Chapter 6 - Andrea
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Andrea
I was buried in Finneas’s calendar, rearranging a double-booked Thursday that was going to give me a migraine if I didn’t fix it in the next ten minutes, when the elevator dinged and a guy walked out who clearly did not work on this floor.
Late twenties, navy suit that fit like it cost more than my rent, brown hair pushed back, and he was already grinning before he was halfway across the room. He made a beeline for my desk with the confidence of someone who had never once second-guessed where he was going.
“Hey.” He leaned his hip against the edge of my desk like he owned it. “I’m Clark. Got a two o’clock with Kingsley.”
“You’re early. He’s on a call. Coffee or water?”
“Nah, I’m good.” He didn’t sit. Stayed leaning, arms crossed, head tilted, looking at me like I was more interesting than whatever meeting he was here for. “So you’re the one behind all those emails.”
“I’m his assistant.”
“That’s not what I meant. I’ve been emailing this office for three weeks and every response was perfect. Timing, tone, follow-up. Told my partner, whoever’s running Kingsley’s calendar is sharper than half the execs we deal with.”
“Flattery before a business meeting.” I leaned back in my chair. “Bold strategy.”
He grinned wider. “Depends. Is it working?”
“Coffee machine’s to your left if you change your mind.”
He laughed and stayed put. Kept talking, easy and relaxed, like a guy who was used to filling silences and enjoyed doing it.
Asked how long I’d been here, whether Finneas was always this hard to pin down for a meeting, whether I was the reason the quarterly reports had gotten so much cleaner in the last two years.
That last one was flattering enough that I almost told him yes, but I kept it professional because that’s what I did.
I was good at my job and part of being good at my job was not letting clients think I was the one making the decisions, even when I was.
“I just organize things,” I said. “The decisions are all Finneas.”
“Sure they are.” He grinned, and it was charming in a no-strings way, the grin of a guy who flirted with everyone from baristas to board members and didn’t mean anything serious by any of it.
He told me about a pitch meeting last month where the projector died mid-presentation and he had to draw his entire slide deck on a whiteboard in front of twelve investors.
“By slide six I was freehand drawing a bar graph and one of the investors asked if the dip in Q3 revenue was real or just my artistic interpretation.”
I laughed, genuinely, because he told it well and the image of a guy in a suit frantically sketching pie charts while investors squinted at his handwriting was objectively funny.
He put his hand on my shoulder while he was hitting the punchline. His palm warm, fingers curling over the top of my shoulder. Casual, automatic, the way some people talked with their whole body and didn’t think about where their hands landed.
Behind me, a door slammed open.
Finneas was at my desk in three strides. I didn’t even get to turn around before his hand closed around Clark’s wrist and lifted it off my shoulder. Firm, deliberate, jaw locked and eyes flat and dark in a way I’d never seen directed at a client before.
Clark blinked. “Hey, I was just-”
“I’d appreciate it if we kept things professional in this office,” Finneas said, and his voice was low and controlled but his eyes were absolutely not.
He let go of Clark’s wrist and stepped back. “Come inside.”
Clark glanced at me. I was sitting very still at my desk with my hands in my lap and my face on fire, my heart doing something fast and confusing that I refused to examine. He straightened his jacket, cleared his throat, and followed Finneas into the office. The door shut behind them.
I stared at my screen. My pulse was still going and my cheeks were burning and I couldn’t tell if it was from anger or embarrassment or something else entirely, something that felt a lot like a rush, which pissed me off even more.
Professional. He said professional. As if I was the one doing something wrong, as if I was out there flirting on company time instead of literally sitting at my own desk doing my job while a client talked to me.
Clark was being friendly and maybe a little handsy but I was handling it fine, had been handling men like Clark since I was old enough to work, and I didn’t need my boss to come charging out of his office like I couldn’t manage a goddamn palm on my shoulder.
And I sure as hell didn’t need him saying “keep things professional” in that voice, in front of a client, like I was the problem here.
My hands were curled into fists in my lap. What the hell was that?
