“It’s not polite to smell other people’s witches,” Matt said.
“And it’s not sane to hire me based on what I don’t smell like!”
“Not like that,” Mateo said and wished they were all sitting down, but Matt never sat down when he was in this office. “Your scent is made of some kind of motor oil beneath the forest. You could be happy here.”
“I spent the first decade of my life in Philly,” Tori said.
“See?” he said triumphantly.
Tori crossed her arms. “It wasn’t a fun decade.”
Mateo winced, but he wasn’t wrong about this.
“You’re going back to her,” Tori said.
“Guys. Talk out loud!” Matt insisted.
Oh, he liked Matt’s witch, and they both would be in his life this way. He wanted to go back to the days when computers were new and delicious and not an endless burden. He already had a few ideas for products, mostly because he spent his days and his nights coding instead of sleeping, trying to keep himself from leaving.
“Okay,” Tori said with a smile as if he’d explained all that and not stared down wordlessly into leftover Pho.
“I hate both of you,” Matt said.
“He’s going back to Colorado to be with Cat. He doesn’t want to run the company. He’s offering us the job instead. Probablybecause it’s more than any three people could do, but two is better than one.”
“I can’t run a company,” Matt said.
“You were already mostly running the company,” Tori said. “He’s never wanted to run the company.”
“That’s not true,” Mateo said. “I did when I started.”
Matt laughed. “Sorry, buddy, even I know you never wanted to run this company after a week of running this company.”
Mateo grimaced. He thought he had hidden that deep until Cat ferreted out the secret. Turns out, the only person he’d hidden it from was himself.
“I would still work here except not here,” Mateo said.
“I can’t run a company,” Matt repeated.
“Matt, it’s just solving problems,” he said, trying to tamp down his impatience. “That’s what you’re good at. I never was.”
Matt looked at him with something other than bafflement and anger for the first time. “It’s because you let every problem hurt. They’re never that deep.”
“Was that my problem?” Mateo said with half a smile.
Matt stared at his shoulder rather than meet his eyes.
“Will you do it?” Mateo asked when nothing else happened.
“For a couple of months,” Tori said.
Mateo automatically shook his head. “This isn’t the try-it-out sort of?—”
She held up a hand. “I will not let Matt make the mistake you did. We will give it more than a week, but if we hate it, this becomes your problem again. I will not let him hurt.”
This was a better plan. This was definitely a better plan.
He nodded once. It was a risk, and it could leave the company in an even worse state in three months, but every instinct he had told him they would not hate this, especially the feisty witch.
