Sara looked at the clock. It was noon but she had accomplished next to nothing all morning. She hated to admit it, but she’d been looking at the door to her office all morning. She kept thinking Warrick would come through it at any minute.
Part of her, a big part of her, wanted to see him. Another part of her didn’t know what to say if he did come. It was why she hadn’t gone to see him herself. She was chickening out.
Would he be upset that she’d sent him away the night before? Would things be awkward? Or would he tell her he regretted what had happened? That they needed to go back to just being friends with an occasional kiss? Or friends without the kissing?
Not friends at all? Clearly, sitting and stewing on the matter wasn’t helping her.
She didn’t know what to think about the fact that he hadn’t come to see her at all. Then again, it was entirely possible he was waiting for her to come to him. After all, she was the one who had set the boundary last night. So maybe he was letting her make the next move.
She looked at her desk, searching for some excuse to go up and see him. She didn’t find any answers on her desk, but she stood anyway. She could come up with something on the way up in the elevator. She could always ask him if he wanted her to contact Jax Cutter about developing a prosthesis for lower limb loss.
Or maybe she’d grow a spine on the way up and just say she had come to see him. To ask what next. Nothing like the direct route.
She exited the elevator on the top floor and made her way down the hall toward Warrick’s office. Charlotte sat at her desk outside, as expected. But the double doors of his office stood open. She could see before she even approached Charlotte, that the room is empty. She pasted a smile on her face.
“Is he in?” For the most part, nowadays, if Warrick wasn’t on a conference call or in a meeting, Charlotte would waive Sara past her.
Instead, today she frowned. “No, I’m afraid not. He’s out for the rest of the week.”
Disappointment slammed into Sara. Disappointment and humiliation. Because if he left for the week and hadn’t told her, last night hadn’t meant anything to him. Right? She hadn’t been this confused in a long time.
She nodded, unable to speak past the lump in her throat. She should have known. It was stupid really, for her to read more into it. They said right from the start they would be friends that would kiss occasionally. So what if kissing had moved into sex? That didn’t mean that the sex meant any more than the kisses had.
“Do you want me to try to reach him for you?” Charlotte asked, a hint of something in her voice that Sara couldn’t place. Pity?
Wonderful. Now she’d gone from self-pity to pity from others. Was that a move up or a move down? She really didn’t know. But she didn’t like it. She remembered that saying about changing your reaction to something when you couldn’t change the thing itself. That’s what she needed to do. She couldn’t control what had happened with Warrick. She couldn’t go back and make changes but she could change her response.
“No,” she said shaking her head, trying for an air of indifference. “I just had a question for him, but it can wait.”
She turned before Charlotte could see through her bullshit, but she had a feeling the woman wasn’t fooled. Charlotte had the ability to see through any smoke screen.
Sara walked stiffly back to the elevator and got herself to her office before she let the tears fall. She honestly felt like she was crying over so many things at once, and maybe it was time she’d let herself mourn a few things.
This wasn’t just about Warrick. She was crying because Mitchell had walked out on her all those years ago, opening a wound in her that would probably never heal. She was crying because last night she had let herself believe, even for the smallest of moments, that maybe she could have a normal relationship. She was crying because she knew deep down she had fallen for Warrick Staunton. She had fallen for him in a big way, and now it looked like her heart would be stomped on once again.