Chapter 10 - Andrea
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Andrea
I held the line for two days.
Mr. Kingsley, no eye contact, files handed over with my arm fully extended so our fingers couldn’t touch.
I spoke to him in the voice I reserved for the IT department when they asked if I’d tried restarting, and every time I walked past his office the pull in my chest yanked me toward the door so hard I had to physically redirect myself back to my desk like a damn shopping cart with a busted wheel.
The first night I went out to the porch with my book anyway.
Sat in my usual spot, opened to my bookmark, tried to read out loud.
Got through half a chapter and the words just hung there in the empty air, flat and pointless without anyone to hear them.
The spot next to me where a warm body used to press against my leg was cold.
I closed the book, went inside, lay on the couch without turning the TV on, and tried not to think about the last thing he said to me in his office. Failed. Wanted to punch a pillow.
Second night I didn’t even make it outside.
Tea at the kitchen table, phone scrolling, early bed.
The pull sat low in my chest, a bruise that wouldn’t fade, and lying in the dark with nothing to distract me I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and breathed through it and told myself I was making the right call.
I felt like shit. That’s the honest version.
Day three I got to the office early, made his coffee, poured the mug. Plain black, no commentary. I picked it up to carry it to his office and then looked down at it and stopped dead in the middle of the floor.
Three empties already lined up on his desk.
This would be his fourth before 10 am. I’d been tracking without thinking about it, the same way I’d tracked it for two years, my brain running the count on autopilot while the rest of me tried to freeze him out.
He was going to give himself a heart attack and nobody was going to say a word because the only person who ever bothered monitoring his caffeine was me.
I should have just set it down and left. That was the professional move, the boundary-respecting move, the move that kept the wall intact. Three days of ice and all I had to do was not write on a Post-It and I could keep it going.
My feet carried me back to my desk anyway.
I grabbed a pink Post-It from the pad, uncapped my pen, and wrote on it before the rational part of my brain could lodge a formal objection.
Peeled it off, stuck it to the side of the mug, carried it into his office, and set it on his desk while he was reading on his screen.
He looked at the mug. His eyes dropped to the Post-It.
Third cup. Don’t push it.
When he looked up at me I was already turning away, but I could feel his eyes on my back and the silence behind me stretched on too long.
Finneas Kingsley didn’t need to read three words twice unless they meant more than three words, and those three words meant I was still watching, counting, paying attention even when I was pretending not to.
My heart hammered the whole walk back. Over a goddamn Post-It, some scribbles of ink that just cracked three days of careful distance wide open. I sat down and pulled up my email and pretended the warmth crawling across my face was from the coffee I hadn’t drunk yet.
That afternoon I was buried in a scheduling conflict, rearranging a double-booked Wednesday, when I glanced up without thinking. A reflex. The same reflex I’d been strangling for three days, except my guard slipped and my eyes went straight through the glass wall into his office.
He was already looking at me.
Our eyes caught and held, and I should have looked away because that was the rule, the whole goddamn point of the last three days, but instead my mouth opened before my brain could catch up.
“Take a picture, it lasts longer.”
He smiled.
Not the jaw twitch, not the polished client version.
A real smile, his whole face changing, eyes going warm, jaw relaxing, and my stomach dropped so hard I grabbed the edge of my desk to keep from swaying.
When he smiled for real he looked like a different person, like someone I wanted to keep making smile, and that thought scared me more than the wolf thing ever did.
I whipped back to my screen so fast my neck cracked. My face burned, I could feel it climbing from my collar to my ears, and I stared at the same email for twenty minutes without absorbing a single word.
Shit.
Three days of ice and I blew it in six words.
The afternoon got worse from there. He didn’t push it, didn’t come to my desk, but the energy between us shifted from cold to warm and I could feel it in everything.
Walking past his office to the printer, his reflection in the glass tracking me.
Hearing his voice through the wall on a call and my body going still to listen.
At four, a delivery came that I had to bring in, and when I set the package on his desk our eyes met and neither of us said a word and the air got so thick I forgot to breathe.
I walked back to my desk on shaky legs and sat down and gripped the armrests of my chair until my knuckles ached.
I was shoving my laptop into my bag at the end of the day when he came out. Jacket on, keys in hand.
“Can I drive you home?”
I should have said no. I’d been saying no to everything for three days, no to eye contact, no to conversation, no to the pull that wouldn’t shut up no matter how many walls I threw between us.
“Fine. But only because parking is expensive and I’m trying to save money.”
His eyes smiled even though his mouth didn’t and I hated that I could read the difference now.
We rode the elevator down to the garage standing side by side, both staring at the doors, the three inches between our arms vibrating with everything we weren’t saying.
He opened the passenger door before I got there and I gave him a look that said I can open my own door and he gave me one back that said I know, I’m doing it anyway, and I got in because fighting about a car door felt like a waste of what little energy I had left.
Neither of us spoke on the drive. He gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, eyes on the road, jaw flexing at every red light.
