Chapter 16
Scottie sat at her desk, fingers poised over her keyboard, gaze on her screen, but her mind was elsewhere. Three floors up, to be exact. Her thoughts kept drifting to Willow and their staircase encounter.
A week had passed since then. A week without any tech problems from Willow. Or maybe she had them and was trying to handle them herself so she wouldn’t have to see Scottie. Did she feel just as awkward and vulnerable as Scottie did after their conversation?
The previous Monday, she had headed to work, determined to seek Willow out during lunch. But before she could, they had run into each other in the staircase. To her pleasant surprise, Willow hadn’t bolted this time, even though Scottie had a feeling she had wanted to.
What she’d said had been less pleasant, though. That “it’s not you; it’s me” line still made Scottie flinch every time she thought about it. It was basically what Tanya had told her when she had ended their ten-year relationship, and Scottie wasn’t sure she could believe it from either woman.
But maybe lumping Willow in with Tanya wasn’t fair.
If she’s worth your time, she’ll tell you where you stand, her friend Kassidy had said. And Willow had told her in very clear words. Scottie had to respect that.
Maybe she should even be grateful Willow had made the decision for both of them.
Being friends was great, right? Safe and manageable, not something that would break her heart and throw her into a six-month crisis where she doubted her own worth.
Willow was right; friendship was definitely the better option.
If only her damn heart would get the memo. It started to beat faster the second a ticket from Operations popped up on her screen.
Willow! Quickly, she reached for her mouse to click on the ticket, eager to find out what tech emergency Willow was struggling with this time.
But then she paused with the mouse arrow hovering over the ticket. Slow down. Was she really ready to face Willow? To embrace a friendship with her without thinking about any what-ifs?
Plus if she appeared too eager, Gordon and Mateo would start teasing her about her “girlfriend in Operations” again. Maybe she should talk one of them into handling the ticket.
Yet when she opened it, the person requesting IT help wasn’t Willow. It was Celeste Covey, Willow’s boss. Smart board frozen, the description field said. Screen completely unresponsive.
Okay, she could handle that. And if she got to see Willow while she was up there, she could handle that too. After all, they were just two co-workers who’d agreed to be friends.
All she had to do was to forget those moments of closeness in the elevator and that misguided kiss. Easy, right?
~ ~ ~
The thirteenth floor was quieter than Scottie had expected for a Monday morning. The usually bustling bullpen was empty.
Her gaze was drawn to Willow’s desk. A closed notebook and Willow’s Rolodex were neatly arranged in one corner, but otherwise, it was empty too.
The faint murmur of voices drifted over from down the hall, and she followed it to the conference room.
The glass door stood ajar. Scottie peered inside.
A dozen Operations employees were gathered around the long table. Some stared at the digital whiteboard at the front of the room. Others secretly scrolled through their emails on their phones. The energy in the room sagged like a pierced balloon losing air.
Scottie immediately detected the source of everyone’s frustration.
The huge smart board was completely frozen. A half-finished chart of some toy production process was displayed on its screen, static and useless.
Celeste tapped at it with a stylus, her jaw tight and her lips compressed into a thin line.
Willow was sitting to her boss’s left, across the table from Barb.
As she shifted on her chair, her dark-brown hair fell forward.
It caught the morning light that streamed in through the window, gleaming like the rich soil Scottie turned in her hands in spring.
Absentmindedly, Willow brushed the strands back behind her ear.
Scottie tightened her grip on her toolbox and knocked on the open glass door with her free hand.
Everyone looked up, but Scottie zeroed in on only one of them. Her gaze met Willow’s.
“Good morning,” Scottie said.
A chorus of answers echoed through the room.
“Morning,” Willow answered softly. After a moment, she broke eye contact and returned her attention to her boss.
“Ah, Scottie. Finally!” Celeste waved her in.
Scottie slipped into the room. “What seems to be the problem?”
“It’s been a week,” Celeste muttered, a growl in her voice. “Just one week and this expensive piece of garbage Joseph insisted we get has already frozen on us. We’re losing time—time we don’t have. This is our busiest season.”
