Page 94 of His Good Girl

“I’m letting you begin.”

“That’s horrifying.”

“I’m growing.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. Talk.”

So I told her everything. The story came out in fragments, heat and humiliation tangled together until I had to get up twice and pace the length of my apartment because sitting felt wrong somehow. I told her about the training, and about Callum calling me into his office at the end of the day. About rolling my eyes. About how he’d called me young lady and how my whole bodyhad betrayed me so visibly that if there had been subtitles, they would have simply read: doomed.

Jules sat with her wine untouched, eyes enormous.

“He said young lady?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“On purpose?”

“Yes.”

Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. “I need a minute.”

“I lived it.”

“I respect that, but I am also a secondary victim of hotness.”

“You are not the victim here.”

“None of us are safe.”

I groaned and kept going. Him locking the door. His hand on my shoulder. Jules went very still when I got to that part, not in the gleeful way, but in the serious one.

“He locked the door?” she asked.

“He asked if I wanted him to unlock it.”

Her face changed. “Before he kissed you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you feel trapped?”

“No.” The answer came so quickly it surprised both of us. I sat back down on the couch, wrapping my hands around my wineglass without drinking. “No. That’s the thing. He made itvery clear there was a door. He offered the door. I could have said yes. I could have nodded. I could have stepped around him. He would have opened it.”

Jules watched me carefully. “And you didn’t want him to.”

I looked down at the wine.

“No.”

Her shoulders relaxed by one inch, but not entirely. “Okay.”

Then I told her about the kiss, or I tried to. Language, as a system, failed me immediately.

“It was…” I began, then stopped.

Jules leaned forward. “Don’t you dare become poetic and vague now.”