Chapter Seven

Friends

Nina

The presentation went well, and they asked some questions, although nothing I hadn’t been able to handle. George, the finance guy, looked tense and nervous, which was understandable. I would not have been happy if I were in his shoes.

Not that I’d ever wear shoes like that because they were fugly, but still.

“When would you like to meet?” I asked Matthias and opened my calendar.

This was all for show and I had zero meetings scheduled, but I needed to do something to push back the wildly inappropriate image suddenly floating around in my brain.

Gray boxer briefs. And nothing else.

I cleared my throat and tried to look calm and in control.

“Friday,” he said, looking at his own phone. “Six-thirty.”

In the morning? Yikes.

Or wasn’t it more likely he meant in the evening? Double yikes.

“Okay,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about the timing, but my week is packed. I hope I’m not destroying your plans for the evening?”

“Not a problem,” I said casually.

Did he seriously want to have a status meeting at six-thirty in the evening on a Friday?

“I can see if my assistant could shuffle some things around,” he offered.

“You’re the boss. It’s not a problem,” I reiterated.

And it wouldn’t be. It wasn’t as if I had a weekend of debauchery planned.

“Right. Let’s clarify this, so everyone knows,” he said calmly. “I’m not your boss. I’ll still want regular updates, but you don’t report to me. You report to Jacob.”

I’d known that, but hadn’t been sure if he did, and had not expected him to announce it in front of everyone.

“Friday evening is fine, Matthias,” I said. “I don’t have anything planned.”

“Good,” he said.

Then he smiled, and the way his eyes lit up looked really good on him, so before I could stop myself, I smiled back.

As I walked next to George toward the elevators, I wondered if agreeing to do Jacob this favor hadn’t, in fact, been incredibly stupid.

Friday night meetings with Matthias was probably not a good way to get over the goddamned crush I had on him.

 

***

 

“A bunch of us are having drinks after work today, do you want to come?”

I smiled at Len but shook my head.

“Sorry, can’t make it.” I made a small face and rolled my eyes. “Status meeting.”

“Bummer. Text me if you want to join us later?”

“Sure,” I said even though I knew that I wouldn’t.

He disappeared, and I stared at my screen for a while.

Matthias and I had had four status meetings in the two weeks I'd been with the company, which was three more than I'd expected, and the meetings hadn't exactly been what I expected either.

The first had been short because Matthias’ phone had cut the whole thing off after less than ten minutes. He’d answered with a sigh, muttered something angrily, and closed the call with a curt, “Fuck it, I’ll be there.” Then he’d apologized, shared that something had come up, and rescheduled for the week after. I assumed it had been his wife who likely didn’t appreciate him having late meetings on a Friday night. The Jackie I remembered from my freshman year in college would not have accepted it anyway.

The second meeting had been weird. We’d gone through what I was working on and how George was helping me in a way that was more a hindrance than actual assistance, which I assured him I would handle. I’d tried to keep it businesslike and professional but had gotten a distinct feeling that his mind was on something else.

When we met the third time, I started to wonder if Mr. Matthias Jones, CEO of a rather large multinational company, was ever so slightly bat-shit crazy. There was no reason for us to meet since I had no particular update to give him, so we would have nothing to talk about.

I informed him of this, and he grinned and told me to please come anyway, and we’d have a cup of coffee. We ended up having coffee for almost an hour, and I’d again tried to keep it impersonal. Anything else would send a very wrong signal to a man who was sort of my boss and also married. It had been nice, though. We’d talked about Jacob and our kids and running. I was faster than him, which made him laugh, but I saw the look in his eyes and knew he’d push himself harder. Whatever because so would I.

Then Matthias sent me an email asking if we could meet in his office Friday night at six-thirty, and I should have told him that no, this we could not do because I had a life, and this life was full of plans.

It would have been a lie, though, and I sent a short email back confirming that we’d meet as per his request.

Perhaps I should cancel and go out for drinks with Len and the others instead?

