Can't Touch This (Can't Touch This #1)

I wanted to slap her.

I truly did.

If only the floor would obey and stop trying to mimic a boat on a rolling ocean. “You are nothing more than a sexually repressed woman who is deflecting her fantasies onto me.”

Polly laughed, leaving me to sway unsteadily as she returned to finishing up on the computer. “Unlike you, I don’t want to touch his wiener.”

“Oh my God, you heard that?”

She smirked. “Every word.”

“We seriously need to get better soundproofing in this building.”

“Or you need to bang him and get it out of your system.”

“And I’m supposed to take advice from a woman on an eight-month sex-Sahara-spell?”

She held up her hands. “I’m just being the voice of your neglected pussy.”

I scrunched up my face. “You just dropped down the totem pole of friendship. Who are you with this dirty talk and where did my post-it loving stuck-in-the-mud go?”

Polly waved me away, her concentration sucked back into work graphs and order forms. “Just trying to help my bestie out.”

I swallowed, testing the awful scratch in the back of my throat. All the symptoms of the flu had hit me over the course of the day. I’d woken with a headache, sneezed twenty times since lunch, felt hot and sticky, then cold and shaky, and now my bloody bones had decided to become rattlesnakes and hiss with pain.

I needed to go to bed. Which I couldn’t because I was on emergency call tonight.

I hate my life.

“You know that saying ‘no matter how bad things get, it can always get worse?’” I rubbed my nose with the back of my hand, squinting through stinging eyes.

“Yes, your point?” Polly looked up from the computer, clicking supply orders for Tales of Tails.

“Well, it sucks…that’s what.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

It does.

Ryder was bad.

But being sick is worse.

I’d take Ryder over the flu, even if he did make me itchy and moody and wet.

Whoa, did I really just admit that?

Polly said softly, “Go home, Vessie. You’ve been working too hard.” Her gaze tracked to the clock hanging on the wall. “You’ve been at it for thirteen hours straight. No wonder you’re ill. Go home. Get better.”

“But I’m on call tonight.”

“Don’t worry about it. Amanda can field the calls from home and if it’s a true emergency and not a simple ‘help, my dog is coughing what shall I do’ kind of phone call, I’ll deal with it.”

The thought of letting Polly do it was far too appealing. But I didn’t want to be that partner. I didn’t want to shuck my responsibilities just because I was sick.

I’m not sick.

Positive thinking and all that.