Chapter 21 Eliana
ELIANA
seized: /sēzd/: verb
Monday morning finds me standing in front of my closet in a t-shirt and no pants like Winnie the Pooh. I’m holding up two nearly identical blouses and spending a stupid amount of time trying to decide which to wear.
Why do I care? I’ve never cared before. So long as my outfits passed the low, low bar that is “business casual,” neither I nor anyone at Hale Hospitality gives a damn how I’m dressed for the day.
But this weekend has changed things.
All weekend long after the fire alarm fiasco, I felt unsettled.
“Ants in my pants” is what my mom would’ve called it.
Ants crawling under the surface of my skin feels a lot more accurate, though.
That’s the feeling—just constant awareness of all things sensory.
Smells, tastes, the friction when I crossed my legs or rolled over in bed.
A hypervigilance that was nearly enough to drive me crazy long before the day was over.
Yas lingered at my apartment for a while, chit-chatting about nothing at all.
I think she knew we both needed a break from serious topics.
The Brandon thing is this hideously ugly specter looming in the background of her life.
The Bastian thing is looming similarly in the background of mine, although “hideously ugly” is not something anyone has ever said about Bastian Hale.
Regardless, both of us were plenty happy to just talk shit about the Love Island cast of buffoons and munch on dairy-free popcorn for as long as our GI tracts allowed.
I was lonely when she left, though—and a little bit scared, too. Without her keeping up a constant stream of chatter, I had only my own thoughts for company.
That’s the worst kind of company there is these days.
Because my thoughts are filled with Bastian in all his many forms. Chef Bastian, Handyman Bastian, Changing Shirts in His Office Bastian. Sweaty Runner Bastian is a new addition to the mix, and he’s already taking up a disproportionate amount of my fantasy runtime.
As I fell asleep last night with ants in my not-wearing-any-pants, it was Sweaty Runner Bastian doing lap after lap through my head.
Abs like the Rock of Gibraltar and that strip of blonde happy trail hair like the lights on an airplane runway saying, This looks like a nice place to land…
Yum.
No, yuck.
Okay, fine, yum. Undeniably yum.
Which brings me to Monday morning, when precisely zero percent of those thoughts have evaporated and one hundred percent of the horniness remains.
The ants remain, too. As I pick a blouse, a lilac-colored gauzy thing with a high collar that fastens tight around my throat, the ants are crawlin’.
As I drink my coffee on the L, the ants are crawlin’.
As I take the stairs up to the office because I need to buy a little time to put my game face on before work begins, you better believe it: The ants are crawlin’.
I don’t think they’re gonna stop anytime soon.
It’s the normal hubbub when I step onto the twentieth floor. Shithead Kyle gives me a snide smile from his cubicle and Jovanni the cleaning lady pats my elbow and tells me I look nice today.
At the far end of the space, Bastian’s door is firmly closed, as per usual. That’s for the best. All is right in the world. I have achieved internal Zen.
That lasts for approximately three steps.
No sooner have I reached my cubicle than does Bastian’s door fly open and boom against the far wall. All eyes whip toward him like we’re a colony of meerkats and a leopard just appeared on the horizon.
“Senior team in the conference room, now,” he says. He’s not raising his voice, not really, but everyone flinches like he just bellowed at the top of his lungs.
Thank God I’m not senior team, because he’s got a noticeably deep furrow in his brow today that can only spell trouble.
But still, the sight of him sets those ants to scurrying. I’m once again painfully aware of every inch of my skin. I sense the zipper of my slacks pressed against my belly button and the underwire of my bra squeezing my rib cage.
He looks good today. Even being angry can’t ruin his looks.
If anything, the extra intensity sharpens his jawline and pulls his cheekbones into high relief.
Did he grow taller overnight? I swear the top of his head didn’t used to graze his doorframe, but today, it does, just enough to tease up a few of those dirty blond strands.
He’s wearing a white shirt, crisp and new, with the cuffs rolled to his elbows like always. I picture those hands shucking an oyster and feeding it to me and something way more visceral than ants goes rippling low in my belly.
Down, girl, I scold myself internally. This is neither the time nor the place. Bastian looks pissed, so just get in your cubicle, let the senior team take the heat, and you can go talk to him later if your schoolgirl crush persists.
Sounds great. Highly doable.
But that plan, just like the Zen I thought I’d found when I first stepped into the office a second ago, does not last long.
“Hunter,” snarls Bastian just as I’m resuming my walk toward my cubicle, “where the hell do you think you’re going?”
I blink. It’s jarring to have the real-life Bastian intrude on my many fantasy versions.
