There's not a lot that means anything to me when it comes to sales numbers and bar graphs; I can't really tell what is and isn't confidential, and none of what anyone presents ever seems like something related to MR.
Maybe I shouldn't grab so many all at once, or someone will think I'm over eager to take notes.The thought nearly makes me snort out loud. As if. I'm going to do what I did the last three annual sales meetings: doodle.
The whole setup reminds me vaguely of being back in school; that while everyone else was semi-paying attention and even taking notes, my brain would shut off ten minutes into a lecture. By the end of class, the heel of my hand would be blue with the ink of my ballpoint pen and my notebook would be filled.
I’m more focused on stirring the sugar into my coffee than I am on the footsteps coming up behind me. The room is still dark for the projector, so I can’t really say a shadow falls over me, but I feel it.
I note the three-finger shape of his big, stone-scaled hands with large dull claws on each tip, and the granite texture of the back of his hands. I know who it is before I even look up.
“Like a bad penny,” a soft, deep voice rumbles, the hushed sound of it sends goosebumps up the back of my neck.
“Oh!” I gasp, and cover my mouth with my handful of notepads, shushing myself as a couple heads turn to glance back here and see what's the matter.
Deeply unfair, are the words that spring to mind.
Thankfully not my mouth, for once.
My eyes dart across the expanse of his chest, miles of it that there are, reluctant to find his face. But when I do, there’s the face I’ve come to dread.
“More like a bad nickel.”
He raises an eyebrow at me.
“I mean, I would like to get rid of you. Not in a threatening way, just,” I smother that train of thought behind my fistful of notepads. “But you’re a bit bigger than a penny.”
Amusement flickers across his stony expression, before he returns in that low rumble of a voice, “And five times the bad luck.”
He doesn’t look any more bedraggled by the red-eye than he did at the airport. If anything, he’s perhaps two percent more handsome than when I last saw him. I don’t know why or how. Chiseled looks are an understatement. He has noble features, high, hollowed cheekbones, short hair that glistens like rutilated quartz. Ridges trace up his nose, over heavy granite brows to tall, curling horns.
It’s the visual equivalent of stubbing your toe when you turn around.
He meets my gaze again and gives a little shake of his head with a smile that tells me he knows I’m ogling him.
And he’s letting me.
Deeply, deeply unfair.
For a moment, I forget I was making myself coffee. I nod and just kind of stand there, clutching my half-made drink and several notepads as he moves closer to the table and plucks up a paper cup and starts to fill it with hot water, drowning a tea bag. Generally, I don’t like to let people know when I find them attractive, because that opens the doors to flirting, and I cannot flirt to save my life. And I can’t even imagine flirting with someone I’ve made a fool of myself in front of already.
Then again, maybe it’s easier if we’ve already established that I’m a mess. I kinda doubt it though.
I watch him for a few moments, less stunned by the sudden abruptness of him appearing, yet again, and starting to sink into the why’s and how’s. I have no idea who he is, but I guess it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility that he works at Evil Inc., and I’ve just never formally met him. He could even be from my local office, and it’s just been long enough since I’ve gone in that I’ve never seen him before.
“Sugar? Milk? Organic orphan tears?” he murmurs, looking at me, and it takes a few seconds for me to realize he's eyeing my coffee for wherever my brain’s stopped in this process. Oh.
“Milk.”
I expect him to pass me one of the pitchers of varying percentages of dairy, but he takes my cup from me.
“How much?”
“Just. Um. Fill it the rest of the way, please.”
I watch him make my coffee with an ease that suggests he maybe didn’t see my vibrator being held overhead by the TSA agent. I’d like to crawl into that reality.
He hands the cup back to me and I'm not sure what to do with it. I’m sorry, why did he finish making my coffee? Is he fucking with me? Is this some weird powerplay because we keep bumping into each other? Or is he just being a gentleman and I'm too freaked out to see that?
“Thanks,” I manage after a moment, failing to ask any of that. Maybe it doesn’t need to be as drastic as I think. Maybe we can both just pretend none of last night happened, that we don’t know each other at all. Because we don't, really, and it's unfair of him to hold any of what he witnessed of me at the airport against my character.
