Page 18 of Lovely War
But I’m itching to get back to my computer. It needs to be better than great. It needs to capture the way things feel right now: the team starting on a hot streak, the air in the arena vibrating with promise. I want to keep cranking up our follower count. I want to remind Coach Thomas why he hired me. I want the people in the finance office to get the message that they need to slow down, wait to make any final decisions, because big things are happening here.
Taylor and Jess stop in front of the stairwell. “Same time next week?” Taylor asks.
“Yes,” I say quickly, already looking forward to it. As a rule, I try to avoid real friendship with coworkers. But a weekly coffee break is harmless, and other than Eric and Cassie, all my friends and family are back in New Jersey. My social life has been dead since I got here.
I could try dating, but I don’t have the energy for my usual diet of uninspiring three-month relationships and mediocre hookups. It’s been a long time since my last breakup with Oliver, but I still feel like I need to ascend to the next plane of adulthood before I’m ready for something serious, and I have no clue how to get there.
Taylor and Jess head to the court, and I climb the stairs to the office. When I turn down the corridor, a familiar dark-haired jerk with a tragically well-sculpted ass hovers suspiciously at the other end, wearing yet another uninspired half-zip. When he sees me coming, he darts back into his office and slams the door.
He was standing near the thermostat.
“No fucking way,” I growl.
I should’ve known. My office is freezing. I learned quickly to wear layers and keep a blanket on the back of my chair. Earlier in the week I tried bringing in a space heater, but Donna sent it packing—something about the fire inspector. I adjust the temperature several times a day but still have a tab on my browser open to an Amazon search for fingerless gloves.
Every time I turn the heat up, somebody else turns it back down. At first I thought it was a maintenance person. But of course it’s Ben. He’s the only one who sits as close to the thermostat as I do, and the only one irritated by my very presence in the building.
I check the temperature. Sixty-two degrees. “Son of abitch.”
He’s trying to refrigerate me into quitting. Well, the joke’s on him, because now I’m a seething volcano. I charge into the kitchen, fling open the fridge, and grab his string cheese. He brings one every day for his afternoon snack. Well, not today, mister. I don’t even peel it, just eat it in three bites like a monster.
We’ve mostly attempted to avoid each other in a way that looks effortless but requires a lot of choreography. One morning I pretended not to see him behind me as I walked into the building and let the door slam in his face. Another time he noticed me struggling to replace the water cooler in the kitchen and walked right past instead of offering to help.
He’s terrible at being mean, even when he wants to be, which is why when we’re face-to-face he mostly looks constipated. I don’t think anyone has noticed the tension, but whoknows what he’s saying behind my back? In a weak moment last week, I signed him up for a contest on a sketchy website, a chance to win a free trip to Antigua that undoubtedly doesn’t exist. It took only twenty-four hours for the scammers to sell his cell phone number to a million telemarketers.
I felt a twinge of guilt when I heard the incessant buzzing of his phone and his nonstop grumbling about it. And the string cheese incident is a little embarrassing. I should be focused on work, and I am about ninety-eight percent of the time. I make no excuses for the other two percent. There is a petty beast inside me, and sometimes she needs to let off steam.
That night, Ben is working late, as usual. I’ve been doing the same, needing the extra hours to experiment and fine-tune and perfect. I can’t see him, but it’s easy to tell what he’s doing after everyone else goes home and the building gets quiet.
Tonight, he’s mostly been sitting at his computer, typing. Occasionally a desk drawer opens and closes. The tip of his tongue is probably sticking out of the side of his mouth a little bit. It always happens when he’s concentrating deeply. It’s extremely dorky and not at all attractive, so I have to check to see if he’s doing it every time I walk past. Every so often a ball thwacks against the backboard of the miniature hoop on his door.
I tune him out when he takes a phone call, walking somebody through a calculus problem. If I remember correctly from college, he has a much younger sister.
My coffee date with Taylor and Jess has me thinking. I need to get out more, to take a break from fixating on my work problems. I curl up in my desk chair, sitting on onefoot and hugging the opposite knee, and pick up the phone to call my own sister.
“I’m at the end of a climb,” Kat says when she answers, panting heavily.
“Don’t slack off on my account,” I reply. “I’ll be quick.”
Kat spends a lot of time on her stationary bike. The athlete of the family, she played college basketball herself and still sticks to an intense workout regimen, on top of her job and her hobby posting hair tutorials online.
“You and Mom should visit tomorrow,” I say. “We can go shopping. And you should stay with me for the night after Mom leaves. You can take the train home.” When I was in college, we went to the King of Prussia Mall every time Mom and Kat visited.
She’s only listening halfway, and her voice is strained as she huffs out her words. “That…sounds like a lot of public transportation…just to spend a night sitting…on…your…couch.”
I straighten a row of pens on my desk. “What if we go out?”
Kat releases a big breath and her voice regulates, climb complete. “Out, out? Like to a bar, at night?” Now she’s paying attention.
“Sure.”
“You never want to go out with me.”
“I never had to go out with you when we lived together because you brought a bar’s worth of people to our apartment. Now I live by myself. I’m bored all the time.”
“Are you depressed?”
“No. Come on, it’ll be fun. I’ll buy you a cheesesteak on the way home.”
