“Better than the coffee within a block of your office?”
“Apparently.”
The elevator stopped briefly on the third floor, but nobody was waiting when the doors opened. They closed seconds later and once again, we were alone.
He didn’t smile. I would have killed for him to smile. I would have killed for him to look anywhere but at me, just for two seconds, so I could pull myself back together.
He didn’t.
The doors opened on the seventh floor. My floor. I stepped out.
I was halfway through the step when he spoke again. “Try not to work too late, Joss.”
The doors closed.
I stood on the seventh floor with my tumbler in one hand and my bag in the other and absolutely no recollection of how I’d gotten there.
Try not to work too late, Joss.
Eventually, I made it to my desk.
At my desk, I dropped into my chair, set my tumbler down beside the keyboard, and opened my laptop. Eleven hundred unread messages had accumulated over the weekend. I stared at them. I read none.
I made it ninety minutes before I had to admit I had not done a single piece of useful work.
He was somewhere in this building.
That was the only sentence my brain could hold. He was somewhere in this building. He’d come to my building’s coffee shop and he’d gotten on my elevator and he’d told me not to work too late. And now he was somewhere in this building, eleven floors above me, doing his actual job, and I was at mydesk reading the same Jira ticket for the fifth time without retaining any of it.
I saw him twice over the next four hours.
The first time was through the glass wall of a conference room two pods over from my desk. He was standing at the head of a table with about a dozen people in chairs around him, his suit jacket on, his sleeves not rolled. I made the mistake of looking up from my screen at the exact moment he turned his head, and his eyes found mine through the glass like he’d known where to look without needing to find it first.
I refocused on my screen. I didn’t look back up.
The second time was when he walked past my pod with Mira on his way to her office. I felt them coming before I saw them. I kept my eyes on my screen until they passed. Mira said something to him as they went by, but I didn’t catch any of the words. I caught the cadence of his voice when he answered her. That was enough.
I was reading the same paragraph of a product spec for what felt like the hundredth time when my phone lit up on my desk.
It was a message from an account I didn’t recognize.
Sutton would like to see you when you have a minute.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time.
A minute.When you have a minute. As if I were going to look at that message and respondnow is not a great time for me, please tell the CEO of my company that I’ll get back to him. As ifa minutewere a real unit of measurement and not, in fact, code fornow.
I stood up.
I walked to the executive wing. I’d been on this floor before, but only twice. Both times, I’d been chaperoned by either Mira or my boss. Both times, the doors to the corner offices had been closed.
This time, his door was open.
He was at his desk. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway, but he didn’t stand. He didn’t smile. He gestured to the chair across from his desk.
“Close the door.”
