Chapter 5 Seven Minutes in Kevin
Seven Minutes in Kevin
I understood the scientific law around time. Time travel was never proven possible even in theory because of the reality that time cannot stop, go backward, or be tailored to our will.
The theoretical physicists could be wrong, though. Maybe it only worked if time bent against our will. Because as soon as Hudson’s voice reached my ears, the world moved through a pane of molasses, allowing me to see Terrence’s horror, Addie’s confusion, and Jared’s smug, shit-eating grin.
God, they all thought we slept together this weekend.
It was happening. My worst nightmare come true.
Not only had everything gone wrong outside the office, but now in the office, I was going to be the center of gossip, my reputation was going to be damaged, our productivity was going to go down the drain, and I didn’t even have a night of passionate, mind-blowing, world-changing sex to show for it.
It was like GalacticSolutions all over again.
Human musculature is made up of roughly six hundred individual components. Every single one of the six hundred muscles in my body coiled in a cringe.
Snapping around in my chair, I found Hudson standing in front of the elevators, his handsome face wrinkled in apprehensive confusion.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Oh, I think everything’s better than all right,” Jared intoned.
BuzzCorp was small, and Jared worked fast; if I didn’t nip this in the bud, everyone from Mario in Accounting to Aimee in Janitorial would be chattering about my sexcapades before lunchtime.
“No, Hudson. I don’t have your sweatshirt. I think you left it on the plane.”
Hint, hint. Yes, I had his stupid sweatshirt, but I’d wanted to return it in private.
“I don’t think so. Didn’t you have it last?”
“Nope.”
Every eye in this room was on me, and I wanted to disintegrate. The discomfort was all-encompassing. Please just shut up about your stupid, soft, amazing-smelling sweatshirt.
“Oh. It’s just I thought I—”
“Maybe you should call the airline. They might have it in lost and found. Now, are you using the conference room this morning? Your team should be getting in any minute.”
I could not be hinting any harder if this was fucking charades. But Hudson persisted.
“I really could have sworn you had it last. I don’t mean to be a pest, but—”
“Why would she have your sweatshirt?”
Hudson turned his attention to Jared, who slurped loudly and deliberately from a near-empty iced coffee.
“I gave it to her.”
Slllrrrrrpppp. “Sounds cozy.”
Addie threw her hand over her mouth to cover up laughter. Terrence, clearly smarter than the rest of us combined, closed his laptop and walked away from this whole pathetic scene.
I shot up to my feet, too.
“All right, well. Great meeting, everyone. I want to crunch some more numbers on these fuck reports before we talk any further about next steps. Let’s circle back to this after lunch.”
Collecting my things, I went for my office, only to be stopped by Jared, who got the last word.
“You need some time to crunch the numbers? You’re the most prepared woman I’ve ever met. What gives? Someone keep you distracted this weekend?”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
Mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to lie.
A moment later, I was in my office, highly aware that my audience could still watch me through the glass walls. I bottled my bubbling emotions deep down and tried to go back to work. Back to what I was good at.
That was all I wanted, after all. To get back to my simple, unaffected self. To once again walk the straight and narrow, with no complications or detours.
But then, probably because there’s no God and if there is a God he clearly enjoys my suffering, there was a knock on the door.
“Scout? Can I come in?”
Hudson had only visited my office once, when Clara first introduced us. But there he was. In front of my transparent door. Being observed carefully by Jared and Addie.
I dropped my tablet on my desk but kept my backpack shouldered. There was no way I’d be having this conversation with him in the corporate fishbowl. We’d need privacy.
“Can you walk and talk?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure.”
He fell into silent step beside me as I left the main, shared floor of BuzzCorp and toward friendlier locales. There were only four places with any privacy here: Clara’s office, the bathroom, the freebies room, and Kevin.
Kevin, named for Kevin Costner, whose movies always made Clara cry, was the remote maintenance closet where she sent me whenever I needed to cry.
A tiny closet lined with bougie, cruelty-free cleaning products and fair-trade mops and brooms—only the best for my boss—it was much smaller than I’d ever noticed before. A fact I only realized when I led Hudson inside and locked the door behind us.
Trying to ignore the looming largeness of him, I reached into my backpack and withdrew the object of today’s frustration.
“Here. Here’s your stupid sweatshirt. Now take it and get out.”
