MY DESK IS ON THE FOURTEENTHfloor, in the design wing of the product development division. It’s an open-plan space with big windows that look out over the mountains, and I’ve decorated my little corner with a few photos, a smallcactus that the office supply catalog described as “virtually unkillable” (which I’m choosing to take as a personal challenge), and a mug that says I’m not a morning person, I’m an always person that I bought at a thrift store for two dollars and which makes no sense but somehow feels accurate.
I like my job. I really, genuinely like it, which still surprises me sometimes, because for the first four months after graduation, I was so convinced that my degree was essentially an expensive piece of paper that I’d started mentally preparing for a lifetime career in coffee.
Not that there’s anything wrong with coffee. I loved working at Beans 4 U. But I didn’t spend four years studying sustainable product design so I could perfect my latte art, even though my latte art was getting pretty good.
Here, I actually get to do what I trained for. The design team works on packaging and product interfaces for preter-human trade goods, everything from biodegradable shipping containers for temperature-sensitive Caro medical supplies to the user-experience design for new safety devices that preters and humans both need in a post-That Day world. It’s fascinating. It’s meaningful. And every morning when I sit down at my desk and pull up whatever project I’m working on, there’s this little hum of satisfaction in my chest that tells me I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
My thesis advisor would probably cry if she could see me now.
She’d also probably ask why I still eat onigiri for lunch three days a week, but that’s between me and my budget.
TRISH FINDS ME AT NOON, which is how most of my favorite parts of the workday begin.
I hear her before I see her, which is funny because Trish Park is the quietest person I’ve ever met. So quiet you lean in when she talks, because everything she says feels like whatever she’s about to say is a secret she’s trusting you with. She works in IT security, two floors down, and she’s brilliant in the way that people who are genuinely brilliant often are: completely unaware of it, slightly uncomfortable when anyone notices, and happiest when she’s buried in code and nobody’s looking at her.
But I hear her today because she’s speed-walking, and Trish speed-walking means something has happened that she needs to talk about immediately but can’t say out loud until she’s in a safe zone, ergo, me.
I’m not sure how that happened, honestly. We met during my first week when I accidentally wandered into the IT floor looking for the supply closet and found her sitting alone in a server room, eating a sandwich and reading something on her phone with an expression that was equal parts dreamy and terrified. I apologized for interrupting. She said, “It’s fine, I’m just having a crisis.” And somehow that turned into lunch, which turned into daily lunches, which turned into the closest friendship I’ve had since college.
The crisis, as I later learned, was a boy.
Not a boy.
A man.
A Caro.
Trish, shy, gentle, blushing-if-you-look-at-her-too-long Trish, is secretly dating a blood drinker.
I still don’t know how it happened. She won’t tell me the details, only that they met “by accident” and that it’s “complicated” and that she refers to him only as “the man I’m dating” because using his actual name out loud would, in her words, “make it too real and then I’d have to deal with the fact that I’m in way over my head.”
I understand this more than she knows.
“Lunch,” Trish says breathlessly, arriving at my desk with her bag already over her shoulder. “Now. Please. I need to talk.”
“Scale of one to ten?”
She considers this. “Seven. Maybe eight. Definitely not below a seven.”
I save my file and grab my lunch bag. “Roof?”
“Roof.”
THE ROOF TERRACE IStechnically for all employees, but nobody ever comes up here except us. It’s too windy for most people, and the altitude makes some of the human employees dizzy. But I like it up here. The view is staggering, endless peaks and pine forests and sky that goes on forever, and the wind is the sort that makes you feel clean, like it’s blowing away everything you don’t need.
We sit on our usual bench, and I unpack my homemade onigiri, which has been my best budget-saving hack thanks toan amazing YouTube recipe reel. Beside me, Trish unwraps something that looks like it was prepared by a professional chef.
I eye her bento box. “Let me guess. The man you’re dating.”
Trish goes pink. Not just her cheeks. Her entire face, her neck, all the way to her ears. It’s sort of magnificent. “He found out I’ve been eating vending machine food for lunch.”
“And?”
“And now there’s a delivery service. Every day. To my desk. The packaging is completely unmarked so nobody can trace it, but the food is...” She gestures helplessly at the bento box, which contains what appears to be seared salmon, perfectly arranged vegetables, and some grain that I’m pretty sure costs more per ounce than my monthly rent. “...this.”
“That’s really sweet, Trish.”
“It’s really terrifying.” She picks up her chopsticks and stares at the salmon like it’s personally offended her. “What sort of person arranges an anonymous gourmet lunch delivery service for someone they’re dating?”
