Chapter 11 - Andrea
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Andrea
I was at my desk at seven, barely through my first email, when Finneas walked in and set a coffee cup down in front of me.
I looked down at the cup. Oat milk latte with a shot of vanilla. My exact order, down to the ratio, the one I’d never mentioned to anyone at this office because who cares how their boss’s assistant takes her coffee.
Except I’d mentioned it to Fin. On the porch, on a random Tuesday, complaining about the broken coffee machine while scratching behind his ears. He’d been sitting there memorizing my goddamn coffee order.
“What is this?”
“Coffee.” Already heading into his office.
“This is my exact order, Finneas.”
“Is it? Lucky guess.”
“You have never guessed at anything in your life. You double-check the weather before you pick a tie.”
“It’s a latte, Andrea.”
“It’s bribery and you know it.”
His jaw twitched as he disappeared through his door. I picked up the cup because I wasn’t about to waste a perfectly good coffee on principle, took a sip, and it was perfect. Exactly right. The bastard.
An hour later he buzzed my desk. “Can you come in? Need you to look at a report.”
I walked into his office and he handed me a file.
He’d pushed his chair back from the desk, legs stretched out, one hand resting on his thigh, the other holding a pen he was turning between his fingers.
The rolled sleeves put the tendons in his forearms on full display, which I was sure was accidental in the same way that the latte was a lucky guess.
I read the first page. Flipped through, scanned the summary.
“This is fine.”
“I want a second opinion.”
“You just got one.”
“Read it again.”
I sighed, read it again, standing across from his desk while he watched me. Not the report. Me. My hands on the pages, my face while I read. I could feel the weight of his attention like a physical thing pressing against my skin.
“Still fine.”
“Third paragraph. Look at it.”
I read the third paragraph carefully this time, genuinely confused now, hunting for whatever he’d caught.
Went through each sentence, checked the numbers against the data set in my head, looked for typos, misplaced modifiers, anything off.
Clean. All of it. I read it again slower and got the same result.
I looked up at him. “Seriously, what am I missing? There’s nothing wrong with this.”
“Stay and walk me through it.”
“Walk you through what? The paragraph is fine, Finneas, every number checks out.”
I stopped. Looked at him, really looked at him. He was leaning back in his chair with his eyes on me, relaxed, patient, turning that pen slowly between his fingers. Not the expression of a man who found an error in a quarterly report. More like a man who was exactly where he wanted to be.
And then it clicked. There had never been anything wrong with the report. He called me in here to sit across from him and talk and picked a fight about a paragraph as an excuse.
My face went warm. “You’re kidding me.”
“Walk me through it.”
I should have dropped the file on his desk and walked out. Instead I pulled the chair closer and sat down, because apparently my self-preservation instincts had fully abandoned me.
We went through it page by page. He argued that the graph labels on page two were inconsistent, which they weren’t, they were abbreviated for column width.
“You want me to rebuild an entire table because you don’t like abbreviations?”
“I want it to be better.”
“It’s already better. I made it.”
He leaned forward on his desk. Forearms flat on the surface, sleeves tight across his muscles, that damn pen still between his fingers. I tried very hard to focus on the report.
“The executive summary needs to be tighter,” he said.
“The executive summary is two paragraphs. How much tighter do you want it?”
“More formal. The board expects a certain tone.”
“The board can handle a contraction, Finneas. If ‘don’t’ instead of ‘do not’ is keeping them up at night, that’s a literacy issue, not a formatting one.”
His mouth twitched. A crack in his composure that lasted half a second, and warmth spread through my chest because I put it there. I wanted to make it happen again. That was dangerous. I pressed on anyway.
“Paragraph four,” he said. “The semicolon.”
“What about it?”
“It should be a period.”
“It absolutely should not be a period. That’s a compound clause with related independent ideas. A period would break the flow.”
“The flow is fine without it.”
“The flow is better with it and you know it. You just want to argue.”
He leaned further forward. So did I. The file was spread between us, three feet of desk separating our faces, and his eyes were right there, close enough that I could see flecks of amber in the brown that I’d never noticed before.
