Todos los capítulos de HE PAID ME TO FORGET MY SON…NOW I WORK FOR HIM: Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

🌹TESSA🌹 Mrs. Brooks did not say anything in the elevator. Neither did I. Wayne was still asleep against my shoulder, his weight heavy and warm, his breath slow and even against my neck, and I kept one hand pressed flat against the back of his head the way I had been doing since we stepped out of my office, angling his face into the curve of my neck, keeping him tucked away from everything. It had become automatic by now, this particular kind of holding, the kind that was also hiding. Eight years of it and my body still knew exactly how to arrange itself around him without being asked. The elevator descended in silence. Mrs. Brooks stood with her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes forward, her posture the same careful uprightness it always was, but something in her was different this morning. The clipped efficiency she wore like a second blazer was still there, but underneath it something had gone softer, something she had not bothered to put all the way back after Raymond's

♠️RAYMOND♠️The restaurant Melisa had chosen was the kind of place that did not put prices on the menu because the people who ate there did not need to ask.White tablecloths pressed to the point where they looked like they had never been touched. Candles in low glass holders casting everything in that particular amber that made people look warmer and softer than they actually were.Melisa had chosen well. She always chose well. That was one of the things about her that I had never been able to fault.She was already at the table when I came through the door. She had worn something dark that left her shoulders bare and dipped low enough at the front that the choice had been deliberate, considered, decided on in front of a mirror with a specific outcome in mind. Her hair was down around her shoulders. Her makeup was the kind that took real time to achieve while appearing not to have taken any time at all.She looked up when she saw me crossing the room toward her and she smiled. I sat

♠️RAYMOND♠️I walked away from her faster than necessary. Out of my own office, my strides not breaking once.Shit. I shouldn't have looked at her. Was it a mistake? I still can't tell.I blocked my nose with my palm as I got into the car. Oliver was already in his seat. He didn't ask for a destination. He looked at the blood on my hand and pulled straight out of the gates.I kept my head down the whole ride, palm pressed hard against my face, and I did not try to explain it to him because I did not have an explanation that made sense even to me. The pain had dulled into something worse than the spike it started as, a pressure sitting behind my eye that would not let go, and every time I shut my eyes I saw the same blur. Light. Sound. Her.I don't remember most of the drive.Eleanor was already coming down the corridor when I walked in, which meant someone had called ahead of me, though I hadn't told anyone to call. She took one look at my collar and didn't bother with hello."Sit.""

♠RAYMOND♠️ Eleanor's voice did not stay in that room. It came with me into the elevator, into the car, sat in my chest the whole ride like something I had swallowed wrong and could not bring back up. Spend time with her. Let it happen naturally. Do not force it. Oliver did not ask where. I did not tell him. I sat there turning the instruction over, trying to find some version of it I could actually carry out, and every version I built collapsed the second I looked at it directly. She worked for me. That was the whole problem. Every hour she spent near me already had a shape to it before either of us opened our mouths. Coffee delivered at a set time. A schedule read from a tablet at nine, the same order every morning, the same distance held the entire time. If I decided when the two of us would spend time together and wrote it down somewhere the way I wrote down everything else that mattered to me, it would not be what Eleanor meant. It would be another item on a list. Controlle

🌹TESSA🌹I froze the second his mouth touched mine.For one full second I did not move at all. I stood there with his weight braced against me and his lips pressed to mine and every part of me locked in place, waiting for my own brain to tell me what to do with this.It did not tell me to pull away.Five seconds. That was as long as it took before something in me gave out, before I stopped holding myself rigid against him and let my mouth answer his instead. I tasted the whiskey first, sharp and warm, and underneath it something that was just him, something I had not tasted in eight years and somehow still remembered exactly, the way you remember the smell of a house you grew up in even after everything in it has been sold off.The club came back to me in pieces. The heat of a crowded room. His hand finding the small of my back the same way it was finding my waist right now, pulling me in like there was no version of that night where he let me stand any further away from him than thi