Page 20 of The Boardroom: Jonathan
Samantha smiled, clicked her pen, and kept writing.
The work went faster than I would have expected it to. We had spent so much time earlier that day doing nearly the exact same thing, just with the aid of computers and a different set of numbers. Samantha and I talked as we worked to suppress our anxiety and boredom, and I liked listening to her stories and seeing her eyes light up with interest as I told mine. The exhaustion and chaos of the day had loosened Samantha up—her stories had a different quality to them now. They ranged from silly to self-deprecating, and I loved every word of them. She talked about her elementary school T-ball team and the cartoons she never missed as a kid, or all the times she had to pick up her drunk sister from parties. She told me her favorite crayon color and the cocktail she liked to order only when she was sad. I worked along, happy to see her opening up so beautifully, and I shared my stories in return. After the hell we had been through that day, we had silently both agreed that there was no going back: we were friends now, whether either of us liked it or not.
The clock ticked along as we worked, the metronome that kept our stories in rhythm, and we worked until our hands cramped up and our brains fogged. But as the minutes passed, a thought kept sneaking through my mind, unannounced:
You know, this really isn’t half bad…
***
“There!” Samantha said, shrieking with joyful laughter. “That’s about all we can do without power.”
I grinned, filled with the kind of joy you only feel after such a condensed period of stress. “I cannot believe we pulled that off.”
“Eh, not quite yet,” Samantha said. “Hopefully if the power’s back tomorrow we can get all the reports typed up and get the graphs all digitized and nice looking…” she kicked her heels across the room triumphantly. “We can just use the format of the one we messed up earlier. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then we’re gold.”
“Oh, thank god,” I groaned, and spun my chair around in circles in a way the CEO is probably never supposed to do. “Hold on,” I said, getting up and running into my office. I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found it: my emergency stash.
I returned with a sneaky grin on my face and walked up to Samantha in her chair, who was already looking at me with suspicion. “Whiskey?” I said, smirking at her with delight.
“Jesus, I should have known,” Samantha said, grabbing the bottle from me and taking a swig. “You were definitely the handsome guy in high school who talked everyone into all their bad ideas.”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
Samantha handed me the bottle back and I took a large drink myself. The office was another world tonight, a different place. It was dark and glowing with a different energy that followed different laws. It would have been a strange sight to our employees to see their bosses so friendly and so relaxed. The two of us spun in office chairs in the middle of the room, laughing. Laughing because the grand scheme of our negotiations didn’t matter today. We were both thrown onto the same sinking ship, so for now staying afloat was all that mattered.
There was a lingering question in the air that neither of us dared to speak aloud just yet…what now? Last time I checked, the snow had piled up as much as had been predicted, and the whole city had gone dark. Samantha and I both lived in hill-covered suburbs outside the city, so getting home would be a dangerous affair for either of us. We could be stuck here for days…and I took another sip of whiskey each time the reality dawned on me again.
Samantha was deep into a story about a time one of her friends walked into the wrong apartment, and I felt bad about it, but under the haze of the whiskey I could barely concentrate. I just stared at her talking. I liked the way her eyes lit up and how she laughed melodiously at all the funny parts. I didn’t even realize until the whiskey started to run through my veins just how much I had tried to resist this…how much I had taken any hint of a feeling I had started to develop and crushed it under my foot before I could recognize it.
There was a possibility I was falling for her.
Okay, okay. I think I was.
IknewI was.
“So, by then,” Samantha continued, and I jumped to a start as I woke up out of my haze. “Rosie had sat down on the couch and noticed that there was this really advanced math textbook on the table, and she knew that Jared was completely inept at that sort of thing, so she—”
“Samantha.”
She looked up, her cheeks warm and flush from the whiskey, and stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I hadn’t planned on saying anything, I realized. I just had an urge to say her name aloud.
“Yes?” she asked, and I nearly lost my breath as she took the topaz clip out of her hair and I watched dark brown waves cascade over her shoulder.
“Let’s dance,” I said impulsively.
Samantha burst out laughing. “How drunk are you, Johnathan? Besides, there’s no music anyways.”
“Never fear!” I said, mocking the voice of a cartoon superhero, as I stumbled out of my chair and ran into Sabryna’s supply closet. “Battery radio,” I said grinning, holding up the clunky box like a trophy.
“Aren’t you clever,” Samantha said sarcastically, with a wry smile lighting up her face. Even as I fumbled with the controls and tried to find a radio station that wasn’t exclusively snow coverage or polka, she looked completely unconvinced that I would ever actually get around to taking her hand and getting her to join me. She simply spun around in lazy circles in the office chair, her head hanging back from the whiskey, the exhaustion, or perhaps pure amusement at my battle with the radio.
I finally found a station that came in clearly enough, and an old ballad played, filled with the sultry melancholy of trombones and the gentle, scratching softness of songs that have only survived through old records.
“Come on,” I said, swaggering up to her chair with a mischievous smile on my face. “I dare you.” I held out my hand to her, waiting with a nervous lump in my throat as she simply stared at it, contemplating.
Samantha smirked and put her hand in mine, and I pulled her out of the chair and suddenly into my arms.
“Scared?” I asked, giving her a teasing smile.
