by R. S. Elliot
“Alright. I’ll take you up on that.”
“Olivia isn’t coming.”
“Oh, I know. Get her a Frappuccino tomorrow, and she’ll forgive you.”
“We’ll see,” I said, then jangled my car keys at Carl. “You’ve got five minutes to wrap things up, or I’m leaving you behind.”
I ducked out before I could get pulled into a conversation with more emotional substance, leaving him to decide whether he would take me up on my offer. I like to think that by now, we understood each other’s idiosyncrasies and spoke the same nonverbal language. It was that sort of sync that made us a good team, especially in an industry where CEOs and CFOs often butted heads or even vied for each other’s authority.
By six thirty the building had emptied out, and the only employees left at their desks were those with catch-up to play or overtime to log. Some of them glanced my way and then quickly dropped their eyes back to their keyboards. I tended to have that effect on people. Olivia was long gone, her screen dark, the pile of post-it notes she kept her day’s running to-do list on neatly discarded. She sometimes poked her head in near the end of her workday to ask if I wanted her to get the ball rolling on anything before she headed out, but not today.
Maybe Carl’s idea about a Frappuccino hadn’t been a bad idea after all.
I made a beeline for the elevator, weaving through cubicles on the most expedient route. A woman with long red hair pulled into a braid had just stepped inside, and I caught the door with my hand moments before it closed. As the elevator door dinged and slid open, her eyes widened in surprise.
The woman in the elevator was a head shorter than me but had an impressive figure, with a lean frame and delicate collar bones exposed by the boat neckline on her shirt. Her eyes were an arresting blue, her red mouth set in a hard, worried line. She was stunning in a short hemline, and a flush bloomed across her cheeks. She was also the girl who got carjacked on the side of the road a few months ago. The one who haunted my mind every free moment I had. The one I thought I would never see again.
I got into the elevator and pressed the lobby button. That gave us thirteen floors together, maybe two minutes of a second chance for me to make the right first impression.
I wanted to introduce myself, to remind her of that night, but just as I turned to speak to her, she lost her grip on the stacks of papers she was holding and ducked down to retrieve the runaways, her face flaring red. She was nervous, way more than she should be in the elevator with another working professional. I stooped down beside her to help her gather up her papers, but she flinched back when I reached towards her hand. Just a bit, but I saw it, and I saw the tightening of her shoulders. Was she afraid? It certainly seemed like she was holding back fear, working hard to keep herself composed as much as she could. What was the problem?
The answer hit me in the face. The carjacking, you idiot. She was carjacked by two men who cornered her at gunpoint. She probably wouldn’t be very excited about someone she thought was a stranger moving into her personal space in a cramped, isolated elevator.
In the end, I opted not to bring up that night, which must have been so terrible for her, and I didn’t touch her. But I did hand back one of the packets of paper that slid over to my side of the elevator, which, to my surprise, turned out to be the SkyBlue employee handbook.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, not meeting my eyes. Her face was half-hidden in a curtain of fiery hair.
Had she been working here the entire time? No, I would have noticed her by now, the company was still small enough that I was introduced to all of our full-time employees at least once. As I had intuited the night we met, she was quite young, probably not out of college yet, and was most likely one of our summer interns.
Sonia would know, but we didn’t often communicate directly. Interns weren’t my business after I looked over the applications and interviewer’s notes to give my final approval. Most other CEOs would see this as a gross misuse of my time, but I like to know the kind of people we welcomed into our doors, and I liked to make sure that they seemed like the type who could meet SkyBlue’s rigorous standards. If an intern had a nervous breakdown two months into their stint and required us to hire and re-train an entirely new person, it would cost the company time and money, which I wouldn’t stand for.
I wracked my brain to remember the mountain of applications I had flipped through a few months ago, and the names on them. Emily was a name I remembered, but I couldn’t recall if she had been one of the applicants I approved. She must have been, though, because here she was. Right under my roof all along.
I wondered if she was so nervous because she recognized me as her rescuer and was putting the pieces together that I was also her boss. But then I remembered that I had never taken off my helmet. She would have to have an excellent memory to pull that whole picture together, and the entire night was probably a blur to her. As much as I wanted to confess, I decided not to spring that on her just yet. If she worked in my building, I would have plenty of time to interact with her in my future, especially if I made it my business to.
“First day?” I asked lightly.
Those pale blue eyes darted up at me, almost in shock. Did she recognize my voice? That would do the heavy lifting of my letting her in on what I knew for me. But then she glanced away, looking a little confused, and I knew my voice hadn’t landed for her. Not entirely.
“Oh, no, but I’m new. I’ve only been here a few weeks.”
She smiled nervously, and I smiled back down at her, as warmly and indulgently as I could. She opened her mouth to say something else, the color rising deliciously in her cheeks, but then the elevator dinged, as though it were a chaperone at a school dance.
“Nice to meet you,” she mumbled, and then zipped out of the elevator before we could exchange another word. I watched her dart through the throng of people in the lobby before disappearing out the glass doors and jogging across the street to the subway station. She wasn’t exactly running away, but she certainly wasn’t wasting any time either.