His jaw was doing that sharp focused thing and I realized I’d stopped looking at the report entirely because I was tracking the line of his jaw instead, imagining what it would feel like under my fingertips, which was a completely unhinged thought to have during a conversation about punctuation.
“It disrupts the rhythm of the paragraph,” he said, and his voice had dropped lower, the way it always did when we argued for too long, like the volume knob was slowly turning down as the distance between us shrank.
“It enhances the rhythm. That’s literally what semicolons do.”
“Says who?”
“Says every style guide ever written. Says me. I’m right and you know I’m right and you’re arguing because you like arguing with me.”
The words came out before I could catch them. His eyes held mine. My face went hot. Neither of us moved.
I caught myself staring at his mouth mid-sentence and jerked my eyes back to the page so hard the words blurred.
“The semicolon stays.”
“Fine.”
“Don’t say fine like you’re doing me a favor.”
“You’re right.”
“Thank you.”
I stood up, grabbed the file, walked out.
My pulse was hammering, my face warm, and we hadn’t touched once the entire time.
Forty-five minutes of sitting three feet apart arguing about punctuation while pretending we weren’t both thinking about closing the distance.
The tension of not touching left me more wound up than any brush in the hallway ever had.
Back at my desk I tried to work but my brain wouldn’t cooperate.
It kept replaying the way he’d leaned forward, forearms on the desk, eyes on mine, arguing about a semicolon he knew damn well was correct.
He wasn’t fighting about the report, was fighting to keep me in his office, keep me talking, keep me close.
And I liked arguing with him. Liked the way his jaw twitched when I scored a point, the way his voice dropped when he conceded, the way three feet felt like three inches when we were both leaning in.
I liked all of it and that terrified me.
Two days later I was at the filing cabinet near the far wall, stretching for a folder on the top shelf.
The shelf was too damn high because everything in this building was designed for people a foot taller than me.
I got on my toes, fingertips grazing the edge, couldn’t quite get a grip, so I braced my foot on the bottom drawer and stretched further.
I didn’t hear him. One second I was alone and the next his chest was inches from my back, warm, blocking out the rest of the room.
He reached over me and pulled the file down with zero effort, his arm passing close enough to my head that I felt the warmth of it.
His cologne hit me and his breath landed on the back of my neck and every hair on my body stood up.
He set the file on the cabinet beside me. His hand brushed my shoulder on the way down.
“Here.”
I turned around and he was right there. Way too close, my back pressed against the cabinet, him looking down at me, close enough that I could see the stubble on his jaw, how his eyes were darker at this distance, a small scar on his eyebrow I’d never noticed.
My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was sure he could hear it.
“I could have gotten it.”
“You were climbing the shelf.”
“I was not climbing the shelf.”
“Your foot was on the bottom drawer.”
“That’s called resourcefulness.”
He didn’t move back. I didn’t move sideways. Six inches between our faces, heat coming off his body, my brain fully offline. If either of us leaned forward we’d be kissing and I needed to get out of this corner before I did what every nerve in my body was screaming at me to do.
“You going to move?” My voice came out breathier than I wanted.
“Are you going to ask me to?”
Shit.
I grabbed the file off the cabinet, ducked under his arm, and made it back to my desk on rubber legs.
Dropped into my chair and my whole body buzzed, from my neck where his breath had landed to my shoulder where his hand grazed to my back where his chest had been so goddamn close I could still feel the phantom heat of it.
He went back to his office like nothing happened. Just sat down, started reading his screen. How? How was he just sitting there? I couldn’t even remember what file I’d originally been looking for.
The rest of the afternoon was a loss. I opened the same spreadsheet four times without changing a single cell.
Typed an email to accounting, read it back, realized I’d addressed it to “Dear Finneas” instead of “Dear Finance Team,” and deleted the whole thing so fast my keyboard rattled.
At some point he walked past my desk to refill his coffee, closer than necessary, and I caught a wave of his cologne.