The meeting ran for an hour. I sat at my desk the entire time pretending to work while replaying the last three minutes on a loop in my head. His hand on Clark’s wrist. The grip, the speed, the way he crossed the floor like Clark’s hand on my shoulder was a personal offense.
Clark came out at three, gave me a polite nod and a much smaller smile than the one he’d walked in with, and headed straight for the elevator without stopping.
No leaning on my desk, no joke, barely a glance in my direction.
I felt a hot flush of humiliation because a client now thought I’d been reprimanded by my boss for flirting at work, which I was not doing, had never done, and was too goddamn professional to do. The irony was physically painful.
I was angry and confused and angry that I was confused, because underneath the embarrassment there was something else I didn’t want to look at too closely.
After the meeting, Finneas didn’t settle back down. If anything, he got worse.
He came out of his office to hand me a file he absolutely could have emailed.
His fingers brushed close to mine on the paper and he held it a beat too long before letting go, his eyes on my face the whole time.
I pulled the file toward me and our hands touched and a jolt went up my arm so fast I almost dropped it.
“Thanks,” I said, too quickly.
He didn’t move. Just stood there beside my desk, close enough that I could smell his cologne, looking at me with an expression that had no business being on a man who just lectured me about professionalism.
“Was there something else?” I asked, and my voice came out steadier than I felt, which was a goddamn miracle.
“No.” He went back to his office.
Twenty minutes later he was back. Needed me to confirm a meeting time he already knew. I confirmed it while looking at my screen because if I looked at his face from this distance I was going to do something embarrassing.
I brought his afternoon decaf at the usual time and when I set it on his desk our eyes caught and he didn’t look away. Five seconds. Six. Seven. My face went warm and my fingers tightened around the mug handle and I set it down too hard and coffee sloshed across his desk.
“Sorry.” I grabbed for a napkin.
“Leave it.” His voice was lower than usual.
I left it. Went back to my desk. My hands were shaking and I tucked them under my thighs so nobody walking by would see.
I could feel him through the glass for the rest of the afternoon.
That prickling awareness on the back of my neck, constant, like standing next to a radiator.
I caught him watching three separate times.
First two, he glanced away, back to his screen, the old routine.
The third time he didn’t bother. Just looked at me, dark eyes, jaw set, no pretense at all.
I looked back because I was Andrea Grey and I didn’t back down from a stare. Not even when my neck was hot and my hands were tingling and every nerve in my body was telling me to look away before I did something stupid.
We held for what felt like a full minute. My heart was racing like it was going to burst out of my chest anytime soon. Then my desk phone rang and I jumped so hard my chair rolled back six inches and I nearly fell out of it.
“Hello?” My voice came out a full octave higher than normal.
The person on the other end asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine, which was a lie. The opposite of fine. A woman who had just lost a staring contest with her boss because a telephone startled her like a goddamn jack-in-the-box.
I made it through the rest of the day by sheer force of will and the fact that Finneas had a 4:30 meeting on a different floor that kept him away for the last hour. Grabbed my bag the second the clock hit six and left before he could come back.
I went to Bonalisa but I couldn’t focus. Walked the dogs on autopilot, filled water bowls wrong and had to redo them twice. Mary was restocking the cat room shelves when she caught me standing in the middle of the hallway staring at nothing.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“You’re holding a bag of kibble upside down.”
I looked down. Kibble was pooling around my shoes. “Shit.” I crouched down and started scooping it back into the bag while Mary watched me with her arms crossed.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Nope.”
“You sure? Because you look like someone put your brain in a blender.”
“That’s actually a very accurate description of my current mental state, but no. Not yet. I need to process.”
She handed me a broom. “Process while you sweep.”
I swept. It didn’t help. My brain kept circling back to what happened.
By the time I got home it was past nine and I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the fact that my brain had been running laps around the same five minutes all damn day.
Fin was on the porch when I walked up the path, and the sight of him sitting there, big and dark and calm, made something in my chest loosen.
I dropped my bag, sank down next to him, and shoved my face into his fur.
