My mother alwaystold me I needed to pay better attention to my hands and feet because I was too damn big for my own good. For the first time in my life, I heeded her advice.
It was too easy to brush against Andy while we leaned over plans at a jobsite or studied a model on my iPad, and it was even easier for my knuckles to graze the back of her hand when we reached for our drinks in the car.
Making it through the week without touching Andy was a greater accomplishment than finishing the Boston Marathon with a respectable time.
Thankfully, our work fell into an effortless rhythm. Routine made it easier for me to keep my hands to myself while delegating projects and overseeing Andy’s work. Her willingness to roll with any rock in the road quickly earned the respect of my general contractors and their crews, and I was in awe of her enthusiasm when it came to demolishing those rocks.
Within the span of a few days, I trusted her thinking and relied on her to handle many of the issues arising from my GCs, which provided me the time to dive into long-abandoned strategic projects.
I didn’t expect her to find a fix for the low ceilings on Monday, and I selected increasingly complex challenges for her each day. She solved everything I threw at her without so much as blinking. The prize was always lunch with conversation, and Andy ended the week having visited five of my favorite eateries and becoming my best foodie friend.
She was also intelligent and sexy and impossible to interpret, and I was obsessed with her. I preferred to think of our little problem-solving game as legitimate mentoring rather than a means to furthering my obsession. Before she arrived on Friday morning, I drafted a list of adventurous lunch spots for next week, eager to get her take on some new gastropubs.
She asked sharp questions and offered unconventional solutions to many issues that left me scratching my head, and her raw talent made itself known. Smart wasn’t the word to describe Andy. Her work needed polish and she’d benefit from more experience, but she was gifted. Brilliant. She knew answers to questions before I asked them.
Inside five days, she became my left hand, and she loved it. It was a good thing she had no idea what I was doing with my left hand when she wasn’t around.
She moved through complex structural geometry as efficiently as Matt, while her design aesthetic rivaled Sam’s. Her brain was her sexiest feature, and working with her felt like the most bizarre, wonderful form of foreplay ever invented.
Through it all, my head overflowed with contradictory impulses, and it was driving me crazy. That, combined with the case of OCD I picked up from keeping my hands to myself, and Andy’s scent permeating my office, my car, my brain…I was a loosely chained madman. A few pulls in the right direction and nothing would be able to stop me from unleashing myself on her.
“Patrick!”
Startled by the fist slamming on my desk, I shook my head and looked up from my laptop. Matt smirked before sitting across from me.
“I’ve been talking for five minutes.”
“Mustn’t have been very interesting,” I murmured, rubbing my forehead. “Long week.”
“They’re the only kind. So…I’ve talked to the rest of the tribe, and we’ve decided to do this shit at eight thirty. That work for you?”
I glanced at the calendar on my screen, searching for an appointment. “Do what shit?”
Matt typed a message on his phone while he spoke. “The will. And the prerequisite drunkenness to read said will.”
Shit. That was the last thing I wanted to do, and my subconscious helped me forget all about it until Matt banged my head back to reality.
My Friday night was going to feature a long run followed by quite a few beers, some red meat, and catching up on my industry reading while watching Premier League games.
I wouldnotspend my Friday night thinking about Andy, trying to guess what Andy was wearing under her black pants and black sweaters, or inventing challenges for Andy to tackle so we could talk over lunch. There was no way in hell I was spending my night picturing Andy’s hair draped across my pillows or her naked skin on my sheets.
Yeah, that was a complete and total lie. I’d be lucky if I remembered to eat between my Andy fantasies.
“Right,” I groaned, standing and stretching my arms over my head.
We demoed a delicate Dutch Colonial today, one I wanted to do myself, and I was feeling it in my back. My shirt pulled free from my low-slung jeans and rode up my stomach. I reached higher, waiting to hear my joints pop while I arched back to stretch the tight muscles between my shoulders.
Andy walked into my office, hundreds of pages of new design plans rolled under her arms. She stopped, her eyes paused on my torso before lifting to my face. Her eyebrow arched and I noticed a subtle smile curling the corners of her lips.
Miss Asani was checking me out. The satisfaction I gained from knowing she liked my body was more than enough incentive to let Matt continue kicking my ass on the marathon training circuit.
If Andy liked what she saw enough for an eyebrow and a smile, maybe—
“Patrick!”
I lost it. I wanted this moment without Matt’s involvement, and I just lost it. “Jesus Christ, Matthew, do you not have an office of your own? What the fuck are you doing here? Do I honestly need to be talking to you right now, or can you bother RISD with this shit? If it was important enough for me to hear, I’d be listening!”
“Play nice, Optimus.” I nearly jumped over my desk to throttle him. Shifting to face her, he asked, “How’d it go this week, Andy?”
