“Lose it all you want; it’ll be just as quickly replaced.”

Though he issues it as a warning, I can hear the smile in his voice too. Noticing that Sandy, in the cubicle next to mine, is staring at me with a big dopey smile, I cup the speaker a little bit and swivel my chair around, giving her my back.

“Thank you . . . Malcolm.” There’s a peaceful silence between us. The kind that’s comfortable, not the kind that you need to fill with anything at all. I stroke the M again quietly, closing my eyes when he speaks.

“I’m thinking of you, Rachel.”

My voice softens when I admit, “I’m thinking of you too.”

I’m not sure what it is about him. If his effect on me is due to his rare ability to turn me inside out with just a glance, a word, an act, or if it’s because I never lived this, not in my teens, not until now.

I just never thought you could feel such delicious intimacy while miles apart, with nothing but each other’s voices as we each hold the receiver to our ears. I imagine him at his desk, leaning back all cocky, with one of his smiles on his face—the one where his lips are curled so lightly it can barely be a smile but yet it is. I’m warm inside as I tuck the phone closer to me as we talk a little. I ask about New York and tell him how frantic I was to find my necklace. I also notice the R is perfectly polished and realized he must’ve sent it to the jewelers who made the M so that the R looks just as new.

As new as we are. Him and me.

When we hang up, I go to the bathroom and slip them out of the box, then I brush my hair aside to expose my throat. I put on the R first, and then I take the M gently out of the box and latch it around the back of my neck. The letters nestle perfectly together near that crook between my collarbones. Strange, how breathless I feel when the M falls into place. I feel like he’s kissing that spot again. Permanently.

Letting my hair fall down my back again, I stare at the girl in the mirror—she’s not lost. She looks confident and a little flushed, a little breathless and a lot happy. The necklaces—sparkly, shiny-new and double—rest at her throat, and you can see in her gray eyes—gray eyes that almost look silver, because they’re gleaming to compete with the gold at her throat—that she happens to think that R + M have never looked so damn good together.

On Thursday I have an interview at Wired and I arrive a little late at Edge. As seems to be the new norm, my link to Malcolm is nothing anyone wants to touch. The interview didn’t go that well at all. There’s always someone in the company who knows Saint, is friends with Saint, or maybe even hates Saint—and they don’t want the infamous girlfriend in their newsroom.

They seem to prefer the news to come out of their newsrooms, not actually be sitting in their newsrooms.

We spend a dream weekend together. On Friday, Gina offers to sleep over at Wynn’s on Saturday and Sunday—Gina has gotten a makeup-artist complex (thank you, free samples that she gets at work), and Wynn has offered to be her test subject all weekend while her boyfriend, Emmett, visits his family—so I invite Sin over to make both my bed and me squeal.

I wake up with him two nights in a row, the second one with little sores on my body, in places he used to exhaustion. I don’t even mind the fact that neither of us is getting much sleep because my bed and I have never known such a good time.

“God, it’s morning already?” I groan, still refusing to move.

He disappears into the bathroom, and I pull the sheets back up to my chin, and I wonder, did I leave my sink clean or did I leave it messy? I think of Sin’s beautiful apartment—perfectly organized—and stress a little about what he may think of my girl chaos.

Then I realize if it’s messy, he’s already seen it yesterday. Relaxing back in bed, I hear him turn on my shower. He’s a far earlier riser than I am; he also gets to M4 usually before most of his employees do. I’m not yet late for work so I stay in bed and enjoy all my sore spots as he comes out with one of my towels hanging low on his hips.

I watch him slip his arms into his button-up shirt and then fasten it with sure, easy flicks of his fingers.

“Leaving for work,” I say dejectedly.

“You could come with me?” His brows raise in humor, and there’s the devil’s twinkle in his eye. “I sense you want to come. Again.”

“Malcolm.” I can’t believe this man. “I’m liquid, and look at you. You look ready to tackle a dragon. I’m tired thanks to you. And you want me to come to M4 with you? What? To work for you? Think of what your investors will think if you hire your girlfriend.”