3. Bee
Bee
My new office has glass walls, a door that closes, and a lock.
Actual lock. Whoo hoo, I'm playing in the big leagues.
Even Todd didn't have a set of keys. Loora might as well be an alien with all the colors of jealousy she's turning. No more yanking on desk drawers with both hands while Todd shouts at me about deadlines and spreadsheets. I should feel victorious. Instead, I’m trying to navigate living in a glass box with the hottest guy, err, um, alien, on the planet in my line of sight.
Because if I can see him, he can see me.
Which means a girl can't even pick her nose, scratch her butt, or adjust her bra.
Maybe now I won't have to. I'm still in shock at the compensation package personnel offered me.
More than enough money to buy the Rolls-Royce of bras.
The kind that fits like a soft layer of skin and not like a wired cage.
The proximity of Skylor’s office means my professional life now includes pretending not to notice every time he stands, turns, or rubs his ears.
Weird habit, maybe nerves? I don't know, but I study it just the same.
Study him. My body has become a badly trained dog, and Skylor Ak Layn is holding the treat.
I spent four hours revising the Mack article.
Four hours of meaningful progress, sentences that actually say something, and researching the good doctor's claims. Four hours interrupted by the awareness of him across the hall, breathing the same recycled air.
A prince. A beautiful immortal cast down into the mortal realm.
His scent reaches me even here. The coffee-sandalwood scent makes my suppressants work overtime until my skin glistens with containment.
I took two supplemental doses today, and I'm still struggling.
It's a weakness I can't afford and refuse to discuss with another living soul.
I've been ducking Loora all day. I'm surprised she hasn't just—
The door opens without warning. Dammit. Locks are completely useless if you don't lock your door. Loora enters with her laptop tucked under one arm, a bag of kettle corn in the other hand.
"Spill girl. What's going on? Why are you hiding out?"
"Not hiding, just working. This is a huge load I'm carrying now."
"Bull. You've been carrying this magazine for the last few years, and we both know it. You only avoid me, when—"
"—when I'm busy."
"Nope, still not buying it." She purses her lips and squints at me until I wiggle in my seat like a toddler.“Besides, your face is doing things,” she announces, settling into my visitor chair. The chair creaks slightly under her height, six feet of limbs she still has not grown into gracefully despite twenty-eight years of practice. “Distracted things. Hot things. Things that say you’ve stopped taking your suppressants and decided to jump on your hot boss and ride him like a bronco in a rodeo.”
I ignore the visual and squeeze my thighs together. “I’ve taken my suppressants.” The denial comes too fast, and she peers harder. “Double dose, actually. I’m being responsible.”
“Responsible would be admitting you’re in heat and going home to a cold shower and your vibrator.
” Loora crunches a handful of kettle corn with the careless joy she applies to everything, including snack foods.
Especially snack foods. “Responsible is not ignoring that chunk of blueberry muffin, while you pretend to care about an article.”
"Blueberry Muffin? Really? You can do better than that." She shrugs. "It's all I could think of with that blue skin, but in my mind, I added a layer of cream cheese icing, thick white ropes of it. If you know what I mean, she adds, unnecessarily, with a wink. I groan and drop my head.
"How are we friends?“
"You're just lucky, I guess. But seriously, what gives? You can't be working that hard."
"Actually, I am. Loora, this is important work. I care about this. It's got to be right.” I pull Dr. Mack's notes toward me. “I care about it so much I am working late to make sure this feature package does not sound like a freshman college paper.”
“Uh-huh.” Loora’s gaze tracks to my neck, where my pulse beats too fast against the collar of my blouse. “Your scent is pushing through, Bee. I’m a Beta with terrible nose genes, and I can still smell you from here. Sweet and sharp and absolutely desperate.”
“Shut up.”
“Make me.” She offers the kettle corn bag, a peace treaty wrapped in cellophane. “Seriously, though. The alien prince. The rotating ears. The thing with the tongue that the Omega forums are absolutely wild about.”
“There is no thing with the tongue.”
My lie fools no one. I have researched the Layn aphrodisiac response, read the medical journals, the firsthand accounts, along with the detailed descriptions of chemical secretions that render omegas pliant and begging.
