3. Joss
JOSS
Ispent the weekend pretending I wasn’t going to think about him.
That worked about as well as I could have expected.
By Sunday night, I’d reorganized my closet, deep-cleaned the kitchen, taken Hadley to brunch under the explicit pretense of having “things to catch up on”—and then refused to discuss the one thing she actually wanted to discuss—and rewatched two seasons of a show I’d already seen twice.
I’d also, somewhere in the middle of all of that, drafted three different versions of a message to my actual boss about Outfit Builder follow-ups, deleted all three, and convinced myself that whatever happened Monday would happen Monday.
What happened Monday was that I walked into the Myrror lobby at 7:52 with a slightly damp coat, a mostly-empty stomach, and the travel tumbler I carried every morning because I couldn’t afford Bitstream prices on a junior PM salary, and Sutton Randall was standing fifteen feet away holding a Bitstream coffee cup.
I stopped walking.
I stopped so fast that the person behind me had to step around me, and I had to say sorry to her shoulder blades as she rushed past.
Sutton was standing near the security desk talking to Beckett.
Beckett, whom I’d now seen twice in three days.
Beckett, who was wearing a leather jacket and jeans and looked exactly the way the press always described him—handsome in a slightly chaotic way, like a man who’d never met a meeting he couldn’t show up late to.
Sutton wasn’t wearing a leather jacket. He was wearing another suit, navy this time, and the Bitstream cup in his hand had the green sleeve and the little stamped logo of the coffee shop on the ground floor of my building.
My building.
Where I lived.
That cup had been purchased this morning, in a coffee shop that was forty minutes from this lobby, on the ground floor of a building Sutton Randall didn’t live in and had no professional reason to be at, as far as I knew.
He went to Bitstream.
That was the only thing my brain managed to formulate for what felt like a long time but was probably one full second.
He looked up.
He saw me.
He didn’t look surprised. Did that mean he’d been waiting for me to come through the door?
His eyes met mine across the lobby. His jaw set.
He took a slow breath. Then he said something to Beckett without looking at him.
Beckett turned his head, looked at me, looked back at Sutton, said something I couldn’t hear, and clapped Sutton on the shoulder.
Then he started walking toward the front doors.
He had to walk past me to get there. I expected him to nod or smile or do one of the polite things a man does when he passes his girlfriend’s roommate on a Monday morning, but he didn’t do any of that. He just gave me a single look as he went by—quick, knowing, slightly amused—and kept walking.
The doors slid shut behind him.
I made myself start moving again. I made myself walk toward the elevator bank like a person who hadn’t just been clocked across a corporate lobby by the founder of her company while her CEO held a Bitstream coffee cup in his right hand.
Sutton fell into step beside me.
We didn’t speak.
We didn’t speak as we walked the twenty feet to the elevators. We didn’t speak as he reached past me to press the up button, which he did even though I was already reaching for it. Our hands almost touched, and for a fraction of a second, I forgot how to breathe properly.
We didn’t speak as the elevator opened and we both stepped in. We didn’t speak as the doors slid closed and the car started to move up.
I was very aware of the coffee cup in his hand.
He was very aware that I was very aware of the coffee cup in his hand.
I cleared my throat and said, “Bitstream’s a long way from your office.”
I’d been working on the line all the way from the front doors to the elevator. Actually, I’d been working on it from the moment I’d seen the cup, but I hadn’t actually committed to delivering it until it came out of my mouth.
Sutton looked down at the cup like he was noticing it for the first time. Then he shifted his gaze to me.
“It’s a good cup of coffee,” he said.
He held my eyes. He didn’t look away. He didn’t soften it. He didn’t turn it into a joke. He just said it like a fact, and then he kept looking at me.
I felt my mouth go slightly dry. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Better than the coffee within a block of your office?”
“Apparently.”
The elevator stopped briefly on the third floor, but nobody was waiting when the doors opened. They closed seconds later and once again, we were alone.
He didn’t smile. I would have killed for him to smile. I would have killed for him to look anywhere but at me, just for two seconds, so I could pull myself back together.
