Sex Lessons with My Worst Enemy novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Toast
Her ex toasts his new fiancee with a joke about Callie being a closed door; she grabs the mic, points at the office's notorious seducer and claims him as her date, and Anson steps up and says yes in front of everyone.
Jared tapped his champagne flute with a fork and eighty people turned to look at him.
I was standing at the back of the rooftop bar, holding a drink I hadn't wanted.
I wore the dress I had bought to look fine.
Five months ago I was the one he planned to marry.
Tonight I was the guest who had been invited to prove that nobody was angry.
"I'll keep this short," Jared said, and his fiancee Whitley laughed at him as though he had never said it before.
Whitley had been my best friend for ten years.
She wore cream silk and a ring that I knew had been picked out before Jared and I broke up.
"I want to thank everyone who watched me find the right woman," he said.
"Whit showed me what it's like when someone actually wants you."
Somebody near the bar said "Ooh."
Jared smiled at the crowd, then straight at me.
"Some people are lovely, but they're a closed door."
"You knock and knock, and nothing ever opens."
The laughter started with the men in his firm.
It spread to the women, who covered their mouths first and then stopped bothering.
Whitley put her hand on his chest and whispered, "Stop it," in the voice she uses when she wants the joke to go on.
My face went hot, and then it went very cold.
I had told Whitley once, crying in her kitchen, that I never felt anything with Jared.
She had kept it for the right audience.
I put my drink down on a stranger's tray.
I walked through the crowd, took the microphone from the stand by the DJ, and the laughing thinned out around me.
"Congratulations, Jared," I said.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
"Since we're sharing, I'll share too. I'm bringing a date to your wedding."
Jared grinned. "Is he real?"
"He's the best lover in this city," I said. "Everybody at my agency knows his name."
I looked across the roof, because I needed a face to point at.
The agency had a table by the heaters.
At the end of it sat Anson Merrow, tie loosened, a beer in front of him he wasn't drinking.
I had hated Anson for six years.
He was the associate creative director on my floor, the man whose reputation walked into every room ahead of him.
The office called him the Serial Seducer, and I had never once heard anyone say it was wrong.
I pointed at him.
"Anson Merrow," I said. "He's been trying to get me into bed since I was twenty-two. I'm finally saying yes."
The roof went silent.
Then somebody gasped, and somebody else started clapping.
Jared's grin slipped.
Anson put down his beer.
He stood up slowly, and every head on the roof turned to follow him as he crossed the floor.
He didn't look at Jared or Whitley.
He took the microphone out of my hand, and his fingers brushed mine, warm and dry.
"Six years," he said into it, calm as a weather report.
"She said no to me for six years."
He glanced at me, gray eyes steady.
"She finally said yes. I'd like to see the closed door that can hold her."
The room made a sound like a held breath let out.
Anson set the microphone back in its stand, put his hand at the small of my back, and walked me through the crowd.
Nobody stopped us.
In the elevator the doors slid shut and my knees nearly went.
I leaned my head against the brass rail and shook.
"I can't believe I did that," I said.
"You did it very well," Anson said.
He was standing against the opposite wall with his hands in his pockets, studying me.
I should have thanked him and gotten off at the lobby.
Instead I said something I couldn't take back.
"Is it true? What they say about you?"
His jaw moved.
"What do you want it to be?"
"I want him to eat his words in nine weeks," I said. "At his wedding."
"I want nobody in that room to call me cold again."
My heart was pounding in my ears.
"So teach me."
He didn't move.
The floor numbers slid down, forty, thirty-nine, thirty-eight.
"Teach you what, Callie?"
"Everything. Whatever it is that you know."
Anson pushed off the wall and stopped in front of me, close enough that I could see the faint scar through his left eyebrow.
"Rule one," he said quietly. "You don't say sorry to me. Not tonight, not ever."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good," said Anson. "Now tell me your address, or tell me you want mine."
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