“Was there something else?” I asked, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was a goddamn miracle.
“No.” He went back to his office.
Twenty minutes later he was back. Needed me to confirm a meeting time he already knew. I confirmed it while looking at my screen because if I looked at his face from this distance I was going to do something embarrassing.
I brought his afternoon decaf at the usual time and when I set it on his desk our eyes caught and he didn’t look away. Five seconds. Six. Seven. My face went warm and my fingers tightened around the mug handle and I set it down too hard and coffee sloshed across his desk.
“Sorry.” I grabbed for a napkin.
“Leave it.” His voice was lower than usual.
I left it. Went back to my desk. My hands were shaking and I tucked them under my thighs so nobody walking by would see.
I could feel him through the glass for the rest of the afternoon. That prickling awareness on the back of my neck, constant, like standing next to a radiator. I caught him watching three separate times. First two, he glanced away, back to his screen, the old routine. The third time he didn’t bother. Just looked at me, dark eyes, jaw set, no pretense at all.
I looked back because I was Andrea Grey and I didn’t back down from a stare. Not even when my neck was hot and my hands were tingling and every nerve in my body was telling me to look away before I did something stupid.
We held for what felt like a full minute. My heart was racing like it was going to burst out of my chest anytime soon. Then my desk phone rang and I jumped so hard my chair rolled back six inches and I nearly fell out of it.
“Hello?” My voice came out a full octave higher than normal.
The person on the other end asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine, which was a lie. The opposite of fine. A woman whohad just lost a staring contest with her boss because a telephone startled her like a goddamn jack-in-the-box.
I made it through the rest of the day by sheer force of will and the fact that Finneas had a 4:30 meeting on a different floor that kept him away for the last hour. Grabbed my bag the second the clock hit six and left before he could come back.
I went to Bonalisa but I couldn’t focus. Walked the dogs on autopilot, filled water bowls wrong and had to redo them twice. Mary was restocking the cat room shelves when she caught me standing in the middle of the hallway staring at nothing.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“You’re holding a bag of kibble upside down.”
I looked down. Kibble was pooling around my shoes. “Shit.” I crouched down and started scooping it back into the bag while Mary watched me with her arms crossed.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Nope.”
“You sure? Because you look like someone put your brain in a blender.”
“That’s actually a very accurate description of my current mental state, but no. Not yet. I need to process.”
She handed me a broom. “Process while you sweep.”
I swept. It didn’t help. My brain kept circling back to what happened.
By the time I got home it was past nine and I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the fact that my brain had been running laps around the same five minutes all damn day. Fin was on the porch when I walked up the path, and the sight of him sitting there, big and dark and calm, made something in my chest loosen. I dropped my bag, sank down next to him, and shoved my face into his fur.
“Okay. Okay okay okay. I need to talk about this or I’m going to combust.”
Fin settled against me and I pulled back and sat cross-legged, my hands already going because I talked with my hands when I was worked up and right now I was very, very worked up.
“So there was this client today. Clark. Nice guy, whatever, friendly, put his hand on my shoulder while we were talking. Normal human interaction, nothing crazy. And then Finneas came out of his office and, Fin, I swear he teleported, because one second the door was closed and then he was just there and he grabbed Clark’s wrist and took his hand off me. Just lifted it. Removed it. Like he was peeling a bug off my shoulder.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest.
“And then he said, quote, ‘I’d appreciate it if we kept things professional.’ Professional! As if I was the one doing something wrong! Like I was out there giving lap dances at my desk instead of literally just standing there having a conversation while a client talked to me about a broken projector!”
