Chapter 8
Danni
“What happened?” Morgan says from my phone. We’re FaceTiming. I’m looking at the underside of her cabinets and a sliver of her ceiling as she busies herself in the kitchen. “Why was your face so red when you left? It looked like you were crying.”
“I wasn’t.” I nearly was. “Did anyone else see me?”
“A few of us did.”
“Wonderful.”
“ Danni . What did Chance do? Was he mean to you?”
“Of course, he was mean.” I prop my feet on my ottoman and tug my sherpa blanket over my legs. Episode Three of Wednesday flickers on the flatscreen in front of me. I turned the volume down when Morgan called me.
“So, how was he mean?” Morgan asks. Pots and pans clatter in the background. “What did he do?”
“He asked me if I had scoliosis. I told him my butt looks like Uranus. And then I accidentally made a culturally insensitive remark about his home country.”
“Back up. Why would someone ask someone else if they have scoliosis?”
“It’s appropriate for a doctor to ask.”
“Yeah. If you’re in a doctor’s office.”
“I told him it was rude.”
“Yeah.”
Morgan’s voice is muffled. I think her head is in the refrigerator. I hear a crisper drawer open and close, and the door thud. She leans over the camera, her hair dangling like limp spaghetti noodles. “That is really rude.” She disappears from my phone again.
“I explained why I’m sitting crooked. I told him it was his fault that I fell down the stairs. He didn’t buy it.”
Morgan’s head pops into frame. “I can’t believe you stole my line.” She snickers.
“The Uranus one? Yeah. He thought it was funny too. He spit Sprite all over my face.”
“And that made you mad?”
A television turns on and I hear Kayla holler, “What do you want to watch?”
“I don’t care,” Morgan hollers back.
Sometimes I wish I had a roommate. FaceTiming is great, but it’s not the same as having a girlfriend next to you on the couch while you share your most embarrassing moments.
“No. That’s not it.” I lean my head back and scowl at the ceiling. I can’t believe I let him get to me. It puts him in the power seat!
“What did you say that was culturally inappropriate?”
“I told him he grew up in a pigsty or a sewer pipe. That didn’t go over well.”
I hear Morgan gasp, and then I hear the pitter-pattering of her feet as she runs to the phone. Her face appears. “Oh no!”
“He thought I was implying that India is a dirty place.”
Morgan picks up the phone and scratches her head. “Okay. Don’t get mad. But I can maybe see why he took it the wrong way.”
“Me too.” My stomach growls. My frown deepens. “It wasn’t my best moment. I wish I could take it back.”
“Did you apologize?”
“Of course, but he just kept pressing, and I don’t know. I’m PMS-ing. My brain just— I don’t know why I even care.”
“No one wants to be called a racist xenophobe.”
“He didn’t call me that.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not, am I?”
“Of course not. He just got under your skin.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you had dinner yet?”
“No.”
Morgan does that motherly thing where she tilts her head to the side and looks at me like I forgot to wash my hands after using the bathroom. “I think you need to eat.”
“He’s seen my weakness, Morgan. He knows he can get to me.”
“Then don’t let him get to you. Don’t let him get under your skin at work tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the next.”
My stomach twists, demanding the Marie Calendar pot pie in the freezer.
I’m PMS-ing. That’s all. I had a moment of hormonal weakness. But it doesn’t have to happen again. I’ll fortify my boundaries. No more flimsy lime green desk divider. That won’t do. I’ll build walls as thick as Fort Knox. He’s not getting a piece of this treasure.
“You’re right. About Chance. And my stomach. I need to eat.”
Morgan leans into the camera and smiles. “You’ll feel better after some chocolate.”
I nod and thank her for listening. We say I love you before I click off my phone. I’ve never had such great friends. Not in high school or college. My sister, Willa, and I are close but she’s still in Indiana.
I rest my head against the couch again and take a moment to appreciate my blessings—my great job, this magical city, a nearby beach, wonderful friends. Chance is like those burrs Willa and I used to pull out of Molly’s coat after she went exploring in the fields behind our house. A temporary nuisance that I can quickly discard as many times as necessary. He won’t affect my amazing life in the slightest.
The rest of the evening is uneventful. I satisfy my stomach’s gnashing teeth with chicken pot pie and a mint Klondike bar, steep some decaf green tea and sweeten it with a pinch of stevia, read for two hours, and then head to an early bed.
