All Chapters of I Slept With My Best Friend's Son: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

She watched the car until it turned the corner. Then she stood in the parking lot for another few seconds with her coffee going cold in her hand and thought about the smile she had held on her face for the last thirty seconds longer than it was comfortable to hold it. She was not a girl who chased. That was important to her — not as a rule she had written down somewhere, just as a fact about herself that she had always known. She did not chase people. She stated her position clearly, as she had done at Evan's door, and she waited to see what came back, and if what came back was nothing she filed it and moved on. She had filed a great many things in nineteen years. She was usually fine with it. But Evan was not nothing. That was the problem. Evan was interesting in the specific way that very few people were interesting — not performing it, not trying to be, just genuinely operating on a frequency that was different from everyone else in their cohort and apparently completely unawa

James had been talking for about ten minutes about something to do with his Systems Architecture assignment when Evan put his cup down. "Could I talk to you for a minute?" He looked at Nicole directly. "Alone." The living room went quiet. Nicole looked at him across the coffee table with the expression she used when she was calculating how many ways she could avoid something before it became more obvious that she was avoiding it than it would be to just do it. James picked up his jacket from the arm of the sofa. "I should get going anyway," he said easily. Standing, no drama. "Nicole, thank you for the tea. Really." "Of course." She stood too. Walked him to the door. Said the right things in the right voice and closed it behind him and then turned around and stood in the hallway with her hand still on the door. Evan was already there. "Hallway," she said. Flat. "Not the living room." She walked past him. --- The hallway was the same narrow hallway it had always been. Same li

They drove for ten minutes without saying anything. James navigated the uptown traffic with his usual calm and Evan sat in the passenger seat with his elbow on the window frame and his eyes on the city going past and neither of them acknowledged the silence. Eleven minutes. Twelve. At the intersection on Amsterdam James reached forward and turned the radio down, which he had not turned up in the first place, which meant he was not turning it down because it was too loud. He was turning it down because he was about to say something and wanted the air clear for it. Evan waited. "Okay," James said. "Okay what." "I've been quiet since we left and I think that's been generous of me so I'm going to stop now." He kept his eyes on the light. "What is going on with you and that woman?" Evan said nothing. "Because I sat in that living room for twenty minutes," James continued, even, unhurried, the way he did everything, "and you barely said six words. And the six words you said you wer

Rhett came home on a Thursday with the energy of a man who had decided the world owed him a celebration. He had won a case. Not just any case — the Harmon Group litigation that had been sitting in arbitration for fourteen months and that three other attorneys had told him was unwinnable. He had won it. Completely. Every count. He walked through the front door and told Nicole this in the hallway with the specific brightness of a man who expected the room to respond to his victories the way it had always responded — immediately and fully. Nicole put down her pen. "That's wonderful," she said. "Congratulations." "I want a party," he said. "Something proper. Invite everyone." She looked at him. "I'll handle it," she said. And she did. --- That was the thing about Nicole Blake that Rhett had always relied on and had never fully understood — she was extraordinarily good at the thing he had asked her to do even when she had no interest in doing it. She made lists. She called the ven

He found her in the campus library on a Wednesday. Third floor. Corner table. The spot she used when she wanted to work without being interrupted, which he knew because he had paid attention even when he had been pretending not to. She had three tabs open on her laptop and a highlighter in her hand and she looked up when he pulled out the chair across from her with the expression of someone who had been expecting something and is waiting to see which version arrives. He sat down. "Hey," he said. "Hey." She put the highlighter down. Waited. "I owe you an apology." She said nothing. Listening. "I've been distant," he said. "Not just the last few weeks — since you knocked on my door. Every time you've shown up I've been somewhere else and I've handled it badly and I'm sorry for that." She looked at him for a long moment. Studying him the way she studied everything — thoroughly, without rushing, not giving anything away until she had seen enough to know what she was looking at. "