain, that I’m afraid of what I might do if she doesn’t shut the f**k up. “I don’t want to hear this. ”
Mac doesn’t listen though and side steps to the other side of my desk to stay away from me as I walk toward her. “Tough titties, you chicken shit pansy. You’re going to listen. Cal sort of woke up, and Marissa was in bed with him… giving him a bl*w j*b. He tried to push her off at first, but he admits… he didn’t try hard. He was drunk and didn’t have much control. She climbed on top of him, Matt. He let it happen, for a while. Then he came to his senses a bit and stopped it. I mean, the act had still been done… but he stopped it. ”
Denial rumbles through and I stop in my tracks, closing my eyes in a vain effort to shut everything out. I can still hear her breathing heavy, because that was quite a mouthful she just said. If what she says is true… then Cal didn’t go after my wife. I mean… I wasn’t sure, but how could I have been? I refused to hear a word of what he had to say after he told me he slept with Marissa. Besides, it didn’t matter. He f**ked her… didn’t matter how it happened, right?
“If you’re honest with yourself, Matt, you know it’s true. He didn’t make the move. Otherwise, why would he have been the one to confess it to you? He came to you to let you know, and you never even gave him a chance to explain. You beat the crap out of him and kicked him out of your life, without even giving him a chance. ”
Pain slices through me because Mac is opening old wounds, and now they are bleeding freely. I turn away from her and walk back to my desk, my mind spinning from the information overload. I wish I could erase what I just learned and go back to being f**king oblivious to what really happened between Cal and Marissa. Because I had carefully constructed my world based on an assumption that Cal was a predator and he had no regard for our friendship.
Mac’s not through with me though. Her voice is gentle and sympathetic when she says, “I’m not justifying what he did, Matt. Cal doesn’t try to do that either. He was wrong, and he knows it. But he did not instigate it and, although he was weak at first, he did stop it. But you already know that’s true, because I understand Marissa wasn’t stingy with her charms. ”
I walk up to my floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the city and stare out blankly. Buildings, traffic, blue skies, and white clouds. I really don’t see any of it. All I can do is envision the scenario that Mac just placed in my head. Marissa sucking off Cal while he was drunk. Climbing on top. Him stopping it… not completing… foregoing his pleasure because he worked through some of his drunken haze to realize what he was doing was so very wrong.
It was nothing I could have ever imagined happening.
I can hear Mac take a few steps away and assume she’s leaving. Which is good… I have nothing to say right now.
But she apparently has one more piece of advice to impart to me. “I only told you this, Matt, because your pain and bitterness are holding you back. I only wanted to show you that it might be a little easier to forgive Cal than you originally thought. Carrying that bitterness is not good. It’s already turned you into someone that is destined to lead a lonely life, because you can’t let it go. That’s fine… that’s your choice. But remember this… you teach Gabe by example. What is he learning from watching you? What are you teaching him about love and forgiveness?”