In Too Hard (Freshman Roommates Trilogy, Book 3) by Mara Jacobs

work? That you’d run to the office?” But he seemed to know that it wasn’t physical exertion that had my cheeks red and my chest rising. Not that he’d even see my chest with me holding my phone so closely to my face.
    The better to see you with, my dear.
    I didn’t even bother to explain my out-of-breathness. “You were here?” I said, trying to control my voice. Shit, it almost cracked.
    Get it together, Syd. You are going to see this guy every day, you can’t let him know what he does to you.
    But he knew. And what’s more, he seemed a little flushed too.
    “I actually thought you’d still be at your other job,” he said.
    “Nope. Like I said, I just got here. They had us stop a little early today because they found a bug or glitch or something that they wanted to look at.”
    “Oh,” he said. Nothing else, but he looked slightly embarrassed.
    “Why would you call if you thought I was at the admin job?”
    “Nothing. I mean…” he let out a big sigh, ran his hand over his sexy stubble like he was noting it for the first time. “Did you already see the note—yeah, of course you did.”
    I nodded, not saying anything.
    “I just thought…Christ, I don’t know what I thought. I was just going to tell you to trash it without reading it, but…shit…even saying it out loud sounds stupid. As if you’d not look at something I wrote to you just because I asked you not to.”
    The funny thing was, I probably wouldn’t look. Well, okay, maybe. Yeah, definitely.
    I kept my mouth shut.
    He sighed again. “Well, listen, I have to go. My parents and I are going out for dinner and we ‘simply can’t miss our reservation, darling.’” Thurston Howell had returned.
    “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to organize the last of it tonight and put it in to the order I want to transcribe from. I’ll start that fresh tomorrow, so I probably won’t be here that long tonight.”
    “I most likely won’t have my phone on during dinner, so just text with any questions, and I’ll get to them as soon as I can.”
    “Will do. But I don’t think I’ll have any questions, I’m in the homestretch with this part.”
    “Well…” He looked down, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. Looking up, he finally said, “I guess…good night.”
    “Okay.” I started to move my thumb to the “end” button, but stopped. “Billy?” I said, I think using only his first name to him for the first time. Maybe I had that first day in his office when he’d hired me. But it was different this time.
    “Yes?”
    “It isn’t crazy,” I said softly. “I miss you, too.”
    He smiled softly, then more widely. “Night, Syd,” he said, and then disconnected.

 
     
    Chapter Eleven
     
     
    “A nd then Jason left, and we knew we were destined to end the night in the drunk tank…which we did.”
    I laughed at Montrose’s story of his most wild New Year’s Eve. Fitting, because we were FaceTiming on New Year’s Eve itself. We had given up the pretense of it being about work and I’d just taken his call in my room, snuggled up in bed, the snow falling outside my window, the glow of a strictly forbidden candle illuminating me just enough for him to see.
    The light from my laptop was making him seem almost ethereal in my darkened room.
    “Come on, your turn,” he said for the thirtieth time since we’d started our conversation.
    I was wearing pajama bottoms and a cami, but it was so cool in the room that I had pulled on a baby-blue rag wool sweater that Jane had once left in my room and so I had—naturally—taken possession of it.
    It was both scratchy and soft, looked about fifty years old, and was something I would never wear out of my dorm room (though Jane did, of course), but it had become my go-to sweater if I was just hanging in the room.
    Somehow I felt…braver by wearing it in front of Montrose, even though it was nearly covered up by my comforter and the angle at which my laptop lay, wedged on