She practically beamed at him.Charming bastard.“Yes.Very well.”
He chuckled.Fucking.Chuckled.“Good.She can stay employed for another week then.”
Oh, very funny, asshole.
His voice was low when he turned to twist the knife.“Wasn’t that nice?People can be lovely.”
Smug bastard.“I hate you.”
The corner of his mouth lifted.“Now, Tiffany, why would you say something like that?”
It turned out it was very hard to scowl while fake smiling.But I still managed it.
The next day,I found myself unpacking a box of Elderflower liqueur, eyeing the bottles, and enjoying the quiet of the storeroom before opening.Such a pretty color, even under this horrendous fluorescent lighting.Glassy and not-quite-gray.More like sea glass, maybe, with a barely-there blue/green tone that reminded me how long it had been since I’d visited the museum with Hannah.
It was beautiful.
There was something familiar about it that I didn’t realize until I was back upstairs and saw Sam passing by the bar.
Surely I had noticed before this, but damn.Those eyes.
They were ethereal sea foam.
Clear like shallow water, but endless as a deep well.
Fuck.I definitely shouldn’t be waxing poetic over Sam fucking Cooper’s eyes.No matter how haunting they were.
But they were.Haunting.Always standing out against the dark brown of his hair and beard.
Except, the beard was gone.I shifted to take another look at him, disguising my movements by pretending to rearrange bottles on the back bar.He was clean-shaven.Gone was the soft fuzz that had been keeping the lower half of his face covered (I’d say warm, but considering how threadbare it was, it wouldn’t have been doing much in that department).
But not all of it had gone.No.He’d kept this silly little mustache.And it was anything but silly because, for some annoying fucking reason, it actually made him more attractive.Brought the focus to his prominent cupid's bow and the little beauty mark on his right cheek and the crooked way he smiled and no, no no no no.
I could not, would not, absolutely fucking refused to acknowledge the fact that he was good-looking.Even objectively.
While I was immediatelythankful when the mustache disappeared a day later (had he kept it on a dare?Why did nothing he did make any sense?), the smile was still all I could see.Blinding me when I least expected it until I had to turn away.
It was frustration, was all.The fact that this … show, this act, wasn’t the real him.
Because with me, it disappeared.His face was like stone when we talked (ok, argued), but I’d see him with other people, his face loose and open, smiling like he knew exactly the reaction it caused and acting like he was perfectly friendly.
But with me, he shut down.
The change wasn’t lost on me.And I was caught between anger and disappointment.
We almost got along.Almost.It would probably help if I wasn’t snipping at him or giving in to the urge to snark back all the time.But he made it so easy.He set himself up for those fights, with his “Tiffany” in that husky, reprimanding tone and his constant dismissal of my ideas and his fucking refusal to smile around me.
I’d arrived early again today because Sam wanted to talk more about these changes he wanted to make.The office was open when I arrived, so I made myself comfortable in one of the chairs, a takeaway black coffee cooling in my hands.
“I’m going to change the name,” Sam said as he swept into the office.
I sat up straight, surprised.“Wait.Really?”
“You have to admit.It doesn’t make much sense.The Basement?We’re on the ground floor.”
“It is pretty ridiculous.”
He blinked at me for a moment until I started to think his brain had stalled and gone offline.“What?”
