“Fin, do you think people can tell when someone likes them?” She was pulling at a loose thread on the blanket, not looking at me. “Like, is there a vibe? Because I swear sometimes at work I catch him looking at me and I think, okay, that’s not a normal boss look. That’s... I don’t know. It’s intense. And then he looks away and goes right back to being a brick wall and I think maybe I imagined the whole thing.”
My wolf went completely still.
“He never smiles at me,” she said it quietly, almost to herself. “Smiles at clients, sure. I’ve seen it. This polite, professional thing that doesn’t reach his eyes. But for me? I just get the grunts and the staring and the...” She waved her hand vaguely. “Whatever that is.”
She was quiet for a few seconds. Her fingers found my fur and she stroked absently, her eyes on the dark yard.
“I think I’d give a lot to have him smile at me. Like, actually smile. Because of me.” She let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “God, is that pathetic? I’m sitting on my porch telling a dog that I want my boss to smile at me. This is rock bottom, Fin. We have officially hit rock bottom.”
I didn’t move. My wolf was so still it hurt.
She wanted me to smile at her. And I had, once, yesterday. That jaw twitch that barely counted. But she noticed, and she wanted more.
She picked the book back up and read for another hour. Her voice shifted between the accents, lazy and warm, and my wolf lay quiet inside me, just listening. This was the only time he was ever truly calm. Here, on this porch, with her voice filling the dark.
She finished a chapter and closed the book with a sigh, pressing it against her chest. “That’s a good stopping point.” She stretched her arms above her head and her back popped and she winced. “Okay. Bed. I have to be up in five hours because my boss is insane.”
She stood up and gathered the blanket, tucking the book under her arm. Then she crouched down and cupped my face in both hands, scratching behind my ears. “Thanks for listening, Fin. You’re a very good therapist. Way cheaper than an actual one too.”
She went inside. The lock clicked and the porch light stayed on.
I waited until the bedroom light went on, then off, before crossing the yard, slipping through the gap in the fence, and shifting back behind the tree line. Fully human again, standing in the dark, my hands were shaking.
She wanted me to smile at her.
Tomorrow, I would.
4
— • —
Andrea
Finneas smiled at me on a Monday morning and I almost dropped his briefing folder.
I’d walked into his office the same way I did every day, folder in hand, coffee situation already assessed through the glass wall on my way in. “Your 10 am moved to 10:30, you’re welcome,” I said, setting the folder on his desk.
He looked up at me. And smiled.
It was small. Brief. Gone almost before I fully registered it. But it was there, a real one, the corners of his mouth actually lifting, and it changed his entire face. His eyes softened and that hard line along his jaw relaxed and for half a second he looked like a completely different person. Like someone who might actually enjoy being alive.
I forgot what I was saying. Just stood there in front of his desk with my mouth slightly open and my brain fully offline because Finneas Kingsley had just smiled at me and I was not prepared for what that would do to my nervous system.
“The 10:30,” he prompted.
“Right. Yes. The 10:30, the client called and asked to push, I confirmed.” I was speaking too fast and I knew it and I couldn’t slow down because my face was doing something embarrassing and I needed to leave his office immediately.
I quickly walked out of his office, sat back down at my desk and stared at my screen without reading a single word on it. My heart was hammering. He smiled at me. Actually, genuinely smiled at me. I told Fin last night that I wanted that, sat on my porch and said it out loud like a wish, and now it happened, and I was having a full internal crisis about it at 7:15 in the morning.
The rest of the day, he did it two more times.
Once when I handed him his afternoon coffee. I’d switched him to decaf three days ago and either he hadn’t noticed or he was choosing not to fight me on it, and when I set the mug on his desk and said “last one for the day, don’t push it,” the corner of his mouth twitched up and there it was again. Brief, barely there, but aimed directly at me.
The second time was during a review of his quarterly report. I was standing beside his desk pointing at a chart that he’d put together himself, which was his first mistake, and I told him his pie chart looked like it was designed by “a very confident toddler.” He looked at me, and the smile came again, quickerthis time, like he couldn’t quite stop it, and my stomach dropped so hard I had to grip the edge of his desk to keep from swaying.
Three smiles. In one day. After two years of nothing but grunts and hand waves and the occasional jaw clench that I had to squint to interpret as approval. Three real, actual smiles directed at me and each one knocked about three seconds of cognitive function clean out of my head.
By the end of the day I was a wreck. A fully operational professional wreck who had filed everything correctly and responded to every email on time and was also quietly losing her mind over micro-expressions from her boss.