I decided that it would be rude to cancel, but that I’d use the opportunity to inform Matthias that we really should cut back on the status meetings. I still cringed when I thought about how I’d slid down a very slippery slope with my former colleague, and I would not do something like that again.

“Hey,” I said and stuck my head into his office.

He was on the phone but waved a hand to indicate that I should enter his surprisingly cozy surroundings. I’d expected it to be the usual power suite with a large desk, gray walls, and a couple of custom-made prints of the company logo, preferably in a black and white retro style with a flash of red or bright blue. He’d instead opted for a smaller desk, some cabinets to the side, and a large seating area with a big sofa and a couple of chairs. When I walked in the first time, it took me less than a second to realize that Matthias had indeed decorated his room on the island himself. The color scheme was exactly the same, except the walls were cream-colored instead of white.

There were a couple of familiar paintings on one wall, and I smiled when I saw the bold strokes and how the vibrant colors blended in a painfully beautiful way.

Matthias rolled his eyes, listened for a while, and frowned at whatever the one on the other end of the line said. Then he muttered something that sounded like a curt goodbye and tossed the phone on the low table with an annoyed sigh.

“Problems?” I asked.

“Aren’t there always?” he asked back with a wry grin.

“Let’s start,” I said instead of commiserating with him because there were in my experience indeed always problems involved when running a large corporation. “I’m sure you want to get home to your family,” I added breezily, to make it perfectly clear that we weren’t going to do anything but discuss the job Jacob was paying me to do.

He’d been in the process of waving toward the couch with one hand, presumably to indicate that we should sit down, but froze and blinked a few times in surprise.

“I –” He continued the wave, and we sat down. “Didn’t Dad tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“It’s just me?”

“Where?” I asked stupidly.

“Nina. I’m not married anymore. I live alone.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but my mind was full of absolutely nothing to say, so I closed it again, and we looked at each other in silence for a while.

“Okay,” I said finally.

He looked sincere, but I frowned and wondered if I could really trust him on this. He hadn’t mentioned his wife when we spent time together on the island, and I thought we connected, but had been ridiculously wrong about that.

Perhaps I was wrong this time too.

“I’m divorced,” he said.

“Okay,” I repeated and wondered if I should perhaps open my computer and start talking about the project plan I’d created with George’s Financial Planning Director, who was a pretty awesome red-headed woman.

Matthias frowned, and then a slow grin lit up his eyes.

“You want to see the papers,” he said with a short laugh.

“Not really,” I said slowly, but it only made him laugh again.

“You’re just like Dad,” he said with another chuckle. “Jacob made me show them over facetime.”

I was about to reiterate that I didn’t need to see Matthias’ actual goddamned divorce papers, although I would not share how reassuring it felt that Jacob had seen them, but his phone rang, and he mumbled something which sounded suspiciously like the f-bomb.

“One sec,” he said and raised his phone. “Yeah,” he answered impatiently.

I meant to sit down and wait for him to finish what sounded like a heated discussion about investment levels but noticed a paper on the floor, so I walked over to pick it up and place it on his desk. I hadn’t meant to look at it, but it was from a medical clinic, and it was right there in my hand.

And it shared that Matthias apparently did not carry any sexually transmitted diseases.

The divorced and apparently perfectly healthy CEO stood by the large windows with his back toward me, so I murmured something to no one at all about pretending that I hadn’t seen it. I was pretty sure he hadn’t intended for me to lay my eyes on that particular paper and put it with its front down on his desk. Then I walked back to the couch and sat down, breezy casualness personified.

He threw the phone on the table by the couch again, and I got another annoyed sigh.

“It has a small but nifty button,” I informed him.

“What?”

“Matthias, you can turn it off.” When he just stared at me, I added, “Or, so I’m told.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked, did not wait for my answer, and walked over to a table by the far end of the room. “Let’s eat.”

“Eat?” I echoed.

