Despite her eclectic taste, Margo didn’t consider herself at all creative. Colette hated logic and the boring, mundane side of numbers. She didn’t have the patience to sit down and make everything add up and balance perfectly. In essence, she and Margo made a good team.
“Mr. Sex,” Margo whisper-yelled back at Colette.
Oh no. Oh my god, please no.
“We agreed we weren’t going to call him that anymore,” she whisper-yelled back. She did a quick double take to make sure no one was walking past the break room. “Chad came close to overhearing us and we put the brakes on that before anyone found out we’d given him that nickname. And he doesn’t deserve it. He might be hot, but he’s also an asshole. He’s a danger to women all over the world. Mr. Gross is more like it.”
Margo rolled her eyes again. Her lips wobbled with the effort of holding her excitement in. Colette’s stomach cramped up. She had a feeling she really wasn’t going to like whatever Margo had to tell her.
“What? What about him?” she prompted, when Margo started stammering something, a garbled up jumble of language that didn’t even make sense.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you would have trusted me with something like that.” Margo’s lips wobbled again, but this time, hurt sparked in her eyes.
Colette’s throat closed up. She felt like she’d just been picked up by a giant and plunked into a pot of boiling water. “What do you mean I didn’t tell you? What’s going on? Margo!” She stopped just short of gripping her friend’s arms and shaking her.
Margo blinked back at her, confused and still a little betrayed. “You and- and Mr. Sex. I mean- you always said you didn’t like him. We agreed he was hot, but like all insanely beautiful men who walk around like they’re sex incarnate, he was a huge asshole. We agreed to not like him. So- I- I never thought you’d- I mean- you’re dating? How? When? You have to tell me everything!”
“D-dating?”
Colette tried to draw in a few breaths, but her lungs felt like they’d been sealed shut. She tried to grip Margo’s arms, to use her like a lifeline when the room began to tilt and spin, but she missed and as the black spots danced in front of her vision, closing in around her like someone had just snuck into her head and turned off the lights, she wobbled. She swayed towards the counter where the coffeepot sat, percolating away, its pleasant aroma and happy little sounds so at odds with the violent quaking going on in the room.
The floor seemed to be shifting and rolling, like an internal earthquake was happening and the kitchen was the epicenter of it all. It felt like a giant pit was opening up, yawning ahead of her as she stumbled. Suddenly, the counter seemed very far away, and the earth was rolling and everything was black.
Colette went down hard, a shriek and a muffled curse echoed in the background, doing nothing to break her fall. She hit hard, groping in the dark as she tried to find her way, right herself, clear her head and somehow get vertical again.
Except getting vertical seemed like a very daunting task.
While her fingers scrabbled at something abrasive, the break room carpet with its industrial low pill, she struggled to draw in a few labored breaths. Her lungs were more than just on fire. They felt like they’d been doused in gas and set ablaze. Her head rung, the shrill chimes sounding right between her ears in a splitting cacophony that she couldn’t shut off or tune out.
While she was trying to convince her lungs to do what they were supposed to do and save her freaking life by inhaling just a little bit of oxygen around all that fire, something changed. She inhaled and she smelled… something sharp. Crisp. Biting and fresh, like the ocean in the morning with all its spicy trees gathered around its shore to bathe in the early morning dew.
Which was both impossible and ridiculous, because she’d never been to the ocean and she’d smelled pine trees only a few times. She’d hardly ever even been out of the city. And she was pretty sure that she was still in the lunchroom in an executive high rise building that was two stories away from being completely corporate and soulless.
Something hard and strong, firm and unyielding, wrapped around her. All of a sudden, she was being lifted, carried. She swung out wildly, flailing her arms, wondering why the hell she still couldn’t see anything. A muffled oomph sounded right next to her ear when her fist connected with someone squishy, soft, and warm. Skin.
Oh no.
The scent. The spicy sharpness flooding her lungs. The hard, unyielding planes, the warmth seeping through her…