“It’s right here,” Rowe said, speaking over me. He wheeled himself back to his desk and gestured to his screen. I spun around in my own chair in shock, looking back across the aisle between our cubicles.
There was a proposal briefing document on his screen.
Janice leaned over it with a cluck of her tongue and hum of disbelief. “Well, make sure you get it put on the server now,” she said. “And I mean right now, Mr. Mendez, before we have to take disciplinary action.”
“Will do,” I said weakly, unable to focus on Janice as she walked her way back toward her office. Normally I would have made a joke about the water in my glass shaking with each footstep, but this time, I was too busy staring at Rowe.
“I’ll upload it for you,” he said, with a smile that somehow seemed genuine.
I glanced back down the aisle. Janice was out of hearing range. “Why do you keep doing this?” I stage-whispered across at him.
“Doing what?” Rowe asked casually. I watched him drag and drop the file onto the server.
“Saving my ass,” I muttered.
Rowe only flashed me one more of those stupid, dazzling smiles. “Because you saved me, remember?”
“Once!” I protested. It had been a moment of pure weakness. Or maybe I’d thought it would piss Janice off more if she didn’t get to fire Rowe in his first week. I couldn’t remember now. There was a fair chance I’d still been drunk from the night before. “You’ve saved me like… sixteen times.”
“At least,” Rowe agreed easily.
He was turning back to his work like it was nothing.
I ground my teeth. That was the worst thing about Rowe.That. The back of his head. His always flawless brown hair, as if he’d styled it specifically to be seen from behind. It was all I ever really saw.
Those moments when he turned around to bestow that disarming smile on me only made the constant presence of the back of his head even worse.
I opened my mouth to get his attention and ask him to save me one last time – the most important time…
And froze.
I turned back to my desk and rubbed my hands over my face again, praying for this day to be over but also knowing that as soon as it was, my chance to not be a coward would be gone.
Rowe
I checked the clock on my monitor for what felt like the sixteenth time. No – I was only thinking sixteen because Xavi had put it in my head. He was wrong about that, anyway. This was the eighteenth time I had saved, as he put it, his ass.
And I’d only checked the clock five times. It was just that I had done it in the space of eight minutes, so it felt like more.
I still had another four minutes to go before I could shut down this machine and get out of here – and I’d heard there was bad traffic thanks to some crash earlier downtown, so I was going to have to rush as soon as those seconds ticked me over into full time.
Three minutes to go, and I could feel my good leg starting to tick up and down, jiggling over and over again with impatience.
“I’m out. You coming for a drink tonight?” someone said from the opposite side of Xavi’s row. One of the girls he bitched with all the time. I heard the sound of a chair sliding back. They were early. Maybe three minutes didn’t matter to them, but it did to me.
It wasn’t just professional courtesy to stay the whole shift. They knew when we’d logged out of our systems. Do it enough times and you could get your pay docked – or lose your job.
I couldn’t afford either of those things.
“Not tonight,” I heard Xavi say. I could picture his wicked grin in my head. “But find someone disgusting and send me pictures from his bed so we can laugh about his microdick in the morning, okay?”
“Gross!” she said, laughing. I tried to block them out and concentrate. “Shutup, Xavi!”
I was already doing calculations in my head as I gave up trying to finish anything and stared at the clock. Two minutes to go. It would take me five, maybe seven minutes to cross the parking lot to my car. I’d had to park a little further away than usual today because the disabled bay was taken, so I had to factor in the extra time. Then another thirty-five minutes, probably, to get across town in rush hour traffic.
I was only just going to make it for my next shift in time.
The clock hit five exactly and I turned off my computer faster than I ever had before. I grabbed my cane from beside my desk and stood, ready to hustle to the parking lot as fast as I could.
