DEBT by Jessica Gadziala Page A

had made on a small white square dessert plate, a fork sitting beside it.
    I reached for it with a weird thrill in my belly and chest.
    He left food out for me?
    Was that like... his way of apologizing for sticking his finger into an obviously open wound?
    I took my plate to my room, picking at the cake as I sat on my bed and stared at my bedroom door.
    Finished, I put my plate on the nightstand and curled up on my side, slowly drifting off to sleep.
    And it was the first time in my memory that I didn't fall asleep with worried feelings of my father running through my head like some dark, twisted, but familiar lullaby.
    No, instead, I fell asleep thinking about Byron.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    EIGHT
     
    Prue
     
     
     
    The next five days had me completely and utterly convinced I had imagined not only the orgasm in the den, but the whole conversation in the kitchen thing as well. Because things went back to business apparently. I fetched coffee. I washed sheets. I scrubbed bathrooms. I sat outside his office, his den, his dining room, his bedroom. There weren't more women to listen to him fuck, so what I was doing outside his bedroom was beyond me. There was also no more making me watch him jerk off. There were no glances that made me think he saw me as anything other than some kind of office equipment. There were no soft tones when he spoke to me. Only sharp ones.
    The only real difference took place Tuesday afternoon when I walked into his office with his seventh (yes, seventh) coffee of the day. I had just put the mug down when his hand pushed a piece of paper across the dark surface of his desk toward me. My brows drew together because he never gave me papers. It was a simple piece of his watermarked white, expensive (I imagined) paper with... a handwritten recipe.
    My head snapped up as soon as I realized what it was, my head shaking a little, to find him watching me intently with those dark, distant eyes of his.
    "You're in charge of desserts twice a week," he informed me with the same tone he would if he were telling me I was in charge of washing and waxing his car, instead of giving me the smallest sliver of sunshine I had known since I moved in under his roof.
    "Peanut Butter Triple Chocolate Explosion?" I asked, smiling a little.
    "Too difficult?" he asked in his usual impatient bark.
    "Don't insult me," I said instead, too glad to have a break from my every day monotony to even care about his usual douchebaggery. I even gave him what I would consider a grateful smile before I turned and walked away, looking down at the notes and realizing that he must have written them. It wasn't the delicate, swirly font of a woman. It was neat, almost to the point of anally precise. Which, well, seemed very much like the kind of handwriting he would have. So that meant he not only sat down to carefully jot down the recipe for me, but he had also went online and looked one up.
    "Miss. Marlow?" he called, my last name going up on the end in the telltale sign that he was about to say something I wasn't going to like.
    "Yeah?" I asked, turning, head tilted.
    "I want the dessert at nine."
    "Nine?" I repeated, brows drawing together.
    "Nine. Find me wherever I am at that point."
    "Um... okay?" I said, turning and leaving his study. That was a weird request. From what I could tell, aside from his coffee, he generally wasn't the kind of person who just... ate anywhere. Usually, he was in the dining room, even if he was eating alone, using the time to shoot off quick-fire texts to God-knew who or read the paper.
    So, while he had dinner, I shooed Ella out of the kitchen and got to work on dessert, perhaps nitpicking over every single little step with borderline sociopath precision because, for reasons I was choosing not to analyze, I really wanted the dessert to come out perfect.
    At five to nine, I walked to Byron's office with a giant slice of Peanut Butter Triple Chocolate Explosion on a plate with a fork and a big glass of