“Yeah. Figured we’d be hungry, so I asked Dane to sort something out.”

“Dane?”

I really should stop repeating his every word, and I would, as soon as he started making sense.

“My assistant. He went Japanese on us, so I hope you like sushi.”

I did, and I wasn’t quite sure what happened, but since the status report was incredibly short, we started discussing my new deck and his old one which needed to be replaced. From there, we moved on to other topics, and it ended up being one of the best evenings I’d had in a very long time.

The connection was there again like it had been on the island. He wasn’t flirting, exactly, but there was something in his eyes that sent a flutter through my belly.

“Len said something about how you’re not dating?” he asked casually while he made coffee for us.

“I absolutely don’t,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

I was pretty sure that if he’d asked me, I would have made a teeny-tiny exception to my self-imposed rule.

“I don’t either,” he murmured and handed me what smelled like a fantastic espresso. “Jackie moved out a long while ago, but I still figured I’d wait a while.” He opened a drawer and turned to look at me. “Chocolate?”

“You have chocolate in your office?” I asked.

“Dane stocks this place with things he deems essential. Apparently...” He frowned and squinted at a small dark gray square. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that he put on, and smiled at me. “Apparently, dark chocolate with pieces of raspberry is essential.”

“Huh,” I managed to say, and even that was a struggle.

He looked insanely hot.

Well, he always looked hot, but those glasses pushed him over the edge and far, far into the insane zone.

“Or sea-salt,” he added. “Which do you want?”

“Raspberry,” I told him even though I’d meant to say sea-salt, and focused on the complicated task of unwrapping it.

“It gets lonely sometimes,” Matthias said and reached for another piece of chocolate. “Not dating, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

He was right about that. I wasn’t big on huge, fancy parties, but I liked dressing up sometimes, and I enjoyed interacting with someone who wasn’t me, myself or I.

“We could keep each other company?” he asked casually. “Hang out sometimes, go running, that sort of thing?”

“Sure,” I said, and tried to cover up how the thought of hanging out with him sent another swarm of silly butterflies though my gut because I wasn’t a teenager, so I didn’t want to behave like one. “I could take care of Pippin for you when you need it. I miss having a dog.”

“We could walk him together tomorrow?” he countered. He was still smiling, but his eyes had sharpened, and his gaze focused on me for a beat. Then he shrugged and added, “If you’re going to have him at your place, you’ll need to get to know him.”

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

Being friends with Matthias was not how I'd expected the evening to end, but it would be good to have someone to spend time with. I was getting to know my neighbors, but most of them were quite a bit older than me, or young families with children and Layla spent more time than usual at the non-profit where she'd volunteered for years.

When I got back home, it was past midnight, and I should be tired, but I wasn't. While I removed my makeup, I thought about how I'd felt when I texted with my now former colleague but immediately realized that the jittery feeling bubbling through me wasn't at all the same.

I might want to rip Matthias’ nicely tailored suit off and push him down on the dark blue couch in his office, but I wouldn’t. We’d be friends instead, and that would be fine too because I liked him a lot. He was intelligent and entertaining, and he made me laugh, so what I felt wasn’t that silly and slightly desperate feeling, which in all honestly had mostly been a little bit sad.

I felt happy in a way I hadn’t for a long time.

I was also stirred up after spending an evening with a man who had starred in numerous fantasies in the past few months, so we’d be friends, but I decided to let him inspire me one more time.

Pleasure ran through me as I started moving my fingers, and the orgasm hit me embarrassingly fast. Though the waves I imagined him moving over me and in me, and when I moaned softly, it was that sharp, focused look in his eyes that was on my mind.

 

***

Matthias

“Shit,” he grunted, moved his hand faster, and put a hand on the tiles to hold himself up as he let go.

When he’d washed off the results of another six o’clock masturbation session, he stepped out of the shower and stared at his dog, who was staring right back at him.

“Jealous?” he said and felt a little ridiculous when he smirked at the animal who had no clue what he’d just watched.

