“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you that if you keep drinking coffee at this rate, you’re going to vibrate through the floor and I’ll have to explain to the building manager why the CEO left a Finneas-shaped hole in the ceiling of the floor below us.”
His jaw twitched. Not a smile. Finneas Kingsley did not smile. But that tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth was the closest thing I had ever gotten out of him in two years, and I had to physically stop myself from pumping my fist.
“If you switch to decaf for the rest of the day,” I continued, pressing my advantage because I had zero self-preservation instincts, “I won’t use pink wallpaper as the background for all your presentations this week.”
He grunted.
I had spent two years learning his grunt language and I was basically fluent at this point. This particular grunt meantI will tolerate your threats because you are competent and I don’t want to train another assistant.It also had a slight exhale at the end, which meant he was almost amused, which I counted as a personal victory.
“Your meeting with the Hargrove account is at two,” I said, shifting back to business. “I moved your three o’clock to Thursday because their team lead is out with the flu, and I already sent the revised agenda for the board call on Friday.”
He didn’t say thank you, because he never said thank you. Just looked back at his screen, which in Finneas language meantnoted and approved.
I went back to my desk and worked like a woman possessed. No lunch break. A granola bar from my drawer at eleven and a handful of almonds at two and that was it. I reorganized the entire data set, built a master summary with color-coded categories, cross-referenced three quarters of financials, and compiled the whole thing into a clean document with indexed tabs. My eyes were dry and my shoulders ached and I had been in the same chair for so long that my left foot had fallen asleep twice.
At some point during the afternoon, I caught him watching me through the glass wall of his office. Our eyes met and he looked away first, back to his screen, like he hadn’t been staring at all. My stomach did a traitorous little flip and I had to pretend I was reading an email so nobody, and by that I meant Finneas, would see the color rising up my neck.
By 6 pm, I dropped the finished summary on his desk with a satisfying thwack.
“Ahead of schedule. You’re welcome.”
He picked it up, read the first page, flipped to the second, then skipped ahead to the index. I stood there, arms crossed, waiting for anything. A “good job” or a “thank you” or a “wow Andrea, you are a miracle worker and this company would crumble to dust without you.” I wasn’t picky. I would have taken a nod.
He set it down.
“Fine.”
Not “acceptable.” Not even “good work” or a grunt of approval. Just “fine,” delivered with the same enthusiasm a person would use to describe gas station coffee.
I turned and walked back to my desk and grabbed my bag and my jacket and headed for the elevator. Two years. Two years of delivering flawless work and getting “fine” in return. Two years of pushing back and being pushed right back. Two years of Finneas Kingsley and his grunts and his jaw and his dark eyes and his rolled-up sleeves and his complete inability to say two kind words in a row.
And I was still here. Every morning. Before the sun came up.
I didn’t want to think too hard about why.
The walk to Bonalisa Animal Shelter took twenty minutes, and I used every single one of them to decompress from whatever fresh torture Finneas had put me through that day. The route was muscle memory at this point: left on Peachtree, past the dry cleaner that always had a cat sleeping in the window, right on Clover, down three blocks to the shelter tucked between a laundromat and a hardware store with a hand-painted sign over the door.
Maryjane was behind the front counter sorting through intake forms when I walked in. I’d met her during my first week in Atlanta, when I was homesick and lonely and wandered into the shelter because I missed being around animals. She’d handed me a leash, pointed at a hyperactive beagle, and said “walk him or he’s going to eat another shoe.” We’d been best friends ever since. She was thirty, dark-haired, always had paint somewhereon her clothes from the mural she’d been working on in the back hallway for six months, and tonight she was wearing a t-shirt that said “Dog Mom” in glitter letters that were mostly peeled off.
“Bad day?” she asked without looking up.
“What gave it away?”
“You have the face. The Finneas face.”
I dropped into the folding chair next to the counter and put my forehead on the desk. The laminate was cool against my skin and I stayed there for a few seconds, just breathing.
“He gave me a week’s worth of work with a one-day deadline,” I said into the counter. “I finished it early because I’m incredible, and he said ‘fine.’ That’s it. Fine.”
“Mmhmm.”
“The man communicates entirely in grunts, Mary. He has a vocabulary of four sounds and a hand wave. I’ve literally been studying his grunts for two years like I’m a wildlife researcher and he’s a rare species of grumpy bear.”
“Mmhmm.”
“And he drinks coffee like he’s trying to single-handedly keep Colombia’s entire economy afloat.”