“Okay. Okay okay okay. I need to talk about this or I’m going to combust.”
Fin settled against me and I pulled back and sat cross-legged, my hands already going because I talked with my hands when I was worked up and right now I was very, very worked up.
“So there was this client today. Clark. Nice guy, whatever, friendly, put his hand on my shoulder while we were talking. Normal human interaction, nothing crazy. And then Finneas came out of his office and, Fin, I swear he teleported, because one second the door was closed and then he was just there and he grabbed Clark’s wrist and took his hand off me.
Just lifted it. Removed it. Like he was peeling a bug off my shoulder. ”
I pulled my knees up to my chest.
“And then he said, quote, ‘I’d appreciate it if we kept things professional.’ Professional!
As if I was the one doing something wrong!
Like I was out there giving lap dances at my desk instead of literally just standing there having a conversation while a client talked to me about a broken projector! ”
Fin’s ear twitched.
“And the worst part is Clark barely looked at me after that. Walked past my desk like I was furniture, probably thinks I got in trouble, that my boss scolded me for flirting with a client, and I wanted to melt into my chair and become one with the upholstery, Fin. I wanted to cease to exist.”
I rubbed my face with both hands.
“And then. AND THEN. After that whole humiliating display, Finneas spent the rest of the day being... I don’t even know how to describe it.
He kept coming to my desk. Kept finding excuses to be near me.
Handing me files he could’ve emailed, standing too close, holding eye contact way too long.
Normally when I catch him looking at me he does this move where he pretends he was reading the wall behind me, which is beige and has literally nothing on it, very convincing.
” I waved my hand. “But today he didn’t even bother pretending.
He just looked. Right at me. And I looked back because I’m an idiot who can’t back down from anything, and neither of us stopped for what felt like an hour and then my phone rang and I squeaked, Fin.
Out loud. In the office. Like a dog toy being stepped on. ”
I dropped my head onto my knees.
“And the thing that’s driving me insane is this: he embarrasses me in front of a client, tells me to be professional, and then spends the rest of the day staring at me like... like that? How is any of that professional? Someone explain it to me because I cannot figure this man out.”
I lifted my head and looked at Fin.
Fin licked my cheek. Full tongue, right across my face.
“Gross.” I sputtered and wiped it off with my sleeve. “But fine, I hear you. No good theories from this end either.”
I leaned back against the railing and tipped my head up.
Didn’t grab my book tonight, didn’t feel like reading or doing voices or anything except sitting in the quiet with Fin pressed against my leg and going over every detail again.
His hand on Clark’s wrist, his jaw when he said professional, seven seconds of eye contact over a coffee mug while my whole body went warm and stupid and I forgot how to set a cup down without spilling.
“The worst part, Fin?” Quiet now. Almost a whisper.
“I’m angry at him. I really am. But I also liked it.
Liked that he crossed the floor and took that guy’s hand off me like it was a personal insult.
And I really, really shouldn’t like that.
It’s controlling and possessive and probably a dozen things I should be mad about.
” I paused. “But I’m sitting on my porch telling a dog that my boss grabbed another man’s hand off my shoulder and the main emotion I feel is flattered, so clearly I have lost all perspective. ”
Fin pressed his nose into my hand and I curled my fingers into his fur and held on.
Eventually I went inside. Brushed my teeth, changed into pajamas, got into bed.
But I didn’t sleep. Lay there with the light off, staring at my ceiling, going over his hand on Clark’s wrist and his fingers near mine on that file and his eyes holding mine while coffee pooled on his desk and my voice cracked on the phone.
The way he stood beside my desk and didn’t move, close enough to touch, looking at me with that expression that said one thing while his words said another.
Two years. Two years of grunts and hand waves and “fine” and “acceptable.” And then today he crossed a room in three steps because a man put his hand on my shoulder and I felt it in my chest like a crack opening up.
“I am in so much trouble,” I whispered to my ceiling.
My ceiling didn’t answer. Which was fair. I wouldn’t know what to say to me either.