My pen slipped out of my fingers, rolled across the floor, and I just left it there because bending down felt like too much to ask of my body right now.
Everything was too much. His proximity, his cologne, the memory of six inches of air between our faces and his voice asking are you going to ask me to. I was losing my shit over a filing cabinet encounter and we hadn’t even touched and that was the most fucked up part of all of it.
I was packing up my bag when he came out of his office. Jacket on. He fell into step beside me and we waited for the elevator in silence.
The doors opened and I stepped in.
He caught my wrist.
My pulse went through the roof. His fingers wrapped around my wrist, loose enough to pull free, firm enough that I felt it everywhere. He tugged me back one step until I was facing him at the elevator threshold.
He leaned down. His mouth stopped next to my ear, close enough that his breath hit my neck in warm slow waves, and every muscle in my body locked. Cologne everywhere, jaw right there inches from my cheek, heat from his skin radiating into mine without touching.
“For the record,” he said, low, barely a murmur, “the shirtless dream was mutual.”
He let go of my wrist, stepped back, and the elevator doors closed between us.
I stood there. Face on fire, wrist burning, brain gone. He dreamed about me, just whispered that into my ear with his mouth close enough that I felt every word on my skin, and then he let the doors close like a man who knew exactly what he’d done and was content to let me suffer with it.
The elevator hit the lobby, the doors opened, and I just stood there until they started closing again. Had to jam my hand in to stop them. A woman in the lobby gave me a look. I walked past her without making eye contact because if I opened my mouth right now the only thing coming out was a scream.
I drove home on autopilot, walked through my front door, dropped my bag in the hallway, grabbed a pillow off the couch, and screamed into it for a solid five seconds. Threw it across the room and stood there breathing hard with my hair in my face.
“I’m going to kill him,” I mumbled aloud and I didn’t care. “He can’t just whisper that and let the doors close like some goddamn romance novel villain.”
Because he knew what he was doing. Every single move since the ice cracked had been calibrated to take me apart without crossing a line I could call him out on.
A latte was just coffee, a report review was just work, the filing cabinet was just helping, that whisper was just a comment.
All perfectly deniable, all perfectly innocent, and none of it was innocent and we both knew it.
I paced, made tea, burned my tongue drinking it too fast because apparently I couldn’t handle hot liquids anymore, then went out to the porch because the walls were closing in and I needed to breathe.
The steps were empty. No Fin. Just the quiet street, the bare spot by the railing where he used to sit. I lowered myself onto the top step, pulled my knees up, wrapped my arms around them.
My wrist still felt warm where his fingers had been. Not physically, not really, but my body kept circling back to the pressure of his grip and the heat of his breath on my neck and those five words in that low voice and every time I replayed it my pulse kicked up again like it was happening fresh.
I sat there for a long time. The neighborhood went quiet around me, houses going dark one by one, a car pulling into a driveway down the block, someone’s sprinkler clicking on and off in a rhythm I could hear through the stillness. My tea went cold in my hand. I didn’t drink it.
I kept thinking about what Mary said on the phone.
Stop overthinking and see where it goes.
Easy for her to say. Mary didn’t have a wolf king whispering in her ear about mutual dreams and making lattes from memory, didn’t have a bond humming in her chest that got louder every time he stood too close, a pull that I couldn’t logic my way out of no matter how hard I tried.
But she wasn’t wrong either. I liked him.
That was the part I kept trying to argue around and couldn’t.
Under the anger and the betrayal and the mortification, under all of it, I liked him.
I’d liked him for two years before I knew what he was and I still liked him now and no amount of ice queen bullshit was going to change that.
I was going to kiss him again and we both knew it. He was taking me apart one move at a time and I was letting him.
“I am so fucked,” I said to nobody.
Not about the kiss. About everything. The bond, the pull, his breath on my neck, the fact that I didn’t want to fight it anymore.
Falling for a wolf king who grunted, drank too much coffee, turned into a dog, and whispered things in elevators.
Sitting on my empty porch with my burned tongue and my cold tea and my racing pulse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stop.