“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s corporate advertising. It is not meant to mean anything.”
“Then you shouldn’t have asked us to do it. FG doesn’t—”
“It was not me that asked you.”
Jonah blinked, and rocked backwards, as if Sacha’s snap had physically hit him. “What are you saying? That you don’t want to work with us? Because that’s easily fixed.”
“That is not what I said.”
“Then what? You’ve had your head up your arse since Wednesday morning, and, frankly, I don’t have time for it. Myteamdoesn’t have time for it.”
Jonah spoke calmly, but anger spots reddened his pale, chiselled cheeks.
Sacha wanted to kiss them away.
He also wanted Jonah to shut the hell up and leave him alone. To walk out of the break room and disappear into a puff of smoke so Sacha could finish this goddamn app and put his brain back together again. He’d never lost his head over a project the way he was in danger of doing right now, and the only variable in his life was Jonah.
Leave me alone. Please.
Jonah stepped closer, narrowing the distance between them. “Look, I don’t understand what I’ve done to piss you off so much in the last week, but whatever it is, I’m sorry, okay? I get that you don’t want complications and I’ll back off.”
“It is—”
“I’m not finished.”
Despite the sharp-edged negativity spiking Sacha’s blood, a grin threatened to split his face in half. He stifled it, and gestured for Jonah to continue.
“We can’t let our failed friendship affect our work,” Jonah said. “If you don’t want to deal with me directly, that’s fine, but don’t make things difficult for other people, my team or yours. If you can’t do that, we need to draw a line under this right now.”
Sacha wondered how they’d gone from pretending to be lovers for the sake of Jonah’s mother to having tense conversations in a break room that smelt of old coffee and stale doughnuts. And why the words Jonah had chosen—“failed friendship”—hurt. Oh, the irony, when it had been him to stick a grenade under whatever they had become.
You are a fool.
A fool with an inner monologue stuck on repeat as Sacha drowned beneath the weight of Jonah’s vexation. “We do not have a failed friendship,” he said, then jammed his lips shut, as if he could stop any more nonsense piling out.
“How do you figure that?” Jonah’s cheekbones sharpened. “Is it because we were never truly friends to begin with? Is that where you’re going with this?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Well, maybe you should.”
“Are you speaking in metaphors now?”
Jonah pushed off the wall he was leaning against and shook his head. “No, Sacha. I’m not.”
He walked out, leaving Sacha in a daze. He waited for the door to slam, but of course, it didn’t. They were at work, not in a soap opera, and their strained exchange had already attracted enough attention.
Sacha turned his back on the curious stares of the FG employees who worked closest to the break room door. Jonah had spoken softly enough for them not to overhear, but Jonah’s demeanour as he’d walked away would’ve been hard to miss from the moon. Sacha wondered if he’d find a mud pie in his coat pocket at the end of the day. That was the difference between FG and Blutecc—in fact, there were many—FG were a close-knit team who adored their leader.
Blutecc were as much of a fractured mess as Sacha was.
Minus the coffee he’d come for, Sacha left the break room and returned to his open laptop in the alcove. Helga was waiting for him. “Where did you disappear to?”
“The break room. If you’d moved your head slightly left, you’d have seen me.”
“I thought you might’ve gone to see Jonah Gray.”
Sacha bristled, irrationally annoyed at hearing Jonah’s whole name fall from lips that weren’t his own. “I did see him, actually.”
