I shook my head, stepping out of her way. “No awkwardness. It’s already gone.”
She looked skeptical but didn’t argue. Instead, she gathered her laptop, her bag, her phone; slow, deliberate, like the room was booby-trapped. “Let me know if you want me to coordinate with legal on the firewall thing.”
“I will.” I paused. “Eliza-”
She stopped at the threshold, not turning around. “Yes?”
“If you ever feel unsafe,” I said, “tell me. I mean that.”
Another silence as her expression told me she was absorbing the words. “You’re not the one I’m worried about,” she said. And she left.
I stood alone, letting the rest of the whiskey coat my mouth and throat. The heat was nothing compared to the acid in my chest.
It wasn’t the kiss I replayed, but the look in her eyes when she locked down that screen, something much closer to terror than annoyance. And she didn’t want me to know she was afraid.
That knotted up my guts.
Chapter Eleven
Eliza
The next morning, I hurried into work. I chose the highest heels I owned. Patent navy, pointy as a threat. My dress was a calculated gray, severe enough to erase the sleepless hollows under my eyes. I’d worn my hair in a stricter bun than yesterday’s, so the effect was, in control, unassailable, absolutely not thinking about the thing I refused to name.
My body disagreed. The muscle at the base of my skull pulsed in revolt. My hands had a faint shake, which I managed by squeezing my coffee cup from my favorite little place so hard the lid kept popping off. I told myself to focus. There was nothing to see here. There had never been anything to see.
I took the east stairs to avoid the risk of running into him at the elevators. At my desk, I powered up, pulled my reports, made a show of attacking the unread emails from last night. I let my screen shield me. I’d survived worse.
Work would keep me occupied. I barely looked up until an echo of his laugh, low, almost polite, threaded through the thin wall separating the project bullpen from the executive offices. I froze, hands mid-hover, the cursor blinking at me.
I could see him through the glass partition. He wasn’t laughing at me, or even looking in my direction. He was standingnext to the conference table with a group of developers, making some point with that infuriatingly gentle voice that people mistook for kindness. When he gestured, the cuff of his shirt rode up just enough to reveal the wristwatch he always wore. He was smiling, but there was a tension to it that I’d never noticed before. It looked like he’d rather be anywhere else.
He caught me staring. Not direct, just a flick of his eyes, a quick acknowledgment and then away. It landed like a slap. My face went hot. I buried myself in a spreadsheet, re-sorting columns just to have something to do.
The rest of the morning was a blur of non-encounters. I mapped his trajectory with the precision of a satellite, adjusting my own orbits to avoid crossing paths. In the break room, I lingered behind a guy microwaving salmon just to dodge a possible collision in the hallway. When I needed the color printer, I sent the job from my laptop and then ghosted it for an hour, so I could pick up the pages when the coast was clear.
But every time I dared a glance through the glass, he was there. Always in the background, always immaculate, always acting like nothing had happened. He moved through the building with this eerie calm, talking to everyone but never lingering. The developers loved him. The admin staff loved him. Even security loved him; last week, I’d seen him defuse a standoff between two rival delivery guys with nothing but a sentence and a smile.
Meanwhile, my brain ran every possible version of his thoughts. Was last night actually an accident? Or a calculated move? Was he plotting to ruin my work, or had he already started?
Every time I caught a glimpse of him, a wave hit: heat in my chest, then adrenaline, then a deep desire for him, then acold, sharp clarity. I hated it. I hated him. I wanted to slam a door in his face and kiss him at the same time.
I sat through an all-staff meeting where Gabriel was three chairs away, his profile too perfect, his attention laser-locked on a presentation about Q2 metrics. He never looked at me once. He didn’t have to. I felt his awareness like a hand on the back of my neck.
By noon, I was wound so tight my own footsteps sounded like gunshots. I ate my salad, then spent the rest of lunch hour pretending to review onboarding materials for the summer interns.
After one, there was a department touchpoint. Gabriel led it, of course. He stood at the head of the glass-walled room, remote in hand, slides flicking behind him like he could change reality with a click. He made an offhand joke about “user experience” that made the room laugh. When someone raised an issue with the new vendor, he absorbed it with a nod, then redirected to me for an answer.
“Eliza, you’ve had the most contact with the implementation. Any perspective?”
My name. Just that. No smile, no inflection. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did.
I kept my voice flat and surgical. “Vendor’s mostly reliable, but their test environments are inconsistent. I’ve documented the variances and flagged the worst for next week’s build.”
He nodded. “Good. Can you share that with Product?”
“Already did.”
A flicker at the corner of his mouth. Approval, or amusement, or something I couldn’t parse. “Excellent. Keep me in the loop on progress.”