Hard to imagine, but there it was.
It didn’t matter how many trivia nights I went to or how many hot guys Lucas got to smile at me across a bar table; I was stuck.
CHAPTER 5
LANDON
By the end of my first week, we’d cleared the mess of old tickets, figuring out which ones were already taken care of and which were outright defunct, and moving into the new system, with a literal first-come-first-served setup now.
Well, with some exceptions. Like, when the COO brought me her laptop and asked me to have a look at an issue she was having with a program, she got to jump the line.
I was working on that when Lucas St. James leaned into the enormous room, craning his head around to look at my desk.
I lifted a brow at him, and he grinned, sauntering in and heading straight across the room. I’d have given anything to have half the confidence of one of the St. James brothers. Just the way they moved was so self-assured, so smooth and chill and just... No question, I was jealous.
He planted his ass on the corner of my desk when he got to me, grinning manically.
“Why is your ass on the boss’s desk, St. James?” Julia called from her workspace, followed by laughter and jeering from the others.
There was a little... not-quite competition between the programmers and the tech team, and unlike at my last job,it truly wasn’t contentious. They all grinned while they were prodding each other, full of shoulder bumps and friendly laughter.
Again, it felt like something from a movie or a TV show. People being nice to each other when they didn’t have to be.
For my part, I was starting to feel like one of those kids who, upon telling stories about his childhood to his friends, got stares of horror instead of the laughter he’d been expecting. If I told my new crew about how things had been in Boston, I suspected they would pity me.
But, I had realized on reflection, I didn’t need or want that. I wasn’t in Boston anymore. I wasn’t living with people so willing to see me hurt. I didn’t have to look at my brother and ex kissing each other at my parents’ dinner table.
I was here, with these people, and everything was pretty freaking great.
I didn’t even miss anyone I’d left behind, which seemed telling about what kind of relationships—or lack thereof—I’d had in the city of my birth.
“Sorry to bother you,” Lucas said, loud and obnoxious for everyone to hear, looking at them instead of me. Then he leaned down, still smiling. “But I wanted to come down and make sure you were coming to trivia night next week.”
“Don’t want to go back to your losing streak?” Julia asked, laughing as he stuck his tongue out at her.
“Now that I’m stuck back, you know, working the job they pay me to do instead of hanging out here in the playroom,” he said, ducking his head, “I can’t just check in all the time. So I wanted to come down and make sure you weren’t making other plans.”
Playroom. Interesting. I cocked my head at him. “Lucas, do you wish you worked here instead of in programming?”
He huffed. “Oh come on. I stare at a screen looking for misplaced punctuation half the day. You guys get to do stuff. Use your hands. It’s fun.”
“You clearly haven’t tried to fix fucking Medson’s frozen computer,” Julia muttered.
Next to her, Alberto groaned. “Again? I swear, next time I get his laptop, I’m installing a parental control app and blocking him from every fucking porn site that exists.”
Everyone burst into raucous laughter, and I almost choked on the sip of water I’d been taking. I wanted to tell them they absolutely couldn’t do that to our CFO, but also... I’d seen the stack of support tickets. The man needed to stop using the company laptop for his skeevy porn sites.
Maybe if we installed one with a non-kid sounding name, like Norton, he wouldn’t realize the app was intended for controlling children’s browsing habits, and think it was a new company policy.
I should probably talk to Maia in HR about that first, though.
Actually, maybe there already was a company policy. I needed to look into that.
I shook myself out of my thoughts and turned back to Lucas. “I’d love to come to trivia night again. It was a lot of fun.”
His answering smile was blindingly bright, and unlike his brother’s, Lucas’s smiles never made me feel like there was a predator watching me.
Was I a weirdo, that some tiny shivery thing in the back of my head liked the way it felt, being in a predator’s sights?