“Let me take a look.” Scottie walked around the table and set down her toolbox a few feet from where Willow was sitting. The unobtrusive apricot scent of Willow’s shampoo drifted over. After breathing it in for two hours in the elevator, Scottie would have recognized it anywhere.
Focus. She was here for the smart board, not to breathe in Willow’s shampoo. Very aware of all the gazes on her, she went to work. She tapped the touchscreen to see if it would register anything at all.
It didn’t.
She checked the cables, then tried to access the digital whiteboard’s settings, but it was completely unresponsive. Next, she attempted a soft restart, holding down the power button for several seconds.
That didn’t get her a response either.
“Hmm.” She unplugged the power cord, waited thirty seconds, then plugged it back in.
Still frozen.
This was not something she could fix in the middle of a meeting. She turned back around.
Every single team member was looking at her expectantly.
“So?” Celeste asked.
“Sorry,” Scottie said. “This isn’t going to be a quick fix. I’ll come back after you’ve wrapped up and take a closer look. In the meantime, I’ll get the vendor’s tech team on the line to make sure we’re not accidentally doing something that’ll void the warranty.”
Celeste gave a tight nod. “Fine. Everyone, take ten. We’ll reschedule this meeting for—”
“Wait!”
Scottie had already turned to leave. Now she snapped back around, along with everyone else.
Willow slowly rose from her seat. Under all the attention, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Why don’t we continue old-school so we don’t lose momentum? It’s the ideas that matter, not the fancy tech that displays them.”
“She’s right,” Celeste said before anyone else could speak. “Let’s do this, people.”
Willow rushed from the room. What seemed like only seconds later, she returned with an armful of stuff.
She spread two taped-together whiteboard sheets over the long conference table and dropped a stack of differently colored sticky notes on top.
“Pink for manufacturing, blue for shipping, yellow for marketing.” She grabbed a marker, scribbled a few words onto a pink note, and stuck it on the paper, starting to recreate the chart from the frozen smart board.
Celeste took a marker too and added blue notes.
Soon, the conference room was buzzing with activity. People were moving around the table, reaching past each other to place their notes. Even the employees who had glanced at their phones earlier were no longer passive.
Toolbox in hand, Scottie stood in the doorway and watched in awe.
Her gaze followed Willow as she gracefully moved around the table, slipping past her colleagues to place sticky notes, each movement precise and fluid.
Every now and then, she paused and studied the paper sheets, looking like a general surveying the strategic map before a battle.
Her resourcefulness and quick thinking were amazing! Like in the elevator, she had seemed prepared for any eventuality, even a brand-new device failing. She had stepped in with a creative work-around as if she had seen it coming.
Willow looked up from the table. Their gazes met across the bent heads of her colleagues.
Scottie playfully saluted her and mouthed, “Nice save.”
A flush rose up Willow’s neck, but she also couldn’t hide the pleased smile that curved up her lips.
“You can go,” Celeste told Scottie without glancing up from the paper chart. “Looks like we’re managing just fine without that thing.”
Scottie tore her gaze away from Willow. After one last nod, she turned and walked out.
~ ~ ~
An hour later, the members of the Operations team filed out of the conference room, chatting and laughing.
Barb snapped a few pictures of the paper chart on the table, then returned to her desk too.
Willow stayed back and gathered the leftover sticky notes into a neat stack, glad to have a moment to herself. Her gaze strayed to the smart board that sat abandoned at the front of the room.
Only when it had malfunctioned had she realized how close to the device she’d been sitting all morning. Was that what had caused it to freeze? A twinge of guilt shot through her, even though she couldn’t be sure. Just in case, she would make sure to sit at the other end of the table from now on.
At least Celeste had submitted the ticket to IT this time, so Scottie and her colleagues wouldn’t connect the glitch to Willow.
Admittedly, it had been nice to see Scottie again, especially since they had been in the middle of a team meeting, surrounded by other people, so they hadn’t been able to talk. Willow still wasn’t sure what to say to her.
A shadow fell across the table, wrenching her from her thoughts.
Her pulse picked up. Scottie? Had she returned, as promised, to examine the unresponsive smart board more closely?
But when Willow looked up, it wasn’t Scottie who stood before her.