Tuesday morning, I wake up at six o’clock. I spend extra time selecting an outfit and applying my makeup, determined to look fierce for...myself. I’m ready in time despite staring into my closet for ten minutes before deciding on a navy power skirt and an off-white silk blouse that tucks in high at my waist.
When I open the door to leave, I see it . The trash bag, placed there to taunt me. My lips pinch forward. Nope. Not today. Not going to let it bother me. I pick the burr out of my coat, close the door and lock the deadbolt. When I turn around, Chance is pulling his door closed. We meet eyes. His expression is unreadable. I hope mine is too.
Without “good morning” or “how are you” we walk to the stairs in unison like two choreographed dancers. Neither of us yield at the stairs. We descend side by side with a mere foot of space between us. I turn toward my car. He turns toward his.
When I’m safe in the driver’s seat, I tug at my waistband. It’s tight. The skirt is constricting. Too formal. I should go back to my apartment and change.
He’ll see me go back upstairs. He already knows what I’m wearing. Strong women aren’t fickle. They put up with feeling like a stuffed sausage for a day. It’s a small matter.
Traffic is heavy, as usual, but predictable. I arrive at the parking garage at quarter to eight. The walk to JetAero makes me sweat, which makes my waistband feel tighter, and I worry that the perspiration on my back might show through the thin silk.
I don’t think I’ll go for “fierce” tomorrow. Tomorrow will be business casual, or maybe couch casual. What was I thinking wearing this silly outfit?
When I reach the main entrance to Citizen’s Tower, a hand grabs the door before mine. Chance is right behind me. He holds the door and allows me to cross the threshold first.
“Thanks,” I mutter.
I head to the center atrium and take the steps to our office. I don’t hear any steps behind me. Chance must have taken the elevator.
As soon as my foot hits the fourth floor, the elevator dings and out comes Chance a few paces ahead of me. He doesn’t hold the door this time. Luckily, he’s out of sight as I slide into my chair, the lingering smell of his cologne the only indication that he came by here on his way to the breakroom. Maybe he’s warming up a Hot Pocket and plans to enjoy a long breakfast. One can hope.
My computer takes five minutes to boot up, five more minutes to load my apps. Still no sign of Chance. Maybe he warmed up two Hot Pockets with a side of salmon, the fish lover that he is. If salmon keeps his big feet under a breakroom table instead of my desk, I can put up with the stink. Except all I smell is his cologne. Still. Maybe he uses it to mark his territory. Sorry, Chance. This is my territory. I was here first.
A notification pops up on my Teams app. I click it open and find a welcome message from Morgan.
Enjoy your last thirty seconds of solitude. Chance is headed your way.
Gee, thanks. I peek over the feeble desk divider and watch Chance march out of the breakroom. He’s wearing a maroon T-shirt with relaxed jeans, his hair equally relaxed like he styled it with his fingers, yet it still looks sculpted, a spiky dollop of chocolate meringue on his statuesque frame. His eyes flit to mine. We connect for a moment, and a jolt of unwelcome amperage sends me on an electric slide down my chair. I didn’t like that jolt and I don’t trust it one bit.
I reach under my chair and pull the lever to drop my seat to its lowest setting. When I’m in shorty-pants mode, I can’t see his eyes and he can’t see mine. But I can see his hand as he runs it through his toasty meringue hair that’s burned black as night.
Hiding, I see, Morgan says.
Yup, I answer. I can’t see his eyes now. It’s fine.
Don’t you have to help him set up his dev environment?
I don’t have to look at him while I’m doing it.
A half-second passes and then Morgan adds, Kayla won’t be in today.
Did she manifest a snow day?
Clearly not, Morgan answers, otherwise none of us would be here.
If it snowed a foot, they’d still make us come in.
They’d make us come in if it was five thousand Kelvins.
Yup , I type.
Hey, rumor has it we're gonna get to telework soon.
Ever since I started at JetAero, the word “telework” has been thrown around, mostly by my coworkers in wistful tones. Not sure how I feel about it. Walking ten feet to work in my jammies and unicorn slippers might be nice, but I like seeing my friends. I’d miss our mid-morning coffee breaks and our laughs over lunch.
Interesting, I reply.
Bruce heard they’re thinking three days a week.
How would Bruce know?
Bruce knows everything.
Bruce knows line 205 in the block of code he wrote three years ago. The man’s memory retention is second only to Adrian Monk’s. And maybe Drew’s. But I’d never say that out loud because Drew doesn’t need another reason to think he’s the next best thing since Stephen Hawking.
