Chapter 3 #2
"What? No. Don't—don't do that." I lifted a hand to wave away her reach for the zipper of her backpack but that sent a snap of pain through my shoulder. A snarl rasped in my throat as I eased back. "You don't have to do that. Okay? I believe you. You're an Excel ninja."
Bent at the waist with her hands frozen on her bag, she frowned at me. "I'm sorry. I didn't hear anything you just said because I think you growled. Like, a second ago. A growly-soundy thing. That came from you. Right? That happened?"
"Not intentionally," I replied.
Still in that awkward, folded-over position, she asked, "Does that happen a lot? That you unintentionally growl at people?"
Her t-shirt was riding up in the back. I didn't want to look but it felt as though every cell in my body was pulling my gaze toward this newly exposed swath of olive skin.
I wouldn't let myself peek, not even for a second, but that left me boring a glare straight through her skull.
Even as I glared at her, I was aware of the tattoo low on her back, something I couldn't decipher with peripheral vision alone and—god help me—I was working my ass off to keep the words tramp stamp out of my mind and mouth.
No need for pejorative comments like that with several hours of confinement ahead of us. Or…ever.
"I didn't growl at you," I replied.
She sat back and took her tattoo with her, thank fucking god, but she crossed her arms under her breasts and—and that was not an improvement on this situation. A glance downward would've been worse by orders of magnitude. I knew this. Yet I couldn't climb past the overwhelming urge to look at her.
Instead, I looked at my watch. It couldn't tell me the time or the steps I'd walked or how many new emails I had waiting for me though it saved me from something I didn't understand.
And I didn't understand it, not at all. Rarely did I find myself with the desire to check someone out or gather more than the most basic information about them.
As a point of fact, physical appearance did little for me.
I wasn't much attracted to bodies. My dick even less.
Once, Millie and I'd planned to meet downtown for drinks after work. According to her, I walked past her twice before she called my name to get my attention. And now that I was thinking about it, I wasn't positive I'd ever intentionally looked at Millie with the purpose of drinking her in.
I definitely couldn't describe the small of her back.
"It sounded like a growl."
"I said I didn't growl at you," I snapped. "There's a difference."
She arched an eyebrow and drew in a breath, somehow aggravated and resigned at the same time. "And you don't want me to build a spreadsheet for you."
"It's not going to change anything, Zelda."
It wasn't. I could not hire this woman. Plenty of people knew how to churn data in Excel.
That didn't mean she understood anything about my business.
I needed someone with a background in financial accounting, not archaeology.
The last thing I had was time to educate someone on the basics of this work.
The ideal candidate was someone who could jump right in and knew what I was—
Oh, fuck.
I wanted someone who knew what I was thinking before I thought it.
"Well…" She tipped her head to the side, her eyes wide. I still couldn't make out the colors with certainty and I wasn't about to ask. "No, Ash, it's not going to change the fact you're a bit of a micromanaging tyrant. I could've invented pivot tables and you'd insist on hoarding the work."
She looked away and that was a blessing. I went through life without anyone dismantling my entire existence piece by piece. Sitting here with my head soft on whiskey and my skin tight and sensitive under her gaze wasn't an experience I relished.
"I might be a micromanaging tyrant," I muttered.
"With a hoarding problem," she muttered back.
"And yet somehow, you still want to work for me."
Zelda unzipped the small bag she wore across her chest and set to unpacking the items inside. Wallet, gum, lip balm, rubber bands, keys, woven coin purse, and a napkin-wrapped breakfast sandwich. She piled everything back into the bag, save for the sandwich.
"What the…" My voice trailed off as she lifted the sandwich to her mouth. I reached out, closed my hand around her wrist. "Where did you get that? Better yet, when did you get that?"
She glanced at the sandwich, then back at me. "Of course. Mmhmm. You're also a food tyrant. Should've seen that coming. Is it all food or just purse food?"
"I don't even know what purse food is but I don't think it's unreasonable to be concerned about how long you've been carrying around scrambled eggs and bacon."
"Unreasonable? No." She considered my hold on her wrist. "On brand? Absolutely."
"Are you really going to eat that?"
Shrugging, she said, "I mean, I'm not building a spreadsheet so…what else am I going to do?"
A slow, distant part of my brain registered the beat of her pulse under my fingertips. I forced myself to release her. "Do you know how to read a cash flow statement? What about a general ledger? P-and-L?"
She set the sandwich down on its grease-spotted napkin. "Give me one and find out."
Since a few companies still reveled in killing trees, I had two glossy annual statements in my bag. I dropped both in her lap. "Find the cash flow statement. Then, talk to me about it."
She laced her fingers together over the reports. "Allow me to save you the suspense and tell you what is going to happen, Ash."
As she spoke, that desire to look at Zelda—to drink in her olive skin, her mermaid tail eyes, her shoulder-length black and blue hair—condensed itself down to a better-but-so-much-worse solution as I found myself gazing at her lips.
This was far more acceptable than studying the way her t-shirt stretched across her breasts or the exact specifications of the tattoo at her waist but it was like falling through the devil's trapdoor because now I was thinking about her lips, her mouth. Her taste.
And that was unacceptable. I didn't know whether her heart-shaped lips were naturally that shade of soft, pale pink, but I knew this wasn't normal for me.
I was more intoxicated than I'd been in years, slowly dying from the pain in my shoulder, and busy resenting seventeen different things.
She was nothing more than a novelty and I was nothing more than preoccupied with her.
"And furthermore," she continued, "I think we both know you're going to hate anyone with all the knowledge and experience you claim to want.
Since they'll arrive on your door with an armload of competence, they'll labor under the belief that you'll allow them to perform competently. Since we both know what you want—"
"You have no clue what I want, Miss Besh," I interrupted.
She gave me another one of those you're an idiot nods.
"You keep on thinking that, sweetie. It's nice to believe your moods don't precede you.
" Another nod. "Anyway. We both know you want someone who is competent enough to stand back and allow you to do everything.
I believe it's clear you're not looking for someone with all this experience and education and whatever.
You'll struggle to tolerate them. You'll drive them away because you'll keep them on the bench.
" She paused, squinted at me. "That's why you have this opening, right?
Someone left because you wouldn't put them in the game. "
It happened again. The growling. This time, Zelda grinned.
"There were a number of factors," I replied. "Small firms don't offer much in the way of upward mobility so—"
"Okay, sweetie. We don't have to talk about that either. We'll file it away with your egomaniacal management style and your aversion to purse sandwiches."
"You can't just walk around with scrambled eggs in your pocket, Zelda," I cried. "It's not—it's not how one transports scrambled eggs."
She reached over, patted my forearm. I tipped my chin down to match the sensation of her hand on my body to its physical form.
It didn't make sense to me that it felt this way while looking like an ordinary hand.
Her fingernails were painted mint green and, by my estimation, she wore at least twelve tiny rings, and she was going to melt my skin off.
"It's okay," she said, nodding. "We won't talk about it anymore.
" She removed her hand. I frowned at my arm because, for the first time in forever, I wanted to find out how it felt for my skin to melt off.
I wanted to know the beginning and end of that sensation.
"You tell me about these statements. That way, I can agree with you and you can have a single moment of happiness in your otherwise tyrannical and obsessively pessimistic day. "
Well…fuck me.