"I don't want to go on any more dates while I'm considering, you know. The thing you told me to think about? I only went out with him because I'd already agreed to the rain check."
Something speeds up in my chest. I can't remember feeling nervous, not for years, but around her it's like an ever-present thing. She's in my ear and so close and yet wildly out of reach.
"Sounds like you'll need more time to think about it, then," I say. My voice comes out smooth. A miracle.
"A bit," she admits. Another rustle and yes, she has to be lying down. I stretch out on the hotel bed and imagine her doing the same on hers.
"Want to talk me through your thought process?" I ask, sounding like I'm asking about the weather, and not if she'll let me ask her out. "No worries if not."
"Okay," she says. "Well… you and I are friends. Weird ones, maybe, and definitely new, but friends. I like that, and we might lose it."
I close my eyes. She sounds like she's made a pros and cons list, and the idea of Audrey sitting down and attacking this like a story she wants to write makes me smile. "We might, yes. But we might have more fun."
"Right. Well, that's another issue. Fun. At some point we'd stop having it, and you'd still be my boss."
"I'd never interfere in your career. I should have made that clearer, spitfire. Would never happen. You could do anything to me and I wouldn't."
"I believe you," she says, yet there's a but in her voice. Of course there is. Because it's her livelihood and her dream, and what am I put up against that? There are too many cases of men who abuse their power over women in the workforce.
"You can say no," I say, "or you can say yes, and there will be no repercussions."
"I know. Carter, I don't… I know. But the idea is still scary. What if someone at work found out?"
I'd researched it. It's not an HR violation, isn't mentioned anywhere in the company's policies. But telling her that feels like admitting to how much I'd thought about this, so I don't.
"All good thoughts. Great ones, even. You keep thinking them. But I want you to remember that I won't be in charge of the Globe forever." I reach down and rest my hand on the belt of my slacks. "You can consider it for a long time."
"Hopefully I won't need a long time," she says.
The silence stretches out between us. It's not heavy. I hear her breathing faintly on the other line and wonder what it would feel like to have her resting on my chest instead.
Audrey speaks again. "Carter. Would it be like it was last week?"
"You and me, you mean? Yes. I think so."
"We had fun."
"We always have fun."
This time, I can hear the smile in her voice. "You make me laugh so much. It's ridiculous, actually."
"And you accuse me of being charming," I say.
"You are that, too. Nothing like how I expected a CEO to be, and especially not when I saw all the changes you brought."
The mass layoffs. They're still uncomfortable to think about, even if they'd been necessary. Upending so many lives. "I live to surprise," I say.
"Well, you surprise me," she replies. "Regularly."
Maybe her words give me the inspiration, or it's still the lingering image of Audrey out for dinner with her date, her cheeks flushed with life and eyes glittering as she laughed at his fucking jokes. But I ask the question anyway.
"Did you want him to kiss you tonight?"
"No," comes the soft answer. "I didn't."
"We never spoke about that."
"About what?"
"Intimacy," I say. "Where it fits into the equation for you, in relationships and dating. With your nerves."
The silence between us feels heady this time. I could take back my words. But I don't, letting them hang there, my stress like prickles beneath my skin.
I hear a soft click on the other end and I know, without knowing how I know, that Audrey has turned off her bedroom light. Cast her room into darkness. "It's complicated," she says. "I do want someone to be intimate with. Just not him. None of the men I've been on dates with, really."
"That's terrible luck," I say.
"Maybe, or maybe it's me," Audrey says. "I think I need more than just some polite small talk to know if I want to be… close to someone."
I smile at my ceiling lamp. You and every woman, I think. "That's not odd."
"It's not? Feels like it is." There's a shuffle on the other end and I imagine her turning over. Tucking her arm under her head.
"Say you met someone you connected with. You went out with them, had a great time. You found out he read the newspaper, and not just digitally."
"You remember?"
"Of course," I say. Her criteria for men. "What would you want him to do?"
Her voice is low. "Kiss me."
"You like being kissed," I say. The words feel hot on my tongue, and I know what I'm doing, and I know I should stop. I'm also more likely to be hit by a meteorite or be nominated as a presidential candidate.
But then Audrey takes it one step further. "I love being kissed," she says. "I like having sex, you know. I don't want you to think I don't, just because I'm not… experienced with relationships."
She said sex, she brought it up, and my mind floods with images. It's not like I haven't imagined it before. How she'd look beneath me, my arms on either side of her face. How the soft insides of her thighs would feel clutched around my head. If she'd whimper when I pushed inside.
"You like having sex," I repeat. The words send an instant ache up my thighs.
"I do," she whispers. "Don't you?"
Banal conversation. Banal, and absurd, and my hand glides down to stroke the hardening outline of my cock through my pants. "It's one of my favorite activities," I say.
With you, though, it would be worship.
"Think we'd have good sex?" Audrey asks. Her voice is small, but also determined, and I go rock hard in a second. It happens so fast I get a brief flash of lightheadedness.
I can't believe she'd brought up us and fucking.