I fidgeted with my bag strap, watched the city blur past through the window, tried not to notice how the car smelled like his cologne mixed with leather.
His hand shifted on the gearstick at a stoplight and my eyes tracked the movement before I caught myself.
He pulled up outside my house and put it in park. Through the windshield my porch looked bare and dark, the light on for nobody, and the sight of those empty steps hit me harder than it should have.
I should get out, say thanks for the ride, close the door, go inside, continue the act.
“I missed reading to Fin,” I said instead.
I didn’t plan it. The words fell out quiet, barely above a breath, and I immediately wanted to reach into the air and shove them back in my mouth.
His hands tightened on the wheel. I heard his breath catch, a sharp intake, and the silence that followed pressed against my skin.
“He misses it too.” His voice came out rough.
My hand sat on the door handle but I didn’t pull it.
The car was warm, he was right there, the porch was dark and empty.
I was so goddamn tired. Tired of being angry, tired of sitting on cold wood alone pretending I didn’t miss a dog that wasn’t a dog.
In the driver’s seat he was holding himself perfectly still, not pushing, not reaching, just waiting and letting me decide, and I hated that he was good at that because it made it harder to keep him at a distance.
I opened the door, got out, stood there with the night air cool on my face.
“Goodnight, Finneas.”
“Goodnight, Andrea.”
I closed the door and walked to my porch and I was halfway up the steps when it hit me that I’d used his first name, not Mr. Kingsley, just Finneas, natural and automatic, my mouth going off-script while my brain was still rehearsing the cold professional act.
Inside, I leaned against the door with my hands pressed over my face. A Post-It, a smile, a confession about Fin, his name in my mouth like nothing had changed. The wall I’d spent three days building was coming apart and I was the one pulling out the bricks.
I called Maryjane. Almost midnight, but she picked up on the second ring.
“He kissed me,” I said.
“WHAT?”
“Last week. On my porch. I kissed him back for about one second before I shoved him away and told him to leave.”
“Oh my God. Oh my GOD.” Sheets rustled, Peter mumbled in the background. “About damn time, Andrea.”
“It’s not ‘about time,’ it’s a disaster. It’s complicated. There’s stuff I can’t explain. He’s not who I thought he was.”
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“Serial killer?”
“No.” I paused. “Not exactly.”
“Andrea Grey, if you don’t start explaining right now I am driving to your house in my pajamas.”
“You can’t, Mary, I literally can’t tell you. Not yet. Just trust me that it’s more complicated than boss-kisses-assistant.”
She went quiet for a beat, processing, deciding whether to push, and I loved her for letting it go.
“Okay. Here’s my take. You like him, he likes you, he kissed you and you kissed him back. Whatever the complication is, stop overthinking it and see where it goes.”
“That’s terrible advice.”
“It’s excellent advice. You just don’t want to hear it because you’re stubborn and scared and you’d rather sit on your porch being miserable than admit you want this.”
“Wow. Harsh.”
“Am I wrong?”
I didn’t answer. Mary laughed, told me she loved me, hung up before I could argue.
She wasn’t wrong about any of it.
The next day, Finneas shifted his approach. He wasn’t pushing or crowding or trying to force a conversation. But the distance I’d carved out over the last three days had shrunk and he was filling the space.
Mid-morning he came to my desk with a file.
“The Hargrove revisions,” he said, holding it out.
When I took it his fingers grazed mine on the paper.
Half a second of contact that traveled up my arm.
He didn’t pull back. Neither did I. We just stood there holding opposite ends of a manila folder with our fingertips touching, my pulse spiking, until he let go.
He walked back to his office. I sat down and stared at the file without opening it.
Walking to the conference room for a client call, his hand landed on the small of my back.
Light, warm through my blouse, his palm spanning between my shoulder blades.
Gone before I could react, but every one of his fingers registered on my skin.
I had to sit through the entire meeting with that touch burning on my spine, pretending to take notes while writing the same word over and over because my brain had vacated the premises the second his hand made contact.
Later that afternoon he passed behind my chair on his way to the printer, close, too close, close enough that the hair on the back of my neck rose and I tilted my head toward the warmth before I could stop myself.
Caught it, corrected, sat straight. But twenty minutes later his hand found mine on another file and my fingers lingered instead of pulling back, and I realized the corrections weren’t holding anymore.
Each one lasted shorter than the last, my body overriding my brain a little faster every time, the gap between “I should pull away” and actually pulling away shrinking to nothing.
I wasn’t forgiving him, wasn’t over the lying or the secrets or any of it. But my body kept moving toward him, and every time I tried to course-correct the pull just got stronger, and I was starting to wonder if I even wanted to fight it anymore.
The elevator ride down felt longer than usual. Just me and the hum of the cables, leaning against the back wall with my eyes closed, saying out loud to the empty car: “I am not going to kiss my boss again.”
My reflection stared back at me from the polished doors when I opened my eyes, flushed and unconvincing.
Yeah. I didn’t believe me either.