Just a Girl - Becky Monson Page 0,77

do? I mean, what if we get caught out to dinner or something?”

“Maybe . . . maybe we just hang out at our places for now. Just”—he held out a hand to stop the protest I was about to make—“just for a bit. I know it’s not right of me to ask. But can you be okay with that?”

Could I? I wasn’t so sure. Except that in this scenario, I got to be with Henry. But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted to scream from the rooftops and also take him home to show off to my mom.

“Maybe it would help me if you explained what happened back in London,” I said. I needed to know. It was this invisible one-sided barrier between us.

Henry stared at our connected hands for a beat and then grabbed my other one. His gaze moved to mine.

He let out a slow breath. “I was hired as an editor when I first met Claire. She’d been at the station for about a year before I started. We clicked straight-away. She was funny, and attractive, and we worked well together. We were friends at first, but then one night after work, some of us from the station met up at a pub, and things . . . changed.”

I felt a little tinge of jealousy hit me in the gut, and I internally rolled my eyes. How could I feel something like that for someone I didn’t know and who was part of the past? I also instantly pictured this Claire person as Moriarty, which was unfounded, but it made her even worse in my head.

“Things were great, for a while, actually,” Henry continued. “We were . . . happy, I s’pose. Everyone at work thought we were so great together. They cheered us on, thought the whole thing was ‘cute.’ I took her home to meet my mum and dad, my sister and my sister’s family. I thought . . . well, I thought she might be someone I could see a life with, that I could have a life with. Looking back, there were signs, of course. She could lose her temper sometimes and could be cruel to people occasionally. But I thought myself in love, so I would talk myself out of the uneasy feelings I’d get when that would happen.”

I already hated this Claire girl so much, and he hadn’t even gotten to the meat of the story, the real reason for me to dislike her.

“We’d been together for about five months, and we were both up for promotion, and . . . I got the job. Associate producer. I was chuffed, and . . . so was my dad. For the first time in a long time. It felt good, you know, to make him proud.”

I rubbed circles on the tops of his hands with my thumbs. I remembered the conversation we’d had on our last date. When we were sharing our secrets. I remembered what he’d said about being a disappointment to his dad.

“Claire . . . she wasn’t happy about the promotion; it caused some tension between us. I didn’t know what to do—we’d both applied for the job, but in the end even though I was new at the station, I’d started in the industry before her and had more experience. What made it most awkward was that I was now her boss. The lines between our working relationship and our romantic relationship started to blur. And not just for me. Rumors started at work about how I was too hard on her, or too soft. I didn’t think I was soft; in fact, I think I was a little overcritical about things at work because of our relationship. Looking back, I can see I got a lot of things wrong.”

Henry paused to take a deep breath. “Things between Claire and me went downhill from there. I started to feel like maybe we needed to break up to save our working relationship. Again, not the best reasoning on my part. I should have been able to compartmentalize better, I should have been able to separate the two. But I couldn’t. And I honestly thought—because things had gotten so bad between us—that when I told her we had to end things, she’d say that she was feeling the same way. But instead she was incredibly angry. She told me that the promotion had made me a different person.” Henry looked down at our intertwined hands. “Maybe she was