Those versions are always kind to me. (Er, well, not always—some of them have particularly filthy mouths and domination kinks that you can’t really call “kind”—but the point is, they’d never bark at me like this.)
“To my, uh, desk?”
He points that broad, tattooed, expert-oyster-shucking hand toward the conference room. “Get in there. Now.”
I frown. I’m not senior team, technically speaking. That belongs to people with a “Chief” in front of their title, and despite the many zeroes on the contract salary I agreed to, no one is calling me “Chief” any time soon.
I glance. My coworkers are all suddenly deeply engrossed in their keyboards and/or cuticles. No help is coming from there.
So, with a resigned sigh, I leave my coffee thermos on my desk and herd myself into the glass-walled conference room along with the rest of the senior team.
It feels like a fish bowl with all of us crammed in here. I take a seat at the far end of the table. If I’m lucky, I’ll blend right into the furniture. No one will even notice me.
Bastian is the last one in. He closes the door with a decisive thump. “We have a problem,” he announces without preamble. “The truffle oil station at Olympus is a fucking disaster. The HVAC system can’t handle the heat and ventilation requirements. We need a complete overhaul of the whole thing.”
The CFO, Nylah Gardner, winces. “How much?”
“Two hundred k,” replies Bastian. “Minimum. Plus two weeks added to the timeline.”
A collective groan ripples through the room. Two weeks might not sound like much, but with the investor preview dinner already locked in, every day counts.
“The real problem,” Bastian continues, his eyes finally landing on me, “is that this should have been caught months ago during the design phase. Which means someone fucked up.”
My throat goes dry. Is he implying—?
“Hunter,” he says, confirming my worst fears, “you’ve been managing the buildout specs. Walk us through how this got missed.”
A dozen pairs of eyes all wheel in my direction. I feel like a bug under a microscope, pinned in place and squirming.
“I, uh…” I sound like a squeaky door hinge, so I clear my throat and try again. “The HVAC specifications were based on the parameters provided by the design team. I’m the one who compiled them into the master document, but the technical review was signed off by—”
“By you,” Bastian interrupts. “Your name is on the approval sheet.”
“Along with yours and three engineers,” I counter. The initial shock is wearing off, replaced by something hotter. “I flagged concerns about the heat load calculations in my notes from the March review meeting. You said—and I quote—‘the engineers know what they’re doing. Stay out of their way.’”
Bastian stops his pacing and faces me fully. “Are you trying to shift blame on this, Ms. Hunter?”
“I’m trying to accurately represent what happened.
” I pull out my tablet with shaking hands and start scrolling.
“Here. March 15th. Email thread with Frank Moretti. I specifically asked about the ventilation requirements for high-heat oil processing. He assured me the system was overspecced by twenty percent.”
“Clearly, it wasn’t.”
“I guess not. So yeah, someone sucks at math. But that someone isn’t me.
” I look up at him, holding his gaze even though my heart is trying to pull an Alien and rip itself out of my chest. “I did my job, Bastian. I asked the right questions. I documented everything. If the engineers gave us bad numbers, that’s not on me. ”
Nylah shifts in her seat. The CMO, Rebecca, coughs nervously. A senior designer named Kyle (not Shithead Kyle and not Security Guard Kyle, another Kyle—I’m just now noticing that there are a lot of freaking Kyles at this company) keeps clicking and unclicking his pen and it’s driving me insane.
But I don’t have eyes for any of them. Truth be told, I barely notice they’re there. I can only look at Bastian, standing tall and inhumanely gorgeous at the front of the room, scowling like he might lunge across the table and throttle me for my insolence at any moment.
“Let’s run through a hypothetical,” he says. “If a project manager’s project runs behind on schedule and over budget, wouldn’t you think that’s the project manager’s fault? Isn’t that implied in the fucking job description?”
“What am I supposed to do when I get the wrong numbers?” I cry out in exasperation. The longer we argue, the more the rest of the room disappears.
Bastian is unmoved. “Check them. Fix them. Do your job.”
“I’m a project manager, not a civil engineer, Bastian. And you pay me to do logistics, not witchcraft. But if witchcraft is what you want, my neighbor’s six-year-old birthday party just had a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat. Should I get his number for you?”
I nearly scream when Bastian’s hands smack the table. It’s like a bolt of lightning. And then, a second later, his growled thunder: “Everyone out,” he rumbles. “Except Hunter.”
Oh, fuck.
Like the rats on a sinking ship they are, they all flee without a moment’s hesitation. Rebecca won’t look at me, Nylah offers me a sympathetic smile, and Kyle shakes his head disdainfully. I’m really starting to dislike Kyles.
The door clicks shut.
Then it’s just me and Bastian in this glass cage.