He didn’t.
The doors opened on the seventh floor. My floor. I stepped out.
I was halfway through the step when he spoke again. “Try not to work too late, Joss.”
The doors closed.
I stood on the seventh floor with my tumbler in one hand and my bag in the other and absolutely no recollection of how I’d gotten there.
Try not to work too late, Joss.
Eventually, I made it to my desk.
At my desk, I dropped into my chair, set my tumbler down beside the keyboard, and opened my laptop. Eleven hundred unread messages had accumulated over the weekend. I stared at them. I read none.
I made it ninety minutes before I had to admit I had not done a single piece of useful work.
He was somewhere in this building.
That was the only sentence my brain could hold.
He was somewhere in this building. He’d come to my building’s coffee shop and he’d gotten on my elevator and he’d told me not to work too late.
And now he was somewhere in this building, eleven floors above me, doing his actual job, and I was at my desk reading the same Jira ticket for the fifth time without retaining any of it.
I saw him twice over the next four hours.
The first time was through the glass wall of a conference room two pods over from my desk.
He was standing at the head of a table with about a dozen people in chairs around him, his suit jacket on, his sleeves not rolled.
I made the mistake of looking up from my screen at the exact moment he turned his head, and his eyes found mine through the glass like he’d known where to look without needing to find it first.
I refocused on my screen. I didn’t look back up.
The second time was when he walked past my pod with Mira on his way to her office.
I felt them coming before I saw them. I kept my eyes on my screen until they passed.
Mira said something to him as they went by, but I didn’t catch any of the words.
I caught the cadence of his voice when he answered her. That was enough.
I was reading the same paragraph of a product spec for what felt like the hundredth time when my phone lit up on my desk.
It was a message from an account I didn’t recognize.
Sutton would like to see you when you have a minute.
I read it twice.
I read it a third time.
A minute. When you have a minute. As if I were going to look at that message and respond now is not a great time for me, please tell the CEO of my company that I’ll get back to him. As if a minute were a real unit of measurement and not, in fact, code for now.
I stood up.
I walked to the executive wing. I’d been on this floor before, but only twice. Both times, I’d been chaperoned by either Mira or my boss. Both times, the doors to the corner offices had been closed.
This time, his door was open.
He was at his desk. He looked up when I appeared in the doorway, but he didn’t stand. He didn’t smile. He gestured to the chair across from his desk.
“Close the door.”
I closed the door.
I crossed the office and sat down in the chair he’d indicated. I set my notebook on the arm of the chair. I brought my notebook with me everywhere. Hadley teasingly called it my emotional support notebook.
Sutton had three things in front of him on his desk. A laptop, a tablet, and what I was almost certain was a printout of my Outfit Builder deck. It was annotated. I could see the pen marks from where I was sitting.
He watched me for a beat, then followed my stare and said, “I read this over the weekend. I have follow-up questions on the engineering estimate.”
He asked me three questions. They were good questions.
They were not the questions a CEO who wanted a polite update would ask.
They were the questions a CEO who’d actually sat with the material and thought about it would ask.
I answered them as well as I could, and we went back and forth for what was probably eight or nine minutes.
Then the questions ran out.
I knew they’d run out because he stopped asking them. He didn’t say “thank you for your time” and he didn’t say “we’ll circle back” and he didn’t make any of the small CEO noises that typically end a meeting like this. He just stopped talking.
I sat there with my hands on the arms of the chair. He sat there with his hands flat on his desk.
I waited.
He waited longer.
I was about to say something—I had no idea what, but I was about to say something just to break the silence—when his eyes dropped to my notebook on the arm of the chair. Then they came back up to my face.
“You haven’t opened that once,” he said.
I looked down at the notebook, then back up at him.
He was watching me with the same expression he had worn on Friday morning when he’d said keep going, Joss, except now I wasn’t standing in front of a screen with my hair pulled back and an audience of four. Now I was sitting in his office with the door closed and no audience at all.
I didn’t know what to say.
I didn’t say anything.
He let the silence stretch.
He didn’t look away.