Chance Taken

“You will,” Tank assures me and I leave, the anger at my dumb sadness exploding inside me.

I find my bike parked next to Hunter’s in the covered garage to the side of the main doors of the HQ. The sight does nothing to help with my sadness. It just makes it more unbearable and my anger worse.

I wish I could at least look forward to spending the day with a beautiful woman, which Veronica very much is, but given how she treats me that’s not even a possibility. Not that any of that matters.

Revenge.

That’s the only thing seething in my mind.

And I won’t enjoy anything in this world until I get it.

Veronica

Loud tapping on the glass door of the office wakes me from a deep sleep. I think it’s been going on for a while and I simply incorporated it into the dream I was having of doing yoga in a bright white room with water dripping somewhere just out of sight, the sound growing louder and louder and more annoying, like the ticking of a time bomb.

I fell asleep on the sofa in the office early this morning, at about two AM, thinking I’d just lie down for a couple of minutes and rest my eyes from the computer screen glare. I didn’t even take my glasses off, so now the side of my head is achy from where the frame pressed into it all night. Judging by the sunlight it’s already mid-morning, but that’s all my groggy mind registers as I walk to open the front door.

I was sure I’d see Trixie when I opened it, or possibly my sister, but certainly not Chance, who is standing there, squinting at me. There’s that same hard-yet-kind look in his eyes, and now I think the kindness I always notice in his face has a lot to do with the way his lips are permanently, ever so slightly turned up at the edges, no matter what else his expression or eyes are doing. He’s wearing a washed-out black long-sleeved shirt with a faded yellow logo of some kind, stretched taut across his defined chest and abs, and his biceps and shoulders too. The sun is also hitting his unruly hair in just the right way to make the reddish undertones in it glow like copper.

I am very acutely aware that I slept in my clothes, which I also wore during all my physical exertions yesterday and that I need a shower badly. The shirt he’s wearing, on the other hand, smells fresh and vaguely of being stored in a closet for a long time.

His lips twitch up, but don’t form the ready smile which was constantly there on his face the first day we met.

“Did I wake you?” he asks. “It’s nine and I’m here. Sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday.”

I nod along as he speaks then become aware of how dumb it must look and freeze. My hair has to be a mess, and I dare not even think what happened to my makeup since I spent a good part of the night rubbing my eyes, and it doesn’t help at all that he smells so fresh and clean, like a meadow in the summer.

“Do you want me to come back later?” he asks.

“No, no,” I say, open the door wider and move back so he can enter. “I just wasn’t expecting you back so soon.”

“I was feeling better, so I thought I’d come in,” he says as he enters, filling my nostrils with that fresh scent of his again. “You know, to get these hours over with as soon as possible.”

He looked at me over his shoulder as he said it and the intenseness in his eyes pierced me right through like a laser or something even sharper.

“Right, but the hours are what they are,” I say vaguely and walk to my office. “Do you want a coffee? I want one.”

“Yeah, you look like you need it,” he says and I decide not to rise to it.

But the last conversation we had, the one on the phone where I asked about Harper that ended with him hanging up on me is replaying very loudly in my mind. I could blame not being fully awake yet for my inability to string a fitting sentence together, but it’s more than that. All my composure just goes straight out the window whenever he’s around, there’s no two ways about it.

So I don’t even try to say anything else, I just walk over to the coffee stand and plop a capsule into the robot. He groans as he sits down in the same chair he occupied the first day he came here. Then I catch sight of my face in the glass of the painting hanging over the coffee maker and acutely and very strongly wish there was some way all this was still part of my dream, just like his knocking was for a while. And secondly, I wish I had checked who it was before opening the door.

I fell asleep without undoing my ponytail, and there’s nothing even remotely cute about the mess that is my hair right now. Add to that my smudged mascara and eyeliner, and the red welts left by sleeping with my glasses and I look absolutely deranged. Like a mad woman. Which after the scene at the festival and more recently on the phone, he most likely already thinks I am. Now I look the part too.

I tug at the elastic band, feeling my hair rip, but ignoring it, then fix my ponytail, and do what I can to erase the black smudges around my eyes, which isn’t much. By the time I look at least moderately presentable the first cup of coffee is done.

“Milk and sugar?” I ask without turning around.

He doesn’t reply and when I turn to see why, he’s staring down at his phone, scrolling.

“Would you like milk and sugar in your coffee?” I ask louder, startling him.

“Black is fine,” he says and goes back to looking at his phone. He’s not getting black coffee, because all the pods I have left are hazelnut cream flavor, but I don’t bother explaining that to him as I set the cup on the table next to him and return to make one for myself. Hazelnut cream with lots of milk and lots of sugar.

I might as well not be here for the attention he’s paying to me as I prepare my own coffee. But when I bring it to the desk and sit down across from him, his eyes lock on mine.

“You asked me about Harper yesterday,” he says and the sip of coffee I was taking turns into a scalding gulp. I cough, covering my computer screen, keyboard and desk with drops of coffee.