It wasn’t as if Pippin hadn’t seen this before, though. Almost two months had passed since his asinine suggestion that he and Nina should be friends, which meant that he’d probably jerked off more than a hundred times thinking about her.

“Jesus,” he muttered. “I have got to sort this out.”

His hair fell over his forehead, and since he’d inherited his father’s thick and unruly mop, he made a mental note to find the time to get a haircut. He’d seen a barbershop on his way to Nina’s place. It looked like it had some serious old school vibes, but considering the neighborhood, it was probably filled with young hipsters who wanted to get conditioner massaged into their beards or something. It might be fun to try a new place, though, so he decided to stop by and see if they had time for him when he anyway was going over to Nina, which he was on a highly regular basis these days.

He scooped up yogurt, added granola, and hit the button on the coffee maker, not sure if he should curse or laugh helplessly at the damned situation he’d put himself in.

It had been a long fucking time since he asked someone out on a first date, but he’d fully intended to end their first status meeting with a casual invitation to dinner. Then Jackie had called out of the blue and shared that she needed some things from the house. Since she didn’t have keys to the place anymore, he could apparently either show up within fifteen minutes or pay to have the back door repaired.

Dane had rescheduled the meeting, but by then, he’d heard from Len how Nina wasn’t dating and how she’d turned both his friend and a few men in her neighborhood down. When he thought about it, inviting her to dinner or whatever during office hours would make it hard for her to say no, which made it something only a douche would do, so he’d revised his course of action. Then he found out that she didn’t know how he’d pulled himself together and gotten out of his marriage, and was glad he hadn't said anything.

Being friends would be good too, he decided. They’d start like that, and he’d move them out of the friend-zone when the time was right which he fully expected to be within a few days.

That had been the plan, but he hadn’t expected to enjoy hanging out with her as much as he did. The weeks flew by quickly, and he’d told himself that taking them into sexual territory could wait a little while longer because she might say no to that, and then he might lose someone who quickly had become his go-to person.

His dick disagreed vehemently, however, and did not want to wait at all.

After a year of his dick barely twitching, he suddenly seemed to be hard as a rock most of the time. It had gotten to the point where the sound of Nina’s heels clicking down the corridor toward his office made him get up to put his jacket on and button it.

He finished his breakfast, dropped Pippin off at the daycare, and headed into the office. Dane waited for him with a thick pile of papers to sign when he got there, and a list of people he should call, which he did. Then he indulged himself by spending a few hours with the commercial operations team, going through campaigns for the release of their newest product.

After that, he had meetings to attend.

“Fuck it all,” he muttered to himself and shocked the shit out of his assistant by sharing that he was leaving.

“Leaving?” Dane echoed, cleared his throat, and added, “Okay, but you have –”

“I know,” Matthias said calmly. “Status report from legal, follow up on the plans for the Minnesota extension, and a discussion with HR about headcount development.”

All of it suddenly sounded incredibly uninspiring, and none of it was urgent.

“Yes,” Dane confirmed, narrowed his eyes slightly and tilted his head to the side. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah,” Matthias said but couldn’t hold a wry grin back. “Gonna play hooky for a few hours, that’s all.”

Dane burst out laughing and made a shooing motion with his hands.

“Get out of here. I’ll sort out the meetings.”

“You should go home too.”

“Will do. I’ll go for a run, which means I’ll try and fail at beating your recent lap times.”

Matthias laughed as he drove toward Nina’s neighborhood, knowing that Dane would be faster than him but not by much. He was in okay shape again, and the run he and Nina usually did together on Sunday evenings had gone from pitiful to relaxing and fun.

There was a free spot right outside the barber he’d planned to stop by, which he decided to take as a sign, so he parked and entered the retro-style place.

“Well, hello there,” a man roughly his own age said and grinned so widely Matthias worried his face would split.

“Hey.”

“I’m Tony, what can I do for you?”

