Corinne laughed a little self-consciously. “Yeah. That.”
“Hey, we all have them. Some of us have kinkier kinks, that’s all. And don’t you think he feels the same way? He remembers. Why else do you think he’s being such an asshole? I mean, he’s acting in the exact opposite way he did when you were together, right? He’s being all bossy and stuff.”
“He’s beyond bossy,” Corinne said with a scowl.
“Would it bother you so much if it wasn’t him? If some random dude had come in to buy the company and was throwing all this bullshit your way?”
Corinne shrugged. “I wouldn’t like it no matter who was doing it.”
“‘Corinne does not take direction well.’” Her sister cackled, pointing a finger. “That was on your report card in the fifth grade, remember?”
“Yes. Yours was ‘Caitlyn has difficulty coloring inside the lines.’”
Both sisters laughed. Corinne finally gave up on eating the soggy pasta. Caitlyn snagged another piece of garlic bread from the basket and used it to point at her sister.
“Point is, we are who we are, and we’ve probably always been that way. So no, you wouldn’t be happy if anyone had come in and started ordering you around, but it’s particularly egregious that it’s Reese.”
“Ooh. Good word.”
Caitlyn fluttered her lashes. “Thank you.”
“He used to be my boy,” Corinne said, suddenly angrier than she’d allowed herself to be. “My fucking boy, Caitlyn. He…he was mine.”
Her voice trailed into sadness.
“Now he’s just fucking with me, and I hate it. Not because he’s trying to prove to me he’s the boss or whatever. But that he would take what we had and try to erase it that way.” Corinne swallowed against the lump in her throat. “I mean, the whole reason we broke up was because he wasn’t able to commit. We’d been together for two years, I was just about to start working for Stein and Sons; everything could’ve been great. But he was dead set on running away from everything. Even me. When I asked him to meet me one last time so we could try to work on it, he never showed up. And he knew the consequences of that, Caitlyn, because I’d warned him if he didn’t show that we were through. That was it, he walked out on me, and he never came back. It was ugly and harsh and horrible, but it was also fifteen years ago. What’s the point of coming back around now to rub my face in how much he is not ever going to bend to me? What’s the fucking point, if it’s not to hurt me?”
“Maybe you should ask him that.”
“Ugh. Gross. That’s almost as bad as asking him why he can’t just love me. I’ll make sure to be drunk with my makeup smeared all over the place too, because that’s classy.” Her phone buzzed from where she’d put it on the counter to charge. When she didn’t get up to answer it, Corinne shrugged at her sister’s look. “What? The kids are with me. You’re here. Who else would be calling me?”
She got up anyway to look at it, her mouth twisting into a sneer when she saw the caller ID. Caitlyn’s brows rose as Corinne put the phone to her ear with a muttered greeting. Then her sister put her hands over her mouth to cover up the laughter.
“Reese,” Corinne said. “What do you want?”
Chapter Twenty
She should not have agreed to this.
The long farm lane of her memory was still there, though it had been paved into a much wider street lined with big houses on small lots. The house at the end was the same though. Two stories, white painted siding, green shingles on the roof and matching shutters. The barn and outbuildings were gone. She parked by the side porch, noticing that it looked a little newer than the rest of the house, as though it had been recently repaired.
She sat in her car longer than she needed to. Fussing with her lipstick and hair. Her clothes, her armor, were more casual than what she’d been wearing to work the past week, but only because showing up at his house late on a Friday night wearing a pencil skirt and kitten heels would’ve been weird. She’d settled for the pair of leggings that made her ass look fantastic, along with a flattering striped top and ballet flats. Now she was second guessing the choices though. She didn’t want to look like this was a…well, a date.
The truth was, Corinne wasn’t sure what, exactly, this was meant to be.
Reese opened the door almost before she’d knocked. “Hi. Come in.”
She waited until he’d moved aside before she entered into the small but cheery kitchen, decorated in colors that had been trendy so long ago they’d gone from outdated to vintage to trendy again. She hung her purse and coat on the back of a kitchen chair without waiting to be asked. Then she turned to face him.
“So,” she said.
“So, I guess we should…do you want something to drink?”
“I have to drive home.” Of course she had to drive home. She wasn’t going to sleep over. Fuck, why had she even said such a thing?