He rises, unfolding to his full terrifying height, and grins down at me with something that looks almost like fondness.
"You are very small and very fierce, Orla Peace," he rumbles, and there's something in his tone, amusement, maybe, or appreciation, or some primal recognition that makes my spine straighten reflexively.
My name in his mouth sounds different. Sounds wrong, somehow, in the best possible way. Sounds like something I want to hear again, preferably not in a corporate training environment where professional boundaries should theoretically still exist. He shapes the syllables with that slight accent, that roughness around the consonants that turns my perfectly ordinary name into something almost exotic.
I should not be cataloguing the phonetic qualities of my own name as pronounced by a co-worker.
I should not be noticing how his voice drops slightly on the second word, how he lingers on the vowel sounds.
I should definitely not be wondering how it would sound in other contexts.
"And you're very large and very aggravating, Thraka," I counter, aiming for dismissive and landing somewhere in the vicinity of flustered. My professional composure is developing stress fractures. I can feel them spreading like cracks in overloaded infrastructure.
His grin widens, showing those intimidating teeth that should terrify me and somehow don't.
"This is true," he agrees cheerfully, utterly unbothered by the accusation, as if being aggravating is a point of pride rather than criticism. "I am excellent at both."
He heads toward the break room, leaving me alone in the cubicle, surrounded by broken keyboard fragments and the lingering warmth of his presence.
I sit back down in my chair with perhaps more force than necessary, the ergonomic cushion exhaling a soft wheeze of protest beneath me.
Check my Fitbit with the kind of clinical detachment I use when reviewing quarterly reports, tilting my wrist to catch the screen's glow.
Heart rate: 142 BPM.
I blink at the number. Stare at it. Will it to recalibrate, to correct what is obviously a sensor malfunction, a reading error, a glitch in the hardware.
It doesn't change.
Resting rate: 65 BPM.
The numbers don't lie. They never do. That's what I've always loved about data, its ruthless, uncompromising honesty. Numbers are immune to self-deception, to rationalization, to the careful narratives we construct to protect ourselves from inconvenient truths.
A 77 BPM differential. That's not normal. That's not professional. That's not the cardiovascular response of someone who is simply irritated by a disruptive colleague.
That's the cardiovascular response of someone whose autonomic nervous system has completely abandoned its professional standards.
I tell myself it's stress.
Just stress.
Elevated cortisol levels. Adrenaline response. The physiological manifestation of prolonged exposure to chaos and unpredictability in my carefully controlled work environment.
Nothing else.
Certainly nothing else.
Nothing that has anything to do with how he says my name, or how his hands looked holding that keyboard, or the way his grin makes something flutter dangerously in my heart.
Just stress.
But my heart keeps beating its trapped bird rhythm, and somewhere in the breakroom, Thraka is probably terrorizing thecoffee machine, and I have two more hours of training to survive before I can retreat to my office and process what the hell just happened.
Contingency plans.
I need contingency plans.
For this.
