“Hey buddy.” I dropped my bag on the porch and sat down next to him. He was warm and solid and I buried my hand in his thick fur and let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since 5:30 that morning. “Long day.”
He put his chin on my thigh and his body pressed heavy against my side and I felt some of the tension in my shoulders start to loosen, just from the weight and warmth of him being there. Fin always showed up on the bad days. I didn’t know how he knew, but he did, and tonight was no exception.
“He’s impossible, Fin.” I leaned my head back against the porch railing and stared up at the sky. Not many stars visible from this part of Atlanta, but I looked anyway. “The man runs oncaffeine and rage. I gave him a flawless report today, color-coded, indexed, ahead of schedule, and he said ‘fine.’ One word. One syllable. I could’ve handed him a blank sheet of paper and gotten the same response.”
I scratched at the spot behind his ears and he leaned into my hand.
“And the worst part?” I dropped my voice, even though there was nobody around to hear me except a dog. “He looked at me today. Through the glass wall. He was reading something and he looked up and I was already looking at him, which is mortifying, and our eyes just met. And he looked away first, Fin. He looked away first. And my stupid stomach did this flip thing and I had to pretend I was busy so he didn’t see my face turning into a tomato.”
Fin’s tail swept across the porch boards again, slow and steady.
“He’s not even my type,” I told him, quieter now. “Rude and grunty and has never once said thank you for anything I’ve done. But sometimes he looks at me and I just...” I trailed off. I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I’d been trying to finish it for two years and the words never came out right. “Forget it.”
He watched me with those dark steady eyes, not moving, not restless, just present. That was the thing about Fin. Never fidgeted, never got distracted, never wandered off while I was mid-sentence. Just stayed and listened like what I was saying actually mattered.
“You’re the only man who listens to me, you know that?” I smiled and scratched under his chin. “The only one.”
I stayed on the porch with him for a while longer, my hand in his fur, my head tilted back, the neighborhood quiet around us. A car passed on the next block and somewhere a few houses down someone’s TV was still on, the blue light flickering through their curtains. I should have gone inside because tomorrow was going to be another long day, the detailed report still needed to be finished and Finneas was going to be in one of his moods and I needed sleep. But Fin was warm against me and the night air felt good after a day spent under fluorescent lights and I didn’t want to move yet.
“He did this thing today,” I said, because apparently I wasn’t done talking about Finneas Kingsley, which was a pattern I really needed to examine at some point. “When I threatened him with the pink wallpaper. His jaw twitched. Right here.” I touched the corner of my own mouth. “It wasn’t a smile. He doesn’t smile. But it was close, Fin. It was so close. And I almost lost my mind over a jaw twitch. That’s where I’m at. My whole life. Getting excited over micro-expressions from a man who thinks ‘fine’ is a compliment.”
Fin didn’t move. Just watched me in a way that, if I were paying closer attention, I might have realized dogs didn’t usually look at people like that. But I was tired, and he was warm, and when I leaned into him and closed my eyes for just a second, I didn’t think about it at all.
2
— • —
Andrea
I caught sight of myself in the elevator mirror on the way up. Soft pink cardigan over a white camisole, a knee-length pleated skirt with tiny flowers on it, hair down in loose waves with my bangs falling just above my eyes. Everything about me screamed approachable. Sweet, even. People held doors open for women who looked like me and then assumed we knew nothing about the world or anything that required any kind of intelligence.
I used to hate looking like this. My entire teenage years were spent trying to fix it, trying to look older, more serious, more like someone people would actually take seriously instead of patting on the head and calling adorable. I dyed my blonde hair dark brown sophomore year. Wore black everything. Heavy eyeliner that took twenty minutes every morning and boots with heels that made my feet ache by third period. Every day I looked in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back, and I kept doing itbecause at least that stranger didn’t get talked over in class or told she was “too cute to be taken seriously” by teachers who thought they were giving a compliment.
I stopped at nineteen. Just woke up one morning, looked at the dark hair and the heavy makeup and the closet full of clothes that didn’t feel like mine, and thought: I don’t even recognize myself anymore. Went back to blonde that weekend. Wore pink the next Monday. And when people underestimated me after that, it just made my accomplishments hit harder. Their surprise was their problem, not mine.
The elevator opened and I walked across the quiet floor to Finneas’s office. His door was open, which meant he was in a tolerating-interruptions mood, so I walked straight in and dropped the completed detailed report on his desk.
“Detailed. Indexed. Color-coded. Ahead of the deadline you set, which was unreasonable by the way.” I crossed my arms. “Done.”
He picked it up without looking at me. Read the first page, flipped to the second, checked the index. His eyes moved fast, scanning the way he always did when he was actually paying attention and not just performing it.
“Acceptable,” he said.
I stood there.
Acceptable. My week of work compressed into a single day, hours of cross-referencing and reformatting and organizing data until my vision blurred, and the man gave me “acceptable.” Yesterday it was “fine.” Today it was “acceptable.” At this rate,by Friday I might earn a “decent” and I’d have to throw a whole party.
“You’re welcome,” I said, with a brightness that was one hundred percent spite. “So glad my efforts met the minimum threshold.”
He was already reading again. Didn’t look up, didn’t respond, just turned the page like I’d already left the room even though I was still standing right in front of his desk. I turned back to my desk and pulled up my email and started sorting through the morning’s pile, which had grown to forty-seven unread in the time it took me to deliver a report and get my ego bruised.
A prickle ran up the back of my neck about an hour in. The feeling you get when someone is watching you and your body knows it before your brain catches up.
I glanced through the glass wall.
Finneas was watching me. The report was on his desk, untouched since I’d left it there. He wasn’t reading, wasn’t on his phone, wasn’t doing anything except looking at me with an expression I couldn’t name because he shuttered it the second our eyes met. He looked away first, back down to the pages, and picked up his pen like he’d been working the whole time.
My stomach did that stupid flutter, same as it had been doing for two years every time I caught him looking at me, every time our eyes locked through that glass wall and held for a beat too long. I was so tired of it. Tired of the flutter, tired of the blush I could feel creeping up my neck, tired of the way my pulse jumped for a man who responded to my best work with a single word that barely qualified as praise.
