The Invitation

Stella wasn’t at work when I arrived on Monday morning. I walked by her office three times before my nine o’clock meeting. When she still hadn’t shown up, I shot off a quick text.

Hudson: Everything okay?

The lack of my phone buzzing caused more of a distraction than if it had rung loudly during the presentation I was supposed to be watching. I couldn’t seem to focus. The other night after Stella left, I’d managed to talk myself into thinking I’d overanalyzed shit—that it was just a headache, and everything would be back to normal by Sunday morning. But obviously that hadn’t happened.

By the time my meeting ended, it was almost eleven, and I still hadn’t heard from Stella. Her office door was locked, and the receptionist said she hadn’t seen her today, so I headed down to talk to my sister.

“Hey. Have you talked to Stella today? She’s not in yet.”

My sister stopped writing and looked up. “Hi, Hudson. It’s nice to see you this lovely morning, too. I’m doing well, thanks for asking.”

“I’m not in the mood…”

She frowned. “What crawled up your butt?”

“Can you just tell me if you’ve spoken to Stella today?”

Olivia sighed. “Yeah, I spoke to her twice. She’s working from home. Didn’t she mention it to you?”

I shook my head. “Is she feeling okay?”

A look of concern registered on my sister’s face. “She said she’d had a headache that kept her up the last two nights, but she was feeling better. Everything okay with you two?”

I raked my hand through my hair. “Yeah. I think so.”

My sister gave me the once-over, and her lips formed a grim line. “You think so? But you’re not sure. What did you do?”

“Me? Why do you think I did something?”

“Usually when a man isn’t sure if he did something wrong, he did.”

I shrugged. “Whatever.”

When I got back to my office, my phone finally buzzed after more than two hours of waiting.

Stella: Everything is fine. Going to work from home today.

I felt a modicum of relief that she wasn’t completely ignoring me, but not enough to make the uneasiness in the pit of my stomach go away. So I wrote back.

Hudson: Headache gone?

It seemed like a simple-enough question, yet I watched as the little dots started to move around, then stopped, then started again before completely stopping. Ten minutes later, a response finally came.

Stella: Yes, headache is gone. Thanks for checking in.

Thanks for checking in felt a hell of a lot like Now leave me alone.

Whatever. I had work to do. So rather than waste more hours than I already had overanalyzing shit, I tossed my phone on my desk. Maybe I just didn’t understand women.

The next day, I was happy as shit to see light streaming from Stella’s office when I arrived at seven o’clock.

“Hey. You’re in…”

Stella had her nose buried in her laptop. She looked up and smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yeah. Sorry about not coming in yesterday.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. You don’t work for me. The space here is yours to use as you need. I was just worried maybe something more was going on than a headache…”

Stella shuffled some papers around on her desk and avoided eye contact. “No, nothing going on. Just a headache. I get them sometimes.”

A few days ago, I would have walked into her office, shut the door behind me, and taken her mouth in a kiss that left me with a raging hard-on. Yet at the moment, the vibe I felt kept me at her door. In other words, it wasn’t just a headache. But she was working, and I had a meeting I needed to prep for, so I wasn’t going to push it right now.

Nodding toward my office, I said, “I have an early meeting that’ll take up most of my morning. You want to get together this afternoon and go through the deliveries that haven’t come in yet? We can talk about whatever else is a priority that you might want me to jump in on.”

“I actually went through the deliveries yesterday. We’re on track as of now. I think I have a handle on things. I’m going to sit with Olivia and go through the final marketing stuff in a little while.”

“Oh…okay.” I shrugged. “Maybe lunch later, then?”

“I’m going to work through lunch with Olivia. And I have a meeting later this afternoon uptown at Fisher’s office.”

“Fisher’s office?”

“It’s nothing to do with Signature Scent.”

Clearly she was giving me the brush off, but I was thick…

“Dinner later?”

She frowned. “I’ll probably just get a bite to eat with Fisher afterward.”

I couldn’t get my lips to turn upward to pretend everything was fine, no matter how hard I tried. The best I could muster was a nod to feign understanding. “Let me know if there’s anything you need from me.”

“Thanks, Hudson.”