“Kris.” At the sound of my voice, she raises her eyes to me. “You know I can’t do this on my own.”
For a long second, we look at each other. In all the years we’ve worked together, we’ve come to know each other’s weaknesses, and mine has always been the human stuff. I can talk all day about where a recruit’s tech will land, give them stats about equipment they’ll have, but I’m garbage at selling places, experiences, people, and obviously this is where the Dreyer job has fallen apart. When Ben and I worked as a team, he’d always handle that side of things, and he was unstoppable. Now it’s Kristen who works these angles, and she’s even better than Ben was. Thorough and detail-oriented, but never robotic or distant. Approachable but not overfamiliar, genuinely excited but not frenetic in her energy. And so, sowarm.
I fist a hand against the table.Don’t think about how warm she is.
“What if we set up a call?” she asks weakly. I don’t even have to say anything. Carol turns her head toward Kristen and raises her hand slightly, like she’s about to check her temperature. She thinks better of it and looks back at me with a question in her eyes. As many times as the three of us have sat together in this room, I’m sure Carol is thrown—not just at Kristen’s passivity, but at the cool awkwardness between us. Kristen does not want to go anywhere with me, and my stomach twists in dread.
It’s never been this way. Kris and I, we work as a team.
“A call isn’t going to do it,” I say grimly, and I realize that Carol might also be thrown by my somber delivery. I’m not a cheerful guy, but this problem—it’s exactly the kind of challenge that usually gets me focused, energized.
It’s doing neither for me right now.
“I’m supposed to go to Michigan on—” Kristen says. She raises a hand to her forehead, her full lips compressed and turned down at the corners, and my chest feels tight. Looking at her face like that, I don’t give a damn about the job, the firm. I’ll pay Carol out of my savings, find her a new job. GreenCorp can get fucked, so long as Kristen has what she wants.
“But I guess I’ll push it,” she says, just as I’m about to open my mouth. “Carol, can we do some travel rearranging?”
She turns the sweater back on. “My favorite! How long do y’all need?”
“A day,” I say firmly, even though I don’t know if a day will do it. Ben once spent six days in rural Oregon to get someone to sign off on some 3-D printing tech our old boss was pissing his pants over. “I don’t care what you do with my tickets, but Kristen needs to be on her way to Michigan Friday night.”
“Jasper,” Kristen says. “I can—”
“No,” I say, and my voice sounds so flat. “We’ll do it quickly. Treat it like a hiccup, and it will be one. A minor inconvenience.”
I see the flash of hurt in her eyes. Carol looks back and forth between us, twinkle lights glinting off her glasses. Iamterrible with people. It’s only by some strange, inexplicable miracle that it’s taken me this long to be terrible with Kris.
She stands from her chair, clutching her laptop to her chest. On instinct, I stand too, and now the sense memory of last night is even fresher. My hands clench in my pockets.
“Absolutely,” she says, her voice curt, her eyes not meeting mine. “A minor inconvenience.”
This time, she leaves the conference room first.
Chapter Four
KRISTEN
December 22
The first fight—the onlyrealfight—Jasper and I ever had was about a kiss.
But not one between us.
It was over two years ago, not long after he’d first come to me about leaving our old company to join him and Ben in the venture that would eventually become our current firm. Ben had been away for an extended leave, but was working a metallurgist recruit our boss wanted badly enough to let Ben and Jasper out of the non-compete that was keeping them from starting their own firm. If Ben could close the deal, Jasper could do what he’d been working toward since the day I’d first met him—go out on his own.
But then, Ben kissed the recruit.
“She’s a distraction,” Jasper had said to me that summer day in my office, pacing in front of my desk, his jaw tight.
“He did the right thing,” I’d told him calmly. “He’s got feelings for her, and he told you he can’t work with her. He’s following the rules.”
“He’s forgetting about thejob,” he’d said, a little angrily, and I’d felt a jarring sense of discontinuity, a sinking, embarrassing sense of disappointment in myself. The night before, Jasper and I had ordered tacos from our favorite place and stayed at the office until ten, going over a contract while an Astros game streamed on my computer screen. It had been the most fun I’d had in months, and when I’d gone home, flushed with the pleasure of being around him—the tie-loosened, talkative Jasper it seemed no one else ever got to see but me—I’d thought,Maybe Icouldask him out sometime.Maybe me and Jasper, we could make it work.
But seeing him like that—not even acknowledging that Ben, his best friend since their college days, had found someone he liked enough to jeopardize such a big job—had felt like a glass of cold water to the face, a reminder of how ridiculous it would be to break my professional boundaries for a man who so clearly didn’t care about relationships. When I’d found out, not long after, that Jasper had nearly sabotaged things between Ben and Kit to get the deal, I’d told him to forget about the new firm, that I’d be staying put. I’d stood in his office with my hands on my hips and told him I’d never been so disappointed with someone in my life, and I hadn’t even been exaggerating.
Of course we patched it up, eventually. He’d apologized to Ben, had apologized to me, and he’d done it sincerely, with genuine remorse in his voice and in his eyes. But for a while, it had strained things between us. Or at least, it had for me. It was my feelings for him—my feelings outside of friendship or collegiality—that had made me so completely disappointed, and I’d known it was unfair to him, unfair to our work together. I’d tried, after that, to keep a better distance. To keep work at work, to enjoy our friendship but not expect more from it. I’d even dated a little, though pretty unsuccessfully, and Jasper and I had gotten back into a good routine.
But I don’t have much hope for that routine as I prep for our trip.