I researched until two in the morning with my hand between my legs and my suppressants failing, hating myself for the curiosity even as I chased every detail.
Loora’s eyebrows climb. “Oh, that was a terrible lie.”
“It was a private lie. Respect it.”
“I respect nothing but women making terrible decisions with hot men. Smoking hot, Beatrice Watson.”
“Skylor Ak Layn is not a bad decision. He is my boss, which is worse.
He is also the corporate overlord currently deciding whether Athena lives or gets folded into memory like countless others.
I'm here to save a magazine, not to get railed by an extraterrestrial monarch against his desk after he finishes chomping me up with his vibrating tongue.”
“I didn’t say anything about desks. That was crazy specific. Now I won't be able to get that image out of my head and obviously, you can't either. Do their tongues vibrate? I hadn't heard that part."
"Oh, my God. Were you leaving, or did you come to help?”
“I absolutely was.” She crunches another handful, entirely too pleased with herself. “But this living vicariously is so much more fun.”
“Loora.”
“I’m just saying, if a woman had to make a terrible professional decision, she could do worse than doing it with him.
” Her attention flicks toward the corridor.
“And he's watching you. By the way he was watching you when I came on this floor.
A lot of watching going on. You're watching him. He's watching you."
"I am not watching him."
Loora just shrugs. "Well, then there's something wrong with you. How are we friends?”
She ignores my glare. Instead, Loora studies me with the same intensity she brings to color palettes and emotional subtext. Her dark brown eyes scan my face, reading a story I haven't agreed to tell.
“You know what your problem is?” she asks.
“I only get one? In that case, I pick having a friend who won't let me work.”
“You still think wanting things makes you weak.” She stands, gathering her laptop and kettle corn with a sigh. “You think if you just work hard enough, prove enough, achieve enough, you’ll somehow transcend being a person with needs and desires.”
“Goodbye, Loora.”
“You want him. So get over yourself and go get that man. Or alien. Which actually makes it hotter.” She pauses at the door, her hand on the knob, and her voice softens.
“Wanting isn't weakness. Weakness is letting fear make your choices because you’re too scared to find out what happens if you just go for it.”
She leaves, and I stare at Dr. Mack's notes until the words stop swimming. There are solid words. Well written. Words that don't care whether Skylor Ak Layn has been watching me through glass. I can work with solid words.
The video meeting loads on my screen at exactly four. Dr. Kenzie MacArthur appears in a plain office with a wall of books behind her and a coffee mug beside her keyboard. She is younger than I expected, maybe in her late twenties, with thick, dark hair twisted up with a pencil and sharp eyes.
The first twenty minutes are exactly what I hoped for.
Coffee as ritual. Coffee as labor. It is marketed as harmless comfort, while the ugly costs are pushed out of frame.
Dr. Mack talks about soil stress, shade-grown farming, deforestation, women workers, and the way corporations love the language of sustainability until someone asks for receipts. I take notes so fast my fingers cramp.
Then she says Layn. Not Athena. Not media. Not even corporate ownership in the broad, harmless way conglomerates collect brands like rich people collect sins.
Layn as a plantation owner.
I stop typing, and my head jerks up. “Can you repeat that?” I ask because journalism has taught me to check and double-check. "Did I hear you correctly?"
Dr. Mack adjusts her glasses. “Layn has been buying coffee plantations in Brazil. More than one. Enough to matter. The acquisitions are legal from what I can see, but rapid expansion always raises environmental questions. Coffee is not harmless just because it smells and tastes good. Land use, water stress, soil depletion, worker protections, carbon promises that no one audits properly. When a corporation buys that much land that fast, the public deserves to know what they intend to do with it.”
My pulse bumps once, hard.
Across the corridor, Skylor’s shadow moves behind the glass.
I keep my eyes on the screen. “Do you think Layn’s purchases are connected to your environmental concerns?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the honest answer.” Dr. Mack leans closer. “But I think the question is worth asking. And I think people should ask it before the land is exhausted, not after.”
By the time the interview ends, my notes have stopped looking like a feature package and started looking like a warning.