by Myers, Kelly
“Hey, you alright?” I asked.
She looked up at me. Red eyes, tears running down her cheeks, she took a minute to focus. Narrowing her gaze.
“Fuck off,” she said.
Still holding my bike, I squatted down next to her.
“You’re hurt. Let me help you.”
“I think you’ve helped me enough today Zack Noble. Just… just leave me alone already.”
I let my bike drop to its side and began gathering her items. I upended the box and slid her books back in, solar power technology and engineering books. Damn. No wonder she didn’t want my help. To save Shingle Click, several groups that were not currently delivering, or not directly related to the product to consumer pipeline had been eliminated. That included the group developing solar power integration.
“Yeah, I probably deserve that.” I reached for a plant in a broken pot. “You’ll need to re-pot this.”
“You killed Henry,” she cried reaching for the green leaves and roots packed with dirt that I held up. “Why are you still here?”
I sighed. This woman was a mess, she didn’t even know she needed help. “You’re hurt, you clearly need assistance.”
“Well, you’re covered in shit. You are shit. Everything is shit.” She pulled the plant into a hug and shook like she was crying.
Crying women were my weakness. She was beautiful and in distress. Instinctually, I reached out to wrap an arm around her. I didn’t give a fuck that she had a man, or that she was pissed at me because of the layoff. She was crying. She swatted my arm away before I was remotely close.
“Let me at least call Chase to come pick you up. You shouldn’t have to walk home with your knee all scraped up.”
She scooted away from me with a turn. “I don’t have a boyfriend anymore. And thanks to you, I don’t have a job. And now I’m going to be homeless unless I can find another job in less than two weeks. Even if I do, I won’t get paid in time.” She sniffled for a bit and then held out her plant. “You killed Henry.”
“How is it my fault you tripped?”
She spun back and glared. Even when angry she was adorable. I took a few squat walk steps back, giving her the room she needed.
She let out a dramatic sigh. “Henry would be content in a cubicle if I still had a job. But I don’t. I had to pack up four months of accumulated reference material because the sexist engineers I worked with were constantly quizzing me. They said it was because I was the intern, but they never actually quizzed anyone else, no, just me. I had to be smarter than any of them, even though I was the intern. I was there to learn, not serve as some kind of human reference database. But I was killing it. I was proving that I knew my shit, and I was in line to be hired.” She closed her eyes for a moment.
“I digress. The box was heavy, I tripped. The pot broke. It’s your fault because if the solar panel group hadn’t been dissolved, I wouldn’t have been laid off today. Therefore, you killed Henry.”
When she stopped talking she just stared at me as if to say point served.
I rubbed my hand over my brow, massaging away the wrinkles that formed there when I was tense. This woman was making me tense. She wasn’t wrong. As crazy as her logic sounded, it was logic.
“I’m sorry I killed your plant. Let’s gather your things and then we can discuss this rent situation. I’m feeling responsible.”
She held her hand out to me. I stood, and then braced, as she levered herself to her cute little feet.
“You should.”
She looked me up and down with a great deal of judgment, before bending over to get the rest of her things into the box. I enjoyed the view. When finished, she stood with her hands on her ample hips and looked at me and then the box, and then at me again. I took her hint and picked it up.
“How much rent money do you need?” I asked as I held her box.
She shrugged. “Chase paid half. And right now I barely have enough to cover my half.”
She was eerily calm. I guess she spent all her rage yelling at me about the plant.
“Swing by my apartment when you get home. I’ll transfer the rent—”
“No, you can’t do that.” She cut me off.
“Crystal—”
“As much as I blame you for the job, the rent is on me and Chase. So it’s on me. And… and… no I can’t let you.”
I never noticed how big her eyes were. Or how long her lashes. The woman didn’t have on any makeup that I could tell, and she was stunning. Maybe it was the way the evening light filtered through the trees and lit up her honey brown eyes. And with Chase no longer around, I was going to be helping her. She didn’t have a choice in this.
“Fine, if I can’t pay your rent, what can I do?”
“Give me a job.”
“I can’t give you your job back. What can you do? What did you do before Shingle Click?”
Her mouth formed around words and I half-listened. Distracted by thoughts of having that mouth form around other things. I heard her mention marketing, management, and graduation. What I didn’t hear was any programming experience.
“Fine, be in my office Monday morning. I’ll find you a job,” I said.
She took the box from my hands with an excited little wiggle. Her face lit up with a genuine smile. “Really? There’s an opening in quality assurance. I can do product testing and proof coding. And the pay will more than cover rent. Thank you, Zack. Or should I say, Mr. Noble?”
“Zack is fine.” The way she jiggled about when she was happy sucked the blood from my brain. I cleared my throat and got on my bike before it all fully transferred to my dick.
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