Chapter 12 Say hello to my work friend, Malik
Say hello to my work friend, Malik
Avoiding someone in an office with glass walls is a lot harder than one could imagine. Toby is easy to spot, but his height also makes it easy for him to spot me. I have used the I-need-the-toilet move twice in the last hour, which convinced Fawzia that I have a UTI.
‘My sister is an oncology nurse, so I know about the dangers of a seemingly small thing like a UTI, which needs to be taken more seriously. If you need to take the day off, just let me know.’
She is so kind. I can’t just leave over a fake infection I do not have (if I did, it would invite an actual infection due to my luck condition), just because I am trying to avoid my supervisor that I danced with last week.
I have also been short in my replies to both Leon and Sashka—I am too worried that they will see right through me. See my weird, weird feelings. Can I even call them that? I guess I have to. The best way to deal with my feelings is to avoid them and bury them under work.
I was given a work phone earlier today and have set up alerts on it to track the mentions of our celebrity, whose name I still don’t recall. The public perception is changing, thanks to Fawzia’s comms plan, but every now and again, a malicious meme sneaks through, and that means I need to log it.
‘You’ve spelt spinster wrong.’ A voice caresses my ear, making me jump and fall off the chair.
I was so absorbed in my work that I didn’t hear or see him coming. The office is staring at me as I slowly get up from the ground, ignoring Toby’s hand.
‘Why are you sitting here? I saved you a seat.’
‘Needed a change of scenery.’ That and I am avoiding you.
Not only did he hurt my feelings, but also I dislike how I felt after dancing. It’s wrong to have any physical reaction to your best friend’s almost boyfriend (and your supervisor!). They haven’t made it official, but despite that, they are pretty taken with each other.
Now that he is in front of me, he looks nice, a white formal shirt and dressy black trousers. I must have raised my eyebrow at the outfit, because he explains, ‘Opera is tonight.’
Ah. Of course. The big romantic evening. I think he is going to ask me to be his girlfriend tonight was the text from Sashka that flashed on my screen earlier today.
The office returns to their business, but I see people throwing glances at us from the corner of my eye.
‘Have you taken your lunch break yet?’ Toby asks; there is something strange in his voice, in the way his eyes look at me.
They are so disarming, his eyes, that I forget to lie. ‘Not yet.’
‘Let’s go. It’s on me.’
He locks my laptop and slides it into my bag, carrying it on the opposite shoulder to his.
There is a lovely Italian place not too far from the office.
It is set up like a cafeteria or really more like Subway, where you can pick your own pasta, pasta sauce, and extra toppings like bacon, parmesan, olives.
It’s usually packed, so people from the office get takeaway from here.
However, when Toby walks in, two people stand and leave the table next to the window. He plops our bags down and turns to me.
‘What do you want?’
My normal order is a spag bol, but I don’t want him to know that. ‘You choose. I am not picky.’
I really am not picky; just look at John.
Toby returns with two plates of spaghetti bolognese. ‘It’s the best thing they make.’
Sashka said that his favourite was the puttanesca though, and afterward she made me sit down and watch a cooking video. The key was anchovies. ‘You could have gone for something you liked.’
‘I like more than one thing on the menu, Fuko,’ he says, and then sighs with annoyance. ‘Sorry, I feel like I keep saying and doing the wrong things around you. I didn’t mean to call you boring.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘It wasn’t. It was out of order. I just had something on that day and wasn’t really thinking.’
There is something in his voice that Sashka would call nedopravda. He is not lying, but he is hiding something.
Seeing me staring, he stumbles over his words to redirect the topic. ‘And I am sorry for dragging you onto the dance floor. I don’t know what’s got into me. I just really want us to be mates again.’
Mates. That would be nice.
‘You are quite an impressive dancer,’ I say.
‘I did ballroom for about six years. Our parents believed we needed to do a sport, an art, and an instrument, and everything else in between. My sister was a lot better than I was before she stopped it, just like she stops everything else.’
I sense a slight resentment in his voice but decide to ignore it for now. You know, how I ignore everything else. ‘I did ballet, and I wasn’t any good at it. It’s impressive you did so many things when you were younger.’
Toby smiles, but his eyes dim, as if a memory weighs his lids down. He gestures for me to eat my food.
I twist the pasta onto the fork. The garlic, tomato, and red wine aroma fills me with hunger. The lights in the restaurant flicker for a second. Must be an issue with the grid.
‘Strange. Anyway, is there anything I can do so that you stop avoiding me?’ He leans in closer. Too close. Why is he always so close to me?
As I lift my fork to my mouth, a bit of red tomato sauce flicks off the noodle and lands in the centre of his white shirt.
‘Oh my god, I am so sorry.’ I look for tissues but then remember that rubbing it in would make the stain worse. ‘Washing liquid and some warm water! They must have some.’
I try to bolt to the counter, but Toby pulls me back by my wrist. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll deal with it.’
He unbuttons the shirt. I hold my breath until I see a T-shirt underneath.
Obviously, he had a shirt underneath, Fuko.
He isn’t going to undress in front of the whole restaurant.
Toby disappears into the toilets with some washing-up liquid from the kitchen.
I stuff myself with all the sauce to avoid any further splatters.
My phone lights up with a message from Leon.
It’s the link to the newsletter he promised last week. I read through as I finish my noodles. Toby comes back, his wet shirt in hand, looking quite proud of himself for getting the red mark out.
‘Eat quickly. We need to go.’ I cut him off before he can tell me about the cleaning process.
‘Fuko?’
‘The venue the events team selected? Look.’
The art venue with the transphobic owner and the venue for our Interview with the Vampire party are the same place. Our client will go from being homophobic to being transphobic really fast if we don’t change the location. We have a week to rectify it.
If my luck wants to change, now would be an amazing time for it.