Un-Tying the Knot {h.s.}

Chapter 55

I cringe as I reach the door, anger and hurt swelling inside me so fast, it almost makes me sick — fighting the urge to turn back and give him an accusatory look at hearing the pet name leave his mouth after what we had just done against his office door.

But I can't.

I have to get used to it, to accept that the pet names and the softness in his voice are going to be something I have to endure if whatever it is we are doing is going to continue.

He's in a relationship, engaged. Jealousy and hurt aren't really an option for me here, not a plausible one, anyway. That doesn't stop me from feeling it, though.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, forcing my legs to move faster, stepping out of the door as quickly as possible while trying to ignore the slickness still smeared on my thighs.

Harry watches me go, a sigh pulling from his throat, guilt burning in his chest. Talking to his fiancé barely ten minutes after fucking her assistant doesn't sit well with him. None of this really sits well with him, and the voice in his head that's been calling him a coward has started to sing a different tune, one that sounds eerily like selfish prick.

He wonders if maybe Olivia was right. Maybe they should stop this. He and Eleanor have been together for such a long time, and they're engaged for God's sake. He's risking everything he's worked so hard to build, fought so hard to keep together, for what? For a quick fuck against his office door?

The best fuck of his life.

With a woman who made him feel things, both emotionally and physically, that he didn't know were even possible. Even when things were great between him and Eleanor, he never felt this way. And it was really fucking him up inside, the desire to be good and honorable and stick it through with Eleanor versus the magnetic pull of doing what feel so right in his soul.

"Oh good, you're there," he hears Eleanor say, and he hears her sigh rattle across the line. "Did Olivia ever get there?"

Oh she got there all right.

"Yes," he stutters, clearing his throat, letting his large hand smooth across his desk calendar as the guilt eats at him. "She just left."

"Harry, darling," Eleanor says heaving another sigh, and he cringes. Her calling him "darling" is never a good sign. "You and I need to talk."

Definitely not a good sign.

"What about, sugar?" he asks, trying to keep his voice light as his skin starts to crawl, dread settling in the pit of his stomach about the life of his that seemed to be quickly splintering into a double one.

"Have you checked your email this morning?"

"You wanna talk about my emailing habits?" he questions, spinning in his chair to face his computer, swirling the mouse until it comes to life.

"Ha-ha, Harold — you're just too droll," Eleanor says, her voice dripping with sarcasm. Harry can't help but laugh.

"Droll?"

"Harry —"

"Did you seriously just use the word droll?"

"Oh, would you sto-"

"Are we in a Sherlock Holmes novel?"

"That's not the poin-"

Harry chuckles, putting on a stuffy version of his native British accent. "I say Eleanor, you are just too droll for your own go-"

"HARRY, WILL YOU LISTEN TO ME, PLEASE!"

Harry goes quiet, his long fingers playing with the paper edge of his desk calendar nervously, biting his lip as the playfulness fades. The guilt he'd been trying to mask with it begins to gnaw ruthlessly at his insides. As much as Eleanor got on his nerves sometimes, it was conversations like this, where she used stupid words like "droll" that made him remember how he loved her, making him slip back into a time when they were just two kids running around LA like they owned the place, back when nothing was complicated and they just simply loved each other.