Morgan and I spend a few more minutes chatting and then we plow into work. I open up my app and continue where I left off Friday, debugging an error that Juanita found during integration testing. As usual, I lose myself in logic and five minutes later, it’s ten o’clock. It feels like five minutes, anyway. Morgan taps the back of my chair, reminding me it’s coffee time. We leave Chance at his desk staring at his phone. Aside from his incessant gum popping and his giant feet encroaching on my legroom and his cologne hovering around him like an ever-present aura, I haven’t noticed him a bit.
When I return, Chance is still looking at his phone. I poke around in my code for a few minutes until I’m ready to go shoulder to shoulder with him. I peek around the desk divider and find him hunched over, palm under chin, elbow to knee, still engrossed in his phone. “Are you ready?”
“For what?” he asks without looking at me.
“Are you ready for me to help you set up your development environment?”
He swipes his thumb across his screen and glances at me. “Sure. Let’s do it.”
I push myself from my desk and inch my way over to Chance with my heels. He smells like mint and cologne. Orbit Sweet Mint, specifically, and a fresh cologne with alpine hints. Good thing I’m not allergic to fresh colognes with alpine hints. The pile of gum wrappers on his desk, each one filled with a chewed wad of minty food-grade rubber, I could do without. But if I hurry through this, I won’t have to look at it too long.
“We use BrainyJ. It’s available in the APSC,” I say, pronouncing it app-see.
He looks up from his phone long enough to raise an eyebrow at me.
“The Approved Software Center,” I explain.
“App-see. App-see,” Chance repeats.
“A-P-S-C.”
He swipes up with his thumb, closing the Star Trek game he was playing, and opens Wordle.
“Okay, then. Do you know how to get to the APSC?”
He enters “brain” into the top row. The “a” turns yellow.
“Are you going to play that instead of paying attention?”
“Wordle helps me concentrate.”
I suppress a sigh, take a moment to reset myself, and try an “I feel” statement. “When you play Wordle while I’m trying to help you set up your development environment, I feel like you aren’t paying attention.”
He picks his chin off his palm. “It helps me listen. But...” He tosses his phone onto the desk and grabs his pack of gum.
The pile of used wrappers and his constant gum popping point to one conclusion: Chance is a chain-chewer. He pulls out a fresh stick, spits his old gum into the wrapper, and tosses it onto the pile. My eyes move from the wrapper to his face, and a realization hits me. This is how he keeps his jaw so chiseled! Also the trash can is under his desk. It’s literally under his desk. It’s fine, though. I’m not triggered.
“Open up the intranet and go to IT,” I say. “The APSC is under self-service.”
He scoots closer to his desk, hovers his hand over his mouse for a moment before opening a browser window. After pulling up the IT tab, he clicks around, finds the APSC, scrolls through the list, inching ever closer to the end of the alphabet.
“We use BrainyJ. You went too far.”
“There it is,” Chance says, his tone too victorious for my liking.
“We use BrainyJ,” I repeat.
“I use Visual Studio Code.”
“Our projects are in BrainyJ.” Am I repeating myself?
“They don’t have to be,” Chance says.
“But they are. We—“
“I’m used to this.” He gestures to the downloading executable file, leans back and crosses his arms as we both wait. “I can still hook it up to Maven.”
“We use Ant.”
Chance winces. Kinda like I did when I heard a woman was playing Doctor Who. I’m not against women, but Doctor Who? That’s like casting Sherlock Holmes as a female. Some fictional characters are sacred, what were they thinking? Just my opinion.
Visual Studio Code completes its download and I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to strong-arm Chance into using the proper software. I look down at his arm, most of his bicep visible beneath the cuff of the short sleeve, just enough muscle to fill the gaps. Pretty sure he’s wearing one of those T-shirts that are like push-up bras for men. His chest looks full and out there.
I realize I’m looking at Chance’s chest while he’s looking at me. His mouth turns up in a smirk. I feel like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Like them, I survive the fire with only a slight blush, but the visual signs of my embarrassment make me even more embarrassed.
“You need to be a team player,” I say to the wall opposite Chance. He saw me blush. He saw me staring at his chest. And he refuses to listen to me. I’m not mad. Serenity now. “Okay. We—we’ll talk about it later. Just, let me show you our code repository so you can get started.”
“Where do you store your dependencies?”
“In our repository.”
Chance rubs his face. “Drew allows this?”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s above your pay grade.”
Chance squints at me, the two little lines between his brows like goalposts. I just scored one on him, which makes me smile. Point: Danni.
