Rebecca Starts Slipping

While Sean was not going to be feeling pity for Rebecca anytime soon, given everything she had done to try and ruin him, seeing her unable to focus was heaven. Watching her struggle to find fault with his conduct while barely being able to maintain her own composure made it even better.

Playing the role of the concerned underling, Sean stopped and turned to look at Rebecca. Her face was flushed, though not with rage. She was far from good at hiding what was actually affecting her, and one hand had slipped down toward her crotch again.

“Ms. Thomas,” Sean ventured, “is there something wrong?”

Rebecca Thomas was a proud, uptight, holier-than-thou bitch, so he was hardly surprised when she glared at him for having the audacity to imply that she was having difficulties.

“I am not having issues,” she ground out, unable to completely hide either her arousal or attraction. “Focus on the slides.”

That only made Sean smirk inwardly. Better still, it gave him an opening.

“All right. Would you rather tell me honestly what the problem is, or have it become worse by becoming deeper and more genuine? Something you can’t deny?”

Rebecca's eyes took on a glazed look before she scoffed.

“Like I would ever tell you,” she snarled, trying to fall back into her previous role as Arch-Bitch and failing as the effects took hold.

It did not disappear. Her mouth was still curled around the scoff when her eyes settled on him again, but something in the look changed. Rebecca had spent most of the morning fighting thoughts of what he might do to her. Sean had learned to recognise those moments by now: the distracted stare, the flush, the way irritation arrived a second later when she caught herself.

This time Rebecca’s gaze lingered on his face instead of slipping past him into whatever fantasy had been distracting her before. Her eyes dropped briefly to his mouth, wandered lower, then snapped back to the presentation with a frown that told Sean she had noticed the change too.

He kept his attention on the slide and advanced to the next set of figures. “The variance against forecast is mostly Richmond and Baltimore. If they challenge the base case, those are the two accounts they’ll start with.”

By the time he reached Baltimore, Rebecca had looked at him twice more. Not through him, not with that distant expression she wore when her imagination got away from her, but at him. Each time she caught herself and returned to the screen a little more irritated than before. Sean gave her nothing to react to beyond the presentation, though keeping the satisfaction out of his face was becoming its own exercise in concentration.

Sean was halfway through the next set of figures when Rebecca wet her lips again. By then he had seen it often enough to recognise the pattern: the colour high in her cheeks, the faint sheen across her forehead, her attention wandering from the presentation to him and then snapping back whenever she realised what she was doing. He could have ignored it, but this was the first time she had given him something he could question without stepping outside the careful professional line he had maintained around her for months.

“Ms. Thomas, are you feeling all right? You’re flushed. If you’re coming down with something, we can move this.”

“No.” Rebecca answered too quickly, stopped herself, and visibly reconsidered. “I mean... yes. Something is wrong.”

Sean almost smiled at that. As far as he was concerned, something had been wrong with Rebecca Thomas long before this morning. The complaints, the insinuations, every attempt to turn ordinary interactions into grounds for getting rid of him had made that clear enough. He kept the thought where it belonged and gave her the same mild concern he would have shown anyone else.

“Would you rather telling me what you think is happening be painful, or would you rather savour telling me?”

The refusal was already forming on Rebecca’s face when she said, “I’d rather savour it.”

That checked her for barely a second. Then the answer seemed to carry her forward with it. “When I saw you this morning, I thought I finally had you. I thought you’d given me exactly what I needed to get rid of you. Except now I can’t stop thinking about you, and I don’t mean what was happening before.”

Sean let her continue. The admission about wanting him gone was satisfying, though hardly revelatory after everything she had already tried. What came next was.

“Before, it was sex,” Rebecca said, irritation creeping into her voice as she searched for the distinction. “What you might be like. What you could do with your hands or your mouth. Whether you could actually live up to what my head kept imagining. Now...” Her gaze slipped to his hands as she spoke, lingered there, then returned to his face with a scowl. “Now I’m noticing the hands themselves.”

Sean kept listening. With Rebecca, silence had always been safer than giving her something she could use, and now it had the added advantage of making her fill it.

“It isn’t only when I’m thinking about sleeping with you anymore. You stand there explaining a spreadsheet and I notice your voice. You disagree with me and I notice that you don’t stumble over yourself doing it. You get something right and instead of simply being annoyed, I like that you’re competent.” Rebecca’s mouth tightened around the last word, as though that admission offended her more than anything she had said about his body. “And when you look at me, I notice that too. I care whether you like what you see.”

Sean kept his attention on the laptop before the satisfaction could show too clearly. Rebecca noticed enough to bristle anyway.

“Don’t.”

He advanced the slide and said nothing, which only seemed to make her more determined to finish.

“That’s the problem. This morning I could still tell myself I wasn’t attracted to you. I was attracted to an idea of you, to what I thought you might be capable of in bed.” Her eyes stayed on him now instead of drifting away. “But that isn’t true anymore. I look at you and I know it isn’t.”

Rebecca’s voice tightened before the last admission, but she gave it to him anyway.

“I find you attractive, Sean, and I hate that I can tell the difference.”