“I’m gonna guess you cut hair,” Matthias said.

“Not yours.”

“Huh?”

“Longer hair will suit you much better,” Tony said and rounded the counter.

To Matthias’ surprise, the hairdresser or barber or whatever the man felt like labeling himself as suddenly turned him around toward one of the big mirrors.

“Look,” the man said.

Then he started fussing with Matthias’ hair, which had been light brown but now was liberally sprinkled with gray.

“I’m not sure longer hair would –”

“Trust me,” Tony said calmly. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time. A bit longer but cut in layers. You won’t look like a hippie.”

“His father does,” another man said.

Matthias turned, wondering how a simple haircut had ended up in a bizarre situation where one man was pushing his hair around, and someone else seemed to be acquainted with his dad.

“What?” he asked and felt laughter bubbling up his throat.

“You have the same eyes.”

“I repeat; What?” Matthias said and narrowed his brows.

He did indeed have his father’s eyes, but very few noticed.

“I’m Luke. Friend of Nina’s. Met Jacob at her place a while back.”

Ah.

He’d heard about Luca Moretti and had met the man’s mother in the grocery store. He had also heard Nina and Layla giggle like silly teenagers about the man and his handsome appearance.

“Huh,” he said, which sounded dumb, so he added, “I’m Matthias. I’ve met your mother.”

“Everyone in the whole damned world has met my mom,” Luke said with a sigh.

“You have sharp eyes. Not a lot of people see the resemblance between Dad and me.”

“Been a cop a long fucking time.” Luke grinned and added with a shrug, “I’ve also seen you with Nina a couple of times, so the need for investigative excellence was limited.”

Tony started laughing and waved his hands in the air in a surprisingly girly gesture.

“Coffee!” he shouted, and someone in the back called out that it would be served immediately.

“I really need a haircut,” Matthias said, and tried to push his hair back into something that looked less messy.

This only got him a slap on his hand, and then Tony leaned in.

“I’m gonna guess that you aren’t gay,” he said with a grin, “Which means I’m not gonna ask you on a date. I still hope I can interest you in a...” he leaned in even closer, but Matthias held his ground and didn’t move back. “Goatee,” Tony finished with a laugh.

A goatee?

“Beard,” Luke rumbled.

“What?”

“Just saying.”

“Hmm,” Tony said, stepped back and pursed his mouth. “Yes, cousin. You are as always infuriatingly right. A beard would look better.”

A beard?

“I just wanted –”

“Just give in,” Luke said and handed him a cup of coffee. “Or run for the hills.”

“It’ll look good,” Tony said.

“What’ll look good?”

Matthias turned and blinked a few times.

“Len?”

“Yeah, yeah. I left the office early when I heard the boss-man had done the same,” Len said with a grin. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

“Lenny, my darling,” Tony said and stretched his arms out. “Let’s chop it off, finally. You’ll have droves of women following you around.”

“He’s getting a haircut, but I can’t?” Matthias couldn’t help asking.

“You get a beard instead,” Luke said calmly. “Be happy with that.”

“You’re growing a beard?” Len asked and sat down in front of the mirror.

“Apparently.”

“It’ll look good.”

“Huh,” was all Matthias said because there really wasn’t anything else to say.

Then he sat down and had a cup of the best coffee he’d had in a very long time. Luke turned out to like skiing, so they talked about the long weekend in the mountains Matthias and Len had planned, and a while later, he found out that Tony was faster than him on a five-mile run. They discussed sports and shared details about their houses, which all of them seemed to need a lot of maintenance.

As the afternoon slowly rolled by, Matthias relaxed and wondered silently why he hadn’t done something like that in the past many years. He should have spent more time with his friends, although when he thought about it, he wasn’t sure who his friends were anymore. He spent time with his brother, but Jake was ten years younger and had kids who kept him busy. There were colleagues he liked. Business associates.

The only real friends he could think of were Len...

And Nina.