I stepped out of the elevator in a bit of a daze, running a hand over the back of my neck. The odds of ever seeing Emily again, much less having her show up as an intern at my company, were lottery-winning. More than that. If I didn’t know better, I would think I was being set up by one of those hidden camera shows. But she had been in that elevator with me, real and radiating warmth and that sugary mall perfume that intoxicated me the night we first met. She had been slipping in and out of my daydreams and my nighttime fantasies for months, the perfect picture of what I desired, and it had gotten to the point where I wondered if I had made the whole night with the carjacking up. But here she was within reach.
My phone buzzed, and I glanced down at the text from Carl. He wanted to know what time we were meeting at the bar, and if I felt like eating dinner or not. I couldn’t bring myself to care to answer, not immediately anyway. Instead, I went out to my car, moving at a brisk clip, and sat there in silence in the parking garage for a long minute.
“Emily,” I muttered to myself, amazed at her very existence. There had to be something to this. If I felt this strongly about someone I hardly knew, we had to have some spark of intense connection. And I was fully set on using my laser-focused determination to act on that spark when the moment was right.
Chapter Six
Emily
I couldn’t believe how fast I rushed out of that elevator without even looking him in the eye. I kept replaying the moment over and over again as I languished on my tiny twin bed. Just as I had the entire subway ride home from work, it was like my brain had just evaporated as soon as those elevator doors closed behind us. I couldn’t tell if the panic was from being in an enclosed space with a man for the first time since being dragged from my car by a gunman, or because the man was Luke Thorpe. Because Luke was, up close, even more mind-meltingly handsome than he was from fifteen feet away. Maybe it was both.
And more than that, there was something about
him that got under my skin, something that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t just that he was handsome, tall and sharp-jawed and certainly well built underneath that suit. He towered over my 5’4 frame, and I expected he was at least 5’10 if not a full six feet. No wonder everyone in the office seemed drawn to him. But there was something more to him, something that reminded me of someone I couldn’t quite place. I was sure we hadn’t met before; I would remember an encounter with my boss. But still, he seemed strangely familiar, and my body responded to him as though we knew each other more intimately. His touch had burned against my skin when he reached out to help me gather the papers I had spilled in a fit of nerves, and it had felt like an almost sexual transgression of personal space, one I wasn’t ready for. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t enjoyed it if I was completely honest with myself.
Still, the way he sized me up implied that I had no idea what I was doing. It was insulting, infuriatingly so. He asked me if it was my first day. Why did he think it was okay to say that to someone who just spilled papers and notes everywhere? Was this the man I was supposed to win over and convince to write me a glowing recommendation to the summer program in Paris?
“Asshole,” I muttered to myself, but even I knew that was half-hearted. I kicked up the plastic fan whirring at the end of my bed another notch. Summer in the city was brutal. I couldn’t afford an apartment with AC, and I was suddenly feeling hot in my face and neck.
My phone rang, and I leaned off the side of my bed to pull it out of my purse, which lay discarded where I dropped it as soon as I arrived home. It was my mother again. She had been calling more frequently over the past few weeks. Maybe trying to reconnect with her daughter living away from home for the first time, or perhaps because she was still worried about me after the carjacking. I considered answering, then rejected her call. I was still feeling mixed-up and jittery from the elevator ride and didn’t feel like talking.
The air from the fan stirred the hair around my face as I sat ruminating furiously about the elevator incident while gnawing on my thumbnail. He had looked at me in such an intense way, like he wanted to know me better, or like he already knew me. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? I was just an intern. We had never been introduced, and I never so much as made eye contact with Luke Thorpe until today. The more I tried to put him out of my mind, the more preoccupied I became with him, until I found myself, to my great embarrassment, scrolling through press photos of him on my phone twenty minutes later. I should just put him out of my mind and go on with my business. But there was no forgetting his powerful presence next to me in that elevator, or the way his watery, woodsy cologne had smelled like money and the beach and the leather interior of an expensive car.
Maybe it was this indulgent spree of Googling and dreaming that led me to be so bold the next morning and do something I would never have otherwise dreamed of.
It started because Olivia was having a stressful day. Well, more stressful than usual it seemed, from the way she stabbed at the keyboard on her computer, snapped at people on the phone, and kneaded her brows with a sigh every few minutes. Everyone was working overtime to prepare for the new product launch, and we were all feeling the push, but I suppose Olivia got the worst of it as the CEO’s personal assistant. When I walked over to her desk to deliver some photocopies from another department, she hardly glanced up at me, and her smile, usually so sunny and encouraging, was thin. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days, and there were crumpled breakfast sandwich wrappers and a half-empty Venti Frappuccino on her desk. This wouldn’t be too strange for anyone else, but I had seen Olivia taking perfectly portioned, healthy home-cooked lunches out of the staff kitchen fridge more than once. The launch had taken over her life.
“Thank you,” she said and struggled to find a place for the papers on her overcrowded desk. She shoved a few things aside, then went looking for something else of importance while I stood awkwardly with my fingers laced. “Just one second, I have... Let me give you this while you’re here. Ugh, where did they go?”
