Inhale, Exhale Read Online Free PDF Page A

quick kiss on the cheek and opened the car door. “I’m going to go home. After I come back from Gamma’s, I’m going take a long bath and go to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    Christian shook his head, closing the car door. “How about we go camping next weekend? Just you and me—alone for seventy-two hours?”
    I hated camping—the bugs and sore back from sleeping in a tent—but with the way his eyes were lit up with hope, I couldn’t say no.
    “Yeah, sure. Sounds fun.”
    Laying in the bathtub three hours later, I tried to lose myself in the memories of when I first started dating Christian: the way he made me shiver with just one glance of his crooked smile, or the way my body ignited when his lips were on mine. But every time I closed my eyes, my thoughts drifted to the dream, and my heartbeat picked up its pace.
    Maybe I’ll go to sleep early, see if I have any more dreams .
     

CHAPTER FIVE

    Seventeen hours. That’s how long I’d been staring at this damn computer screen. My ass was numb, my eyes burned, begging me to take my contacts out, my stomach was screaming at me to eat something, and my blood was pumping so much caffeine I might as well have inserted an IV directly into the vein. I stood and stretched. My weary sigh was the only sound this hour of the night besides the hum of the server in the next room.
    Every other employee had gone home to live their lives and be with their families hours ago. I was the single putz who remained. JT had gone home at ten, claiming his mom needed help. It was bullshit, and he was probably somewhere getting laid right now, but I couldn’t hold it against him. At this point—as pathetic as it was—I was living vicariously through him and I knew he’d share all the details with me tomorrow. At least one of us was getting some.
    But the code was done, and, knock-on-wood, it was working. It was one in the morning, and I wanted nothing more than to hit the Wendy’s late-night drive through and crash on the couch to my Tivo’ed episodes of Tosh.O and pass out.
    I walked a few steps toward the bathroom to take a piss, shocked by how heavy my body felt. Practice in the morning was going to be brutal. Being sedentary for so long killed me, and I had a crew competition in a few weeks that, at this rate, I’d never be ready for.
    After returning to my desk, I was ready to call it a night and power everything down when I saw the little envelope icon on the bottom right of my screen. I’d neglected to check my emails for most of the day, wrapped up and absorbed in coding. I knew I needed to at least check them now and make sure there was nothing that needed my immediate attention tonight.
    Scanning through the barrage that could all wait until tomorrow, I noticed I had five messages from Connie, each with a title more frantic than the last.
     
    “New employee setup?”
    “Have you completed this yet?”
    “Why isn’t the NE SU done yet?”
    “Grant–are you ignoring me?”
    “We need to talk.”
     
    Well, fuck. I’d been so absorbed in my project that I’d totally forgotten about the setup I promised Connie I’d do. I scrubbed the back of my neck with my hand to keep from punching the screen. This was ridiculous. There were a half-dozen other people working in the department who could have taken the ten minutes necessary to do the setup, all of whom worked below me. I went to Carnegie Mellon University, graduated with honors, practically ran this division, and my coding kept these systems operational. Why the fuck was Connie fixated on me doing the setup when anyone else easily could have? I practically ran the department while most of the other assholes I worked with probably didn’t do shit today, other than sneaking around the content blocker to check their Facebook pages or watch porn on their iPads. I could hear my teeth grinding, something I only did when really pissed, and tried to take a breath to calm myself.
    This was bullshit. I hadn’t even