He didn’t. Neither did I. When I brought him his afternoon coffee I leaned in too close setting it down so that my perfume would hit him, my hair brushing his shoulder, my hand resting on his desk with my fingers inches from his. His jaw clenched, his knuckles going pale around the mug. I walked back to my desk and sipped my own coffee with a vicious satisfaction.
The next morning I wore a skirt that I knew for a fact did things when I walked, making a point of passing his glass wall to the printer four times before lunch. On the fourth trip I dropped a pen on purpose, bent to pick it up, smiled sweetly at him over my shoulder when I heard his office door open behind me, and kept walking. His door closed again. Hard.
At a client meeting I sat across from him instead of beside him and crossed my legs slowly while he was mid-sentence. He lost his place. First time I’d ever seen Finneas Kingsley stumble through a sentence in a professional setting and I stored that shit away like a trophy.
However, I didn’t expect to be trapped in the copy room. I was waiting for the printer when the door clicked shut behind me. Turned around and he was standing between me and the exit, shoulder against the door, arms crossed, sleeves rolled, biceps straining the fabric, not touching me, not speaking. Just looking at me from across the small room with dark eyes while the printer hummed behind me and my heart slammed against my ribs.
“Are you going to do anything or just stand there?”
“I’m deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“Whether to kiss you or let you walk out.”
My pulse hammered. “And?”
He held my eyes for one more beat. Uncrossed his arms, stepped aside, opened the door.
“After you.”
I walked out on rubber legs. Didn’t look back because if I looked back I was dragging him into that room and locking the door and I had a shred of professional dignity left, even if it was the size of a damn Post-It note.
The elevator was the breaking point.
End of the day, just the two of us in the private car. I was running through tomorrow’s meetings because talking about work meant not thinking about the copy room, not thinking about how my whole body was still buzzing from thirty seconds of him looking at me without touching me.
“Henderson pushed the morning call to 10:30, so you’ve got a gap before the board review. I moved the Johannesburg follow-up to fill it.”
He was standing eighteen inches to my left. I could feel his body heat through the air between us, his cologne hitting me every time I breathed in. The elevator hummed, floor numbers ticking past.
I kept going. “After the board review you’re clear until 3, unless the Shanghai office calls back.”
“Andrea.”
“What?”
“Stop talking about meetings.”
I looked at him. He was staring straight ahead at the doors, jaw tight, hands at his sides. But I could see his chest moving too fast, could see his fingers curling and uncurling like he was fighting to keep them still. The air in the elevator was thick, charged, pressing against my skin.
“If I stop talking about the schedule I’m going to think about the copy room,” I said.
“I haven’t stopped thinking about the copy room.”
My breath caught. The floor numbers kept ticking. Twelve. Eleven. Ten. Neither of us looking at each other but I could feel the distance between us like a physical thing, eighteen inches of charged air that was getting harder to maintain with every floor.
“You should have kissed me,” I said, and I didn’t know I was going to say it until it was out.
“I know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because if I started I wasn’t going to stop.”
My heart was hammering so loud I could hear it over the elevator hum. Eight. Seven. We were running out of floors. In thirty seconds the doors would open and I’d walk to my car and drive home and this conversation would be over and we’d go back to pretending tomorrow.
Six. Five.
