“Why did you come back here, Reese? The truth. Not some story you want to tell me, or tell yourself.” Corinne leaned a little closer. “Why?”
“When I saw the report about how Stein and Sons was a good prospect for a buyout, I didn’t even think twice. I knew I had to make an offer. It was a good excuse to see you again. That’s it.” The truth felt good.
“So…why were you such an unholy bastard about everything?” She still had that familiar head tilt, the one she’d always given him when she was trying to figure him out…or trying to figure out what to do to him.
He didn’t have a good answer for that. “I’ve spent a lot of years forcing myself to forget or push aside the memories of how we were together. Until I saw you again…”
“And you wanted to see me again.”
“Yes. More than that, I wanted you to see me.” He cleared his throat, wishing it was as easy now as it had been back then to give up to her. “I wanted to show you that I’d been right to leave. If I’d stayed in Lancaster, I would never have become what I am today.”
Corinne tilted her head to look him over. “You wanted to prove that I’d been wrong to ask you to stay.”
“I wanted you to see how wrong you’d been not to want to come with me,” he said.
“Because now you have money and power,” Corinne replied quietly. “As though any of that ever mattered to me.”
She’d always been able to read him. Hearing her say it shamed him, but he lifted his chin anyway, not wanting to show it. Her smile struck him right between the eyes.
She shrugged. “You wanted to show me up and prove a point by coming back here, and you also wanted to show me up and prove a point by making me run those ridiculous reports. Well, are you happy about it now? Do you think you got what you wanted? I am impressed, by the way, with everything you’ve accomplished. But I always knew you would make something of yourself. Even if you didn’t think I did, I always knew.”
As a younger man, he’d taken a lot of comfort from relying on her to guide him. His indiscretions had been minor. Her disciplines as much a game as anything they’d done. He didn’t forget, though, how it had felt to trust her, to know that whatever she was asking of him, he would be able to provide. He’d learned not to need that guidance from someone else, but he’d never forgotten how it had felt to have it.
“This is stupid,” Reese complains. Pen in his hand. Paper in front of him.
Corinne has demanded he write lines.
“You’re a procrastinator,” she tells him calmly from her place at the kitchen sink where she’s peeling potatoes for dinner, a job he was supposed to do but had left so long that she’d lost her patience with him. “If I ask you to do something, I need to know you’ll do it. If you tell someone you’re going to, you need to make sure you do. What good is your word if you don’t keep it?”
He writes the first line, I will not leave my chores undone.
“Writing lines isn’t going to make a difference, Corinne.”
“No, edging your cock won’t make a difference in this, because you like that,” comes the retort. She turns, peeler in hand. “After the two hundredth line, when your hand is cramping and you’re sure you can’t do another one, maybe you’ll remember the next time to keep your word.”
“This is ridiculous!” He writes another line.
She laughs. “Yes, it is.”
He does it anyway. When he has finished, she rubs his sore hand with warm oil and blows him, off and on, for an hour or so. That is a different sort of punishment and torture, but it is not discipline.
They both know the difference.
“Did you?” Corinne asked again. “Get what you wanted?”
He cleared his throat and looked at the desk, then back at her, amused to see that she was blushing a little. “Yes.”
“It’s been a very long time since I did anything like that. Actually, I’ve never done anything like that.” She smoothed her skirt over her knees.
They stared at each other for a few minutes in silence, but it wasn’t awkward. If anything, sitting quietly in her presence reminded him strongly of when they’d been together, when they’d needed no words. When simply being with each other was enough.
“The night you came to my house…”
She smiled. “Yeah?”
“Did you mean what you said?”
Corinne looked scared for a moment. Then slowly, she nodded. “Yes. I did. Everything. Did you?”
“Yes.”
She looked down for a second, and when she looked up, the smile was back, this time with a glimmer of tears in her gaze. “Things are not the same as they were back then. I’m not the same person.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to be.”
“You,” she said firmly, “are not the same person.”
“I hope not.” Reese inched a bit closer, not reaching for her, though he wanted to.
Corinne cleared her throat. “You were very clear when we met in the restaurant that first day to talk about the offer. You are not my boy.”
“I was being a dick—”