He was in a dark gray shirt today, top button undone, sleeves already rolled to his elbows even though it was 7 am and the building’s heating hadn’t kicked in yet. His hair was slightly damp, like he’d showered recently, and I noticed that before I noticed the coffee, which told me everything I needed to know about where my priorities were at.
I looked down at the cup. Oat milk latte with a shot of vanilla. My exact order, down to the ratio, the one I’d never mentioned to anyone at this office because who cares how their boss’s assistant takes her coffee.
Except I’d mentioned it to Fin. On the porch, on a random Tuesday, complaining about the broken coffee machine whilescratching behind his ears. He’d been sitting there memorizing my goddamn coffee order.
“What is this?”
“Coffee.” Already heading into his office.
“This is my exact order, Finneas.”
“Is it? Lucky guess.”
“You have never guessed at anything in your life. You double-check the weather before you pick a tie.”
“It’s a latte, Andrea.”
“It’s bribery and you know it.”
His jaw twitched as he disappeared through his door. I picked up the cup because I wasn’t about to waste a perfectly good coffee on principle, took a sip, and it was perfect. Exactly right. The bastard.
An hour later he buzzed my desk. “Can you come in? Need you to look at a report.”
I walked into his office and he handed me a file. He’d pushed his chair back from the desk, legs stretched out, one hand resting on his thigh, the other holding a pen he was turning between his fingers. The rolled sleeves put the tendons in his forearms on full display, which I was sure was accidental in the same way that the latte was a lucky guess.
I read the first page. Flipped through, scanned the summary.
“This is fine.”
“I want a second opinion.”
“You just got one.”
“Read it again.”
I sighed, read it again, standing across from his desk while he watched me. Not the report. Me. My hands on the pages, my face while I read. I could feel the weight of his attention like a physical thing pressing against my skin.
“Still fine.”
“Third paragraph. Look at it.”
I read the third paragraph carefully this time, genuinely confused now, hunting for whatever he’d caught. Went through each sentence, checked the numbers against the data set in my head, looked for typos, misplaced modifiers, anything off. Clean. All of it. I read it again slower and got the same result.
I looked up at him. “Seriously, what am I missing? There’s nothing wrong with this.”
“Stay and walk me through it.”
“Walk you through what? The paragraph is fine, Finneas, every number checks out.”
I stopped. Looked at him, really looked at him. He was leaning back in his chair with his eyes on me, relaxed, patient, turning that pen slowly between his fingers. Not the expression of a manwho found an error in a quarterly report. More like a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
And then it clicked. There had never been anything wrong with the report. He called me in here to sit across from him and talk and picked a fight about a paragraph as an excuse.
My face went warm. “You’re kidding me.”
“Walk me through it.”
I should have dropped the file on his desk and walked out. Instead I pulled the chair closer and sat down, because apparently my self-preservation instincts had fully abandoned me.
