Chapter 22 #2
"He's been bloody vicious lately," added Mick from IT, the same Mick who'd walked in on Ryland and Stephen in the server room all those weeks ago.
His eyes flicked to Stephen as he entered, a knowing look that made Stephen want to crawl inside the coffee machine and drown himself in overpriced espresso.
"Something's got him proper wound up. Or maybe someone. "
Stephen kept his expression carefully neutral as he approached the group, pretending a fascination with the coffee machine's settings that would suggest he was considering a career change to barista.
"Morning," he mumbled, jabbing at buttons with more force than necessary, briefly fantasising that each one was taking out Ryland's eye. Jab. Right eye. Jab. Left eye...
Those impossibly blue eyes that had looked at him with such intensity in Geneva, framed by stupidly long lashes that had no business being on a man who used spreadsheets to rank Swiss cheese varieties.
Eyes that had darkened when he'd... No. Absolutely not.
He was not going to stand in the Dabney break room having inappropriate flashbacks while Janet from HR dissected Ryland's latest workplace atrocity.
"Stephen!" Janet's voice had the pitch of someone about to deliver gossip they believed was juicy.
"We were just talking about Dr Ryland. He made Jenkins's new assistant cry yesterday after she ordered the wrong spectrometer.
Apparently told her that a trained monkey with a Fisher-Price calculator could have managed the purchase more efficiently. "
"How unfortunate," Stephen replied, watching coffee drip into his mug. "Perhaps she should have ordered the right spectrometer."
The universe, determined to ensure Stephen's day reached new heights of mortification, chose that exact moment to deliver a killing blow. The break room door swung open, and there he was.
Ryland looked like shit, if Stephen was being honest. But still charming, in that scruffy, absentminded professorial way of his.
His hair stood up in unruly tufts, as if he'd been running his hands through it continuously.
The circles under his eyes suggested he'd been getting about as much sleep as Stephen, though presumably with less wine and fewer dick pics from strangers.
His usually immaculate shirt was rumpled, the top button undone.
Their eyes met across the room, a moment of electric connection that sent a jolt straight to Stephen's core. He watched, with a mixture of hurt and vindication, as Ryland's expression cycled rapidly from shock to something that looked alarmingly like longing, before settling on panic.
Then, with all the subtlety of someone who'd just spotted their ex at a speed dating event, Ryland executed a perfect 180-degree turn and walked straight back out without a word.
The silence that followed was so complete Stephen could hear the coffee machine's internal mechanisms whirring. Five pairs of eyes swivelled toward him in unison, like meerkats spotting a predator.
"Well," said Janet finally. "That wasn't awkward at all."
"Did he just..." Priya let the question hang in the air.
"Flee the room like Stephen was carrying a highly contagious disease?" Mick finished for her. "Yes, yes he did."
Stephen busied himself with mopping up his coffee spill, hoping the flush creeping up his neck might be mistaken for embarrassment over the mess rather than what was actually causing it.
"I didn't even know Ryland could move that fast," observed Thompson from Compliance. "Usually takes him five minutes to walk down a corridor because he's calculating the optimal path in his head or something."
"Something's definitely happened between you two," Janet said, abandoning all pretence of tact. "Last month you were practically attached at the hip, and now he's treating you like you've got the plague."
"Nothing's happened," Stephen lied, with all the believability of a politician caught on camera with his pants down. "We're just busy with different projects."
"Right," Mick drawled. "So busy he needs to literally run away rather than be in the same room as you for thirty seconds."
"Maybe it's a weird alpha scientist thing," Priya suggested, taking pity on Stephen's obvious discomfort. "My brother's a physicist, and he once refused to speak to his lab partner for three weeks because they disagreed about quantum string theory."
"I really don't think it's about quantum string theory," Janet said, her eyebrows performing a suggestive dance.
"Speaking of scientists," Thompson interjected, "my cousin's a professor at Imperial. Bit of a Ryland type, actually. Brilliant, awkward. Breathes through his mouth. Single, too. Alpha. I could set you up?"
Stephen stared at him. "You want to set me up with your mouth-breathing cousin because he reminds you of the man who just fled the room rather than look at me?"
"Well, when you put it like that..." Thompson had the grace to look slightly abashed.
"Thanks, but I think I'll pass on the discount Ryland experience," Stephen said, gathering what remained of his dignity along with his sadly depleted coffee. "If you'll excuse me, I have actual work to do."
He escaped the break room with his head held high, waiting until he was safely around the corner before slumping against the wall with a silent groan.
It wasn't even ten, and already his day had achieved new depths of humiliation.
Every corner potentially held the risk of another Ryland encounter.
Or worse, more colleagues eager to discuss their theories on why the Director of Research was suddenly treating Stephen like an unexploded bomb.