It was February 17, there was dirty, slushy snow all over the ground, and London Fashion Week was less than one week away. Like everyone else, Jules was thrown into frantic preparations while also trying to train Allie to hold the fort while they were gone.
Vivian wasn’t slowing down either. Their morning rides had no more silences; Vivian talked from the moment she got in the car to the moment she sat at her desk.
The good news was that now Allie was the one responsible for getting Vivian’s morning coffee to her. The bad news was that now Jules arrived at the office with Vivian every single morning, and people had started to notice.
Jules felt the sting of raised eyebrows and muttered comments. Now she understood what Vivian had meant at Christmas about disliking passive-aggressiveness. What was the big deal? So Jules showed up to work with her boss. Who cared?
It wasn’t as if anything inappropriate was going on. At all.
It was actually refreshing when a wide-eyed Allie asked her right up front, “Why do you always arrive at work with Vivian? Do you have it timed that well?”
Typical. Allie had come to be in awe of the way Jules kept up with Vivian.
“Er, no,” Jules admitted. “Ben picks me up every morning before he gets her. It’s so she can start giving me instructions right away.”
“Wow,” Allie breathed.
Right then, Vivian breezed in. Like everyone else, she had to be exhausted from the frenetic pace. More exhausted, considering her pregnancy, but she never showed it. “Bring me the latest prints from Creative,” she said, and Allie scurried away.
“Confirm lunch with Stan,” Vivian added to Jules in a low voice.
Jules couldn’t quite speak, so she nodded and smiled brightly at Vivian as if nothing were wrong at all.
Without another word or look of acknowledgment, Vivian headed into her office.
Jules tried not to gag on her latest hot, miserable surge of jealousy. She’d never felt anything like it before. It was worse than the time she’d had acid reflux in middle school.
Love my new special project. Just love it to pieces.
How was it possible that Vivian already had a new guy just a few months after Robert had left her, in the middle of a divorce while pregnant? Was she that desperate to have someone else on her arm at parties? Apparently so. Shit.
There might be less to it than that. The bastard really was attractive. And Jules could tell from the way Vivian looked when she got in the car in the morning that she’d stopped throwing up and felt a lot better.
In fact, her research told her that after the first trimester, women often got their libidos back. Sometimes they got more than their fair share. Maybe Vivian didn’t want someone at her side in public—maybe she wanted something a lot less complicated.
It was so unfair. Stan Oppenheimer didn’t, couldn’t know, Vivian. He didn’t spend all day in her back pocket. But he got to have this?
And what was Vivian thinking? This was how she got in trouble every time: getting together with men who didn’t understand her and who became threatened by her success. Didn’t she know by now that it wouldn’t work?
So who would work? she asked herself with gritted teeth. You? Get real.
Jules wasn’t entitled to anything, and it didn’t matter who Vivian got her rocks off with. It would never be Jules, and that was fine. It was good. And it would be ridiculous to think things could ever be different.
Somehow telling herself that a hundred times in a row didn’t help.
That afternoon, as usual, Vivian returned from her little lunch date looking extremely pleased with herself. Probably nobody but Jules could see it, but Vivian was definitely…satisfied by something. Sated, even. She hadn’t looked this happy since the pizza.
Because she was a glutton for punishment, Jules waited until they were alone and stammered, “D-do you want me to make another reservation? Appointment? With him?” She might as well beat Vivian to the punch and start trying to numb herself right away.
Vivian frowned. “Did I ask you to?”
“No,” Jules croaked, wishing Stan Oppenheimer into the hottest part of hell.
“What I want you to do,” Vivian said acidly, “is check on the London hotel reservations.”
“I did that while you were at lunch,” she said, trying hard not to think about her room—no, Robert’s room—no, the second bedroom—at Vivian’s London townhouse. “We’ve all got rooms lined up.”
“‘We’?”
“Well,” Jules said with a forced laugh, “not you, obviously. You’ll be in the townhouse. I meant…”
Vivian gave her a flat look. “So will you.”
After a moment, Jules said, “Oh.”
“Make sure there’s enough room for Charlotte in the front row at the Ashish show.”
Vivian strode away, and Jules took a deep breath before calling the Ashish organizers and then the hotel to cancel her room. Because she wouldn’t be there anymore.
Then she found herself staring into space. So she was going back to the townhouse after all. It was stupid to feel happy. It would be stupid to feel anything at all. It wasn’t a reason to be happy—it wasn’t good, it wasn’t fair of Vivian to get Jules’s hopes up like that, whether she meant to or not.
Because she didn’t think she could take it—living in Vivian’s house again, talking to her at four in the morning again, making her breakfast and seeing her bare toes again, and knowing that none of it was for her. That even if Stan Oppenheimer wasn’t in the picture, it still wouldn’t be for her. That she couldn’t afford to get used to it, no matter how much she wanted to.
“Hey, Jules?” Allie said.
She jumped. She hadn’t heard her return from her errands.
But now Allie nibbled at her lower lip, which made her look like a worried, redheaded rabbit.
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Jules snapped, and when Allie’s face crumpled, she felt like a monster. “Fine,” she repeated more gently. “I just, um, have a headache.”
“Oh gosh!” Allie dug into her tan Chloé bucket bag, which Jules had envied for days. “Here. I have some ibuprofen.”
With no reason not to, Jules took the pills. Might as well, since she really did have a nasty headache coming on. “Thanks.”
Maybe a headache was better than heartache. Too bad she had a mortal case of that too.