I rattle off the URL to our code repository, Chance enters it, and his expression droops as I explain our organizational system. He offers his opinions about how he’d do it differently, verbally reorganizing our entire folder structure.
“Nothing’s ever ideal,” I snap. “Most of this code was written before me. I just do my job. Also, we’re a team. We cooperate.”
“I like improving things.”
“You have to weigh the costs versus the benefits.”
Chance looks skeptical.
“Everything has a cost,” I say. “Management doesn’t pay us to bjork around and fix what isn’t broken.”
Amusement replaces his skepticism. “Did you just say ‘bjork?’”
“I said what I said.”
He raises both eyebrows and pulls in a slow breath.
“I’m hungry. Are you hungry? I think we should break for lunch.”
“I could eat.”
With a swift push against the floor, I propel myself over to my desk. Chance stands and strides to the breakroom, hands in pockets, self-assured as usual. When he’s out of sight, I drop my head to my hands. I’ve worked with code mavericks like him. Getting him to cooperate is going to be like herding toddlers at Disney World. Luckily, I’m neck deep in my own project, and will be until the end of August. He’ll be someone else’s problem while I zoom through the summer in solo-mode. The thought makes me smile. A hunger pang turns it into a wince.
I picked the wrong day to bring my lunch. And the wrong day to skip breakfast. My blood sugar is so tanked I’m both starving and nauseous. The distinct smell of salmon coming from the breakroom isn’t helping. I gotta walk through fish odor and past Chance to get to my food. The Chance part I can handle more than the smell. I might throw up.
I contemplate texting Morgan to see if she wants to go out for subs, but I’m working on a headache. I need to eat now. With a sigh, I push away from my computer and trudge into the breakroom that’s decorated with wall signs and coffee pods and napkins and empty containers that no one claimed the last time Juanita emptied the refrigerator out of spite.
Drew and Chance are sitting at a table, Chance with his salmon, Drew with a microwaved frozen dinner and a shaker cup full of protein powder. He chugs it in a single breath and then lets out a loud burp. A chorus of “excuse me’s” filters through the open doorway. It’s an office tradition. Drew burps. We excuse ourselves.
I head to the fridge and poke my head in, shoving a couple of containers out of the way to find my homemade chicken soup. After popping it into the microwave, I step back and cross my arms while I wait.
“She’s a dog groomer,” Chance says. “She didn’t have time to shower before our date, so she smelled like a Bulldog.”
“No self-respecting canine lover would own a brachycephalic dog,” Drew says in his clipped, choppy style.
“A Poodle, then.”
“Better. They do not shed. And their snouts are not malformed. However, they must be groomed. Hence, your date’s job. Hence her foul scent. Hence your crappy date. I had a beagle growing up. Not recommended either. They are the dumbest dog breed. He ate my pet salamander and almost died of salmonella. My salamander was already dead. I was preparing it for burial.”
“Sounds traumatic.”
“It was not.”
A brief silence. There’s two minutes left on my timer. Two more minutes to see if I care where this conversation goes.
“Anyway,” Chance says, “she only brushes her teeth with baking powder.”
“Baking powder when mixed with a tooth whitening toothpaste does wonders for coffee-stained teeth.”
“Only baking powder.”
“Hmm. Her breath must smell too, then.”
“I didn’t get close enough to find out.”
“How does one learn someone’s dental hygiene habits on a first date?”
“It was one of my questions. I decided to write up a list to save time.”
Chance has a list of questions for his dates now? So he can speed past the niceties and find out if she’s bedroom material? How…very…disgusting.
The microwave timer beeps. I pull out my soup and give it a stir. Behind me, Drew asks Chance about his questions, and Chance begins listing them off.
“What are your dental hygiene habits? Do you shower or bathe once a day? How often do you exercise?”
I slap my lid back on my container, grab a few napkins, and turn to leave. Chance’s smoldering eyes grab mine, making me pause. Heat rises up my neck, but I quickly shake it off. He manipulates women with that gaze, and I refuse to be manipulated.
He breaks eye contact and refocuses on Drew. “She’s not the one,” he says.
His sneaky little spell broken, I’m able to dart out of the room. As I cross the threshold I hear, “I still haven’t cracked the code. It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
What code? The “how to get women into his bed” code? With a face like that, I hardly think the code is encrypted. Chance probably has women eating out of his hand. So, what code exactly?
The question niggles at me while I eat. Two questions actually. What is the code? And why do I want to know?