Kat
The doorto my office dips inward, and I jump halfway out of my seat. A moment later, my assistant Lucas sticks his head around it, face serious, hair parted and tamed like he’s been in church.
“Need anything else, boss?” he asks.
I cross my ankles under my desk and try not to look like I’m one minor surprise away from a heart attack, which I might be. My laundry isn’t any more folded than it was Saturday morning. I’ve gotten maybe seven hours of sleep over three nights. I feel scraped out and raw, and the month of sitting across from my ex all day, every day, has only just begun.
“You were supposed to go home an hour ago,” I tell him, and it comes out sharper than I mean for it to. “And don’t call me boss, I’m not Springsteen.”
That gets a blank look, because Lucas is twenty-one and apparently unconcerned with classic rock.
“Sorry,” I say in the next breath, because none of this is poor Lucas’s fault and I know it. “I’m fine. I got behind today because of—” I gesture at the second desk now in my office, “—but you should go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Have a good night,” he says, and then Lucas disappears and I put my face in my hands, shoving my glasses into my hair.
Today, I did not cry under my desk.
I wanted to. Just a nice, quick, stress-fueled sob while most people were at lunch, leaving plenty of time to splash off my face and pull myself together before anyone came back.
But alas, no. Not only is crying at work generally frowned upon, I’m one of three women employed by Stratifite, so not only is it my job to manage the projects of half the programmers here, I also get to prove to everyone that two X chromosomes do not render one incapable of working in tech. If I get caught crying under my desk, I may as well resign my job, put on a frilly apron, and start ironing someone’s tie.
Of course, that might happen anyway, because B&L—the energy conglomerate with more branches and subsidiaries than a whole forest full of rivers—bought Stratifite last week, and now we’re merging. There might be redundancies.
And who’s overseeing the process? Evan, who has already asked me twice what exactly my job here is, as if he’s never heard of a project manager before.
I keep my face in my hands as I hear the main door shut behind Lucas. I finally slump to my desk, forehead on my hands, and I stay like that for a few minutes because giving up feels kinda good.
I don’t know how long I’ve been like that when the main door opens again.
“Kat?” calls Silas’s voice.
I pull my glasses back down, brush my bangs out of the way, stand for the first time in a few hours and steel myself.
“Back here,” I call, and push my door open to see a bouquet of roses walking across the room toward me. A dozen? Two dozen?
My stomach plummets, and I’m intensely glad we’re the only ones here.
“Voila, babe,” he says, and holds them out to me with a grin.
I stare, motionless, as anxiety pours into my chest for a reason I can’t even name. They’re flowers. Only flowers. From someone with whom I have a reasonable truce.
What the hell is wrong with me?
“What are you doing?” I finally manage.
“I can’t bring my girlfriend flowers?” he asks, casual and charming in a button-down shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled up. He’s a little too loud, a little too much, and it takes me a second.
“There’s no one else here, you can turn off the Silas Show,” I say.
“This isn’t gonna work if you call it a show.”
“This isn’t gonna work if you—”
I don’t have an end to that sentence, so I stand there and gesture with my hands while he watches me. Finally I take a deep breath and close my eyes, squeezing my fists. Well, one fist. The other is still too bandaged.
“Sorry,” I say, and push my glasses up. “Thank you for the flowers. They’re lovely. Let me find something to put them in.”
“I got a vase,” he says, tapping it with one finger. “I figured your office wouldn’t have anything.”