“Of course.” He set down his pen. Didn’t stand. Didn’t gesture to the chair. Just watched me with those impossible blue eyes and waited for whatever I was about to do to both of us.
I closed the door. That was my first mistake. Closing the door made it private. Private made it real.
“Last night,” I began.
“Charlie—”
“Please let me finish.” My voice was steady. I’d practiced this in the shower, in the car, in the elevator. I had the words in the right order. “What happened last night was ... it can’t happenagain. You’re the CEO of the company that owns my project. I’m the lead engineer on the most important technology in your portfolio. The power dynamics alone make this?—”
“A mistake?” he said quietly.
The word hit the air between us and just hung there. A mistake. Three syllables that reduced the most honest thing I’d felt in years to an error in judgment.
“Yes,” I said. “A mistake.”
Something moved across his face. Not anger—I could have handled anger. This was worse. A flash of something raw and undefended, there and gone so fast that anyone who wasn’t watching carefully would have missed it. But I was watching carefully. I’d been watching this man carefully since the night he’d pinned a stranger’s wrist to a bar and told me to walk away from a drink I didn’t know was poisoned.
He controlled it. Folded it away behind the CEO mask with a precision that was almost surgical.
“If that’s how you feel,” he said. His voice was even. Professional. Exactly what I’d asked for.
I wanted to scream.
“It is,” I said instead. “SEAS is too important. For both of us.”
“You’re right.” He picked up his pen again. A dismissal disguised as agreement. “It won’t happen again.”
I stood there for a beat too long. Waiting for him to fight me on it. Waiting for him to say the thing I couldn’t say—that it hadn’t been a mistake, that we both knew it, that the real mistake was pretending otherwise.
He didn’t. He just went back to his papers.
I walked out of his office on steady legs and made it all the way to the stairwell before I leaned against the cold concrete wall and pressed both hands over my mouth.
It wasn’t a mistake. I knew it wasn’t a mistake. The way he’d kissed me—like I was something he’d been looking for withoutknowing he was searching—that wasn’t a mistake. That was the truest thing that had happened to me in ten years of keeping my head down and my heart locked up.
But the truth was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Not with SEAS on the line. Not with everything I’d built hanging in the balance between what I wanted and what was smart.
I wiped my eyes, straightened my blouse, and went back to the lab.
For the rest of the day, I buried myself in the sensor calibration data. Numbers didn’t lie and they didn’t kiss you in dark rooms. Numbers were safe. I ran the pressure tolerance simulations three times, adjusted the frequency parameters, documented every variance.
At lunch, Jason brought me a sandwich I hadn’t asked for. “You look like you haven’t eaten,” he said.
“I ate.”
“When?”
I couldn’t remember. He set the sandwich on my desk and left without pushing. Good man, Jason. He never pushed.
Through the glass wall of the lab, I could see his office. The office he really used. His third floor CEO office was often empty these days – because he’d chosen to camp in a smaller office meant for an engineer, one on the same floor as my lab. His light was on. It was always on. Twice I caught myself looking up without meaning to, and twice his chair was empty—he was somewhere else in the building, doing whatever CEOs did when they weren’t being told by their lead engineer that the best kiss of her life was a professional liability.
The third time I looked, he was there. And he was looking back.
We held each other’s gaze for exactly one heartbeat. Then I turned to my screen and he turned to his phone and we bothwent on pretending that the six floors between us were enough distance.
They weren’t.
That evening, I found a note tucked under the windshield wiper of the SUV.