I said nothing while she swore to herself and flipped through papers and folders. Eventually, she found a sales sheet with a crumpled edge that she thrust into my hands.
“This goes to Carl, please, and thank you. He might have errands for you as well, so just check while you’re in — oh fuck.” She had just glanced over at her desk clock and noticed, with a pale expression, the time. “It’s almost two. Shit, I forgot Luke’s espresso. I’m so busy, and it just fell right through the cracks...”
She pushed herself up from her desk, talking to herself more than me, and an impulsive idea welled up inside me.
“I can take Mr. Thorpe his coffee.”
She blinked at me as though I wasn’t speaking English.
“What?”
“It looks like you’ve got a lot on your plate right now. Delivering coffee is an intern thing, right? I’m happy to run out for you and—”
She sagged a bit against her desk and looked like she may fall into her seat. Instead, she lowered herself gently and pressed her manicured nails to her mouth, deep in thought.
“Well, maybe... Yeah, that could work. He’s just so particular about when he gets it, and I don’t have time to—”
“I completely get it. I’m happy to help.”
Olivia nodded, slowly at first and then faster. Then she ripped off a post-it note from her stack and scrawled Luke’s order down, even going so far as to include the foam ratio and the temperature he liked it brewed at.
“Go to the shop on the corner and come right back. Remember to knock before you go in and be polite. He’s busy today and bound to be irritable, so best not to make conversation. If he gives you trouble, just tell him I sent you.”
“Alright,” I said with a nod, then bounded off towards the door. I remembered to drop the sales sheet in the CFO’s box and snatched up my purse before heading to the elevator. Sprinting most of the way down the congested city street, I ordered as quickly as I could and ferried the precious cargo back across the street and up the thirteen stories to the SkyBlue offices. I repeated a little mantra to myself in the elevator that everything was going to be fine and that I was going to make a much better second impression. Unfortunately, I was so focused on my little pep talk that I forgot to knock and shouldered open the door to Luke’s office without warning. I caught Olivia’s horrified expression as the door swung closed behind me, but by then, it was already too late.
The scene was nothing like I expected. Somehow, I had imagined that Luke would be sitting at his desk busily at work, or maybe standing with his back to me admiring the skyline from his corner office window. Instead, he was sitting in one of the cushy leather guest chairs arranged in a semi-circle off to the side of his office, and he wasn’t alone.
There was a woman here with him, tall and dark-haired with stately high cheekbones. She was older than me but looked to be still in her twenties and wore a thick blue floral lace dress over a white slip. She looked surprised, but Luke, who sat beside a little boy of about seven or eight, merely raised an eyebrow at me.
“Oh God,” I breathed. “Sorry! I should have knocked, so sorry. I’ll just…”
“There’s no use apologizing for something you’ve already done,” Luke said, voice mellow and smooth despite his biting words. “If you’re here, you may as well serve me my coffee.”
With that, he turned back to the woman and the little boy as though nothing had happened, and gestured vaguely to a sleek end table near where he sat. I stood frozen for a moment, unable to read the woman. The woman’s grey eyes were fixed on mine, but a moment later, she turned her attention back to Luke like I wasn’t even there. Was this his wife? His child? I hadn’t read anything online about him having a family. A rush of embarrassment flooded me at the memory of spending a solid half hour the night before scrolling through pictures of him, and I wanted nothing more than to duck out of the room and hide under the desk until he forgot I even worked there.
But l
eaving abruptly would be just as bad as arriving unannounced, and I had promised Olivia to do this job right, so I tentatively took a step forward.
The little boy was the only one who hadn’t broken stride when I arrived and was still regaling Luke with stories of his friends at school, who by the sound of things were very excited about trading some sort of little trinket tied into his favorite TV show. Luke listened to him intently, smiling with a gentleness that I hadn’t seen in any of his pictures, and I felt like I was witnessing something private, something no one outside this family was generally privy too.
To my great surprise, Luke carried on his conversation with the woman and the little boy as though I wasn’t even there, hardly glancing up at me.
“I’ve told you I’m doing my best to get along with him,” Luke said. “But I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
“What about forgiveness?” The elegant woman asked, looking all the more put-together for her simmering anger.
“What about it?”
“He’s family.”
“He’s your family, Sarah, and only mine by extension. I’ll thank you to remember that the next time you come in here to try to guilt me into something.”
“I’m not trying to guilt you into anything! I just asked you to come to dinner, to just spend a bit more time with us outside of work.”
“Yes, you are; you just did it again.”
I was painfully aware that this was not a conversation I was meant to overhear, no matter how calmly Luke spoke, or how lovingly he tousled the little boy’s hair while he did it. This was a family dispute, and a messy one by the sound of things. I crossed the carpet to the three of them with my face burning. Was this some sort of punishment for interrupting? Or did Luke really care so little about a coffee-serving intern that he didn’t see a reason to pause his conversation?
I was immensely grateful that there were no saucers or pot to fumble in this situation, and that “serving” coffee meant just setting Luke’s to-go cup down where he indicated he wanted it. He glanced over to me only for a moment as he reached out to take it.
