I turned to find him picking up his phone and scrolling through it. “Doesn’t everybody?” I answered.
He looked up from his phone to me. “I suppose so, but it’s the self-absorbed, pretentious fools like me that think it only applies to them.”
He stared at me, almost challenging me.
“You’re not…” I started. He raised his eyebrow at me. “Afool.”
For a split second his face didn’t change, and I thought that maybe I’d blown the whole thing. That he’d say it wasn’t going to work out. That I wouldn’t be able to afford staying here for the summer and instead be forced to take care of the boys and not be able to take any kind of paying job.
But most devastating of all, I wouldn’t get to work so closely to a man I greatly admired—pretentious and self-absorbed as he might be.
Then he burst out laughing and returned to his phone. “Oh, Syd, this is going to work out just fine.”
As he clicked away, I relaxed, and mentally noted that he liked when I told him what was what. Looking at the boxes around me, I wondered if that would apply to his work as well.
He held his phone out to me. “Here, put your number in so I have it, okay?”
“Of course.” I took the phone from him, our fingers not touching at all. He’d already set up a contact page for me and all I did was add my number. I added my email too, although he would have had that on his class roster, but this saved him a step.
And really, wasn’t that why I was earning a badly needed ten thousand dollars? To save Montrose amajorstep of sorting through five years of notes? Though by the number of boxes, it looked more like fifty year’s worth.
I handed the phone back to him and he called me. I took my phone out of my back pocket and started to add the new number to my contacts.
“Syd,” he said and I looked up. “Say cheese.” He was holding the phone out, in a camera-holding way.
I automatically smiled. After all the social media my generation had been exposed to, when a phone was pointed at you…you posed.
“Is that okay?” he said after he took my picture. “I just like keeping photos on my contacts. I tend to forget names sometimes and this helps me.”
“Sure,” I said. Then held mine up and took a shot of him as he was looking down at his phone. He looked up, startled, when he heard the click. A corner of his mouth quirked up in a half-grin. He tipped his head a little in my direction, as if to say, “touché.”
“Okay. I’ve got to get going or I’m going to miss my train.” He looked as if maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Then he let out a big sigh and said, “Yeah. I’ve got to go,” as if trying to convince himself.
He came around to my side of the desk and handed me a key chain with a key card and two keys on it. “This one is for the building. And this one for my office. You have to use the key card if you enter the building when it’s locked and you use the key. When you enter and leave. They need to know who’s in the building in case of a fire or something.”
I nodded, holding my hand open under his. He placed the keys on my palm. “The building is going to be open during regular office hours. I guess because of all the front end testing stuff?”
“Right,” I said.
“But I’m guessing they’ll be locked up on weekends and on actual Christmas and New Year’s days, so…the key and key card.”
“Got it.” I wrapped my hand around the keys and put them in the front pocket of my jeans.
“Not that I’m saying you have to work weekends or anything. Again, you make your own schedule, I just want the job done before the end of next semester, so I can start digging in as soon as I’m done and back in New York.”
“That’s fine. But my next shift at the admin building isn’t until Monday morning, so I had planned on getting started today and working this weekend.”
“That’s great. Oh, you mean, starting…today?”
I nodded. “Right after you leave.”
He looked around at the boxes and it seemed like panic crossed his face. “Umm…yeah…well.”
I grabbed his bulging satchel from the top of his desk and handed it to him. He numbly took it, looking at it like it was a foreign object.
“You’re going to miss your train,” I said. I grabbed his leather jacket from the coatrack in the corner by the door, and handed it to him. “You need to go.” I pulled his arm, the warmth of him seeping through the fleece he wore.
“Right. Right,” he said, moving to the door, but still looking around like he was leaving his newborn baby with a first-time sitter.
