We went through it page by page. He argued that the graph labels on page two were inconsistent, which they weren’t, they were abbreviated for column width.
“You want me to rebuild an entire table because you don’t like abbreviations?”
“I want it to be better.”
“It’s already better. I made it.”
He leaned forward on his desk. Forearms flat on the surface, sleeves tight across his muscles, that damn pen still between his fingers. I tried very hard to focus on the report.
“The executive summary needs to be tighter,” he said.
“The executive summary is two paragraphs. How much tighter do you want it?”
“More formal. The board expects a certain tone.”
“The board can handle a contraction, Finneas. If ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’ is keeping them up at night, that’s a literacy issue, not a formatting one.”
His mouth twitched. A crack in his composure that lasted half a second, and warmth spread through my chest because I put it there. I wanted to make it happen again. That was dangerous. I pressed on anyway.
“Paragraph four,” he said. “The semicolon.”
“What about it?”
“It should be a period.”
“It absolutely should not be a period. That’s a compound clause with related independent ideas. A period would break the flow.”
“The flow is fine without it.”
“The flow is better with it and you know it. You just want to argue.”
He leaned further forward. So did I. The file was spread between us, three feet of desk separating our faces, and his eyes were right there, close enough that I could see flecks of amber in the brown that I’d never noticed before. His jaw was doing that sharp focused thing and I realized I’d stopped looking at the report entirely because I was tracking the line of his jaw instead, imagining what it would feel like under my fingertips, which was a completely unhinged thought to have during a conversation about punctuation.
“It disrupts the rhythm of the paragraph,” he said, and his voice had dropped lower, the way it always did when we argued for too long, like the volume knob was slowly turning down as the distance between us shrank.
“It enhances the rhythm. That’s literally what semicolons do.”
“Says who?”
“Says every style guide ever written. Says me. I’m right and you know I’m right and you’re arguing because you like arguing with me.”
The words came out before I could catch them. His eyes held mine. My face went hot. Neither of us moved.
I caught myself staring at his mouth mid-sentence and jerked my eyes back to the page so hard the words blurred.
“The semicolon stays.”
“Fine.”
“Don’t say fine like you’re doing me a favor.”
“You’re right.”
“Thank you.”
I stood up, grabbed the file, walked out. My pulse was hammering, my face warm, and we hadn’t touched once the entire time. Forty-five minutes of sitting three feet apart arguing about punctuation while pretending we weren’t both thinking about closing the distance. The tension of not touching left me more wound up than any brush in the hallway ever had.
Back at my desk I tried to work but my brain wouldn’t cooperate. It kept replaying the way he’d leaned forward, forearms on the desk, eyes on mine, arguing about a semicolon he knew damn well was correct. He wasn’t fighting about the report, was fighting to keep me in his office, keep me talking, keep me close. And I liked arguing with him. Liked the way his jaw twitched when I scored a point, the way his voice dropped when he conceded, the way three feet felt like three inches when we were both leaning in.