I want to cry in peace, thank you.
Hudson only followed the first half of my instructions. I should have had him written up for insubordination in the workplace. “You dragged me in here to give me this?”
“I couldn’t return it in front of everyone.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re going to think we had sex! Jared already does think that!”
With those two little sentences, it was like the air evacuated the closet. In the stillness that followed, I was hyperaware of Hudson’s proximity, particularly his face, which fell, drawing new lines I’d never seen in his perfect features.
His long fingers curled around the sweatshirt, holding it to himself like armor—or a security blanket.
“I get the sense that I messed up back there.”
“You could say that,” I snapped. Then I course-corrected so he wouldn’t think me a total asshole. None of this was his fault. It was mine. I didn’t need to take it out on him. “Thank you very much for lending it to me. You were really helpful yesterday; I mean it.”
“I sense a but coming on.”
“But after sleeping on it, I don’t think I can help you with the sex toy lessons. If it gets around the office that we’re spending a lot of time together, the gossip is going to spiral, and we can’t afford any—”
“Distractions, I got it. But we can fix this. Get them off your back and give us the space for our tutoring sessions. I spent most of last night doing my own research.” The tips of his ears went pink. “I gotta say…I was overwhelmed. I need you. What if I cleared things up for everyone?”
“What, go out there and make a company-wide announcement that we didn’t sleep together? I’m sure that wouldn’t make them suspicious.”
His glasses slipped down his nose. He nudged them back up. “Why does it bother you? Would it really be so bad if we had?”
There were a million ways that I could have answered that, all of them too revealing.
I could have said no, because having sex with him probably would have been amazing—too good for me.
I could have said yes, because if we’d had sex and I told the entire office we had a one-night stand, then I’d be humiliated for being just a one-night stand.
Or that if we’d had sex and we were still having sex, then that meant I’d gone off the deep end and dove headfirst into a relationship, which I’d never allow myself to do again, especially not during crunch time at work.
Or I could have said, Hudson, my last relationship destroyed my entire life, so I keep myself in a little emotional box where I can stop myself from hurting anyone else—or me.
So if you and I have sex, that means that everything has gone very, very wrong.
You understand. I just don’t do fucking and relationships. I can’t afford the chaos.
“I just need to keep firm professional boundaries.”
His face fell slightly. “Well. No one deserves to be made to feel bad at work. If they’re bothering you, you should report them to HR. Or make Clara remind them about their hostile work environment training.”
Yeah, you’d think that would be the solution, wouldn’t you?
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
I hate conflict. I hate attention. The only guaranteed way to go unscathed is to hide from anyone who could possibly hurt you.
I stared down at my hands. “It’s just easier to be invisible. No one can touch you when you’re invisible.”
“That’s why you don’t want to teach me about sex toys. Because then you won’t be invisible.”
“Yeah.”
There was a shift in the body in front of me, and suddenly we were so close the fibers of our sweaters brushed.
I looked up, and there he was. Gazing down at me like I wasn’t the problem I knew myself to be.
He smiled again. A real one this time. “Well, you’ve already failed there. You’ve never been invisible to me.”
My lips parted, and the air between us crackled. I thought about our kiss yesterday, accidental and fleeting as it was, and wanted nothing more than to close the gap again. To test if his lips were as warm and soft and welcoming as they had been the first time.
I’m sure I would have said something as meaningful and as profound as what he’d just said to me, but before I could—
Knock, knock, knock!
“Scout?”
I practically threw myself against the far wall of the closet, staring at the closed door with wide oh shit eyes.
Clara. Somehow, Clara had found me in here. Dammit, couldn’t a girl spurn her office crush in peace?
“Just think about it,” Hudson blustered to say in a whisper. “You can’t go invisible again, and I’m sticking around the office until the end of my contract. You might as well help me out with our work.”
Clara knocked again.
“Uh, yeah?” I replied through the still-closed door.
“Could I please see you in my office?”
“Sure. I’ll be right there.”
I heard her heels click on the floor for a few paces.
Click. Click. Click. Click…
Phew. I’d gotten away with it. She had no idea that I’d been in here with Hudson. Home free.
Click. Her heels stopped on the floor. My luck ran out.
“Oh,” she continued, cheerful as ever. “And please tell Hudson that he should go back to work, too.”