Free The Boss by Abigail Barnette

"
    "Forgiven," I interrupted him. The sudden
shift in his mood seemed to have less to do with alcohol than with
me, and I was flattered and slightly overwhelmed. But something
he'd said before wriggled in my brain. "You said you talked to a
work colleague, and that's why you're here?"
    "Rudy," he admitted. "I'm sorry, I know he
works with you, but he's been my best friend for years. I suppose
it does change the dynamic, now that he's working for my company...
but I needed to speak to someone. He’s the only person in my life
who knows about you, how we met. And he's the only person in New
York I trust in personal matters. There was a bit of a custody
battle, and I lost most of my friends here."
    I frowned. "I thought your daughter was
twenty-four."
    "Custody of the friends." He smiled sadly.
"Acquaintances, really. I spend a lot of my time working. Elizabeth
made most of our connections here through her charity work."
    "Ah." I really, really didn't want to talk
about his divorce, almost as much as I didn't want to think about
him being lonely in the city. I remembered the two weeks at NYU
before housing had dropped Holli into my lap, how awful and empty
they had seemed. I didn't need to sympathize with Neil in that way,
because it was just another excuse to get involved with him for a
wrong reason. If we were going to do this, we were going to do it
right.
    I took a breath and carefully considered my
response. "I don't know how I feel about you telling... whatever it
is you told to Rudy. I have to work with him, too. But if you trust
him to keep your secret, I can. You have more to lose in this
situation than I do, I think."
    Neil shook his head. "This is all going much
differently than I expected."
    "You expected you'd show up and we'd fuck?"
The word sent a jolt of tension through me.
    "Can you blame me for trying?" He gave me
that half-smile that melted my bones. "I should go. This was an
inappropriate visit."
    I watched him as he stood and strode toward
the door, and my chest tightened. Okay, so he'd let Eye-Rolling
Rudy in on our dirty little secret from six years ago. I'd told
Holli, hadn't I? And she occasionally worked for the magazine. It
might not have been the same level on the indiscretion scale, but
if he was feeling even a fraction of the emotional confusion I was
suffering from, no wonder he’d needed a sympathetic ear.
    Plus, he wasn't looking for a serious
relationship. I loved sex, and finding someone I wanted to have it
with, someone who was actually good at it and who didn't want to
involve me in their five-year plan, was absurdly difficult in a
city of eight million people. Especially when you were holding
every available man to the impossible standard of being as amazing
as Neil Elwood.
    And here he was, the guy who set the bar for
my sexual expectations. And he wanted exactly what I wanted.
    “Wait,” I said.
    He stopped, his forehead creased with
confusion.
    "If you're down for a little extracurricular
fun, and this isn't some kind of weird male sexual scavenger hunt
wherein you need to fuck your secretary to score points..." My
voice trailed off. I had gotten off track somewhere. I inhaled
through my nose and straightened my spine. "Then fine. Let's just
see each other casually."
    "When you say 'see each other'..." he began
cautiously.
    "I mean have sex. In a friendly, no-strings
kind of way." It never crossed my mind to be worried about whether
or not he'd think it was “slutty” of me to want such an
arrangement. It was strange, but I felt like I could trust him to
be honest with me and not judge me according to some bullshit
misogynistic double standard. Maybe having the kind of sex you have
with a person you think you're never going to see again is the way
all relationships should start.
    "And nothing is going to happen tonight," I
stated firmly. It took a lot of self-control not to whimper during
that sentence. I'd spent so many years fantasizing about him and
only him, and now he was