Page 31 of I Accidentally Hired a Shadow Walker
“You’re no help,” I fussed, and Kaa lifted her head, rolled her eyes, then slithered back over to her pot. “I didn’t mean to upset you!”
She would stay there for at least two days before she let me see her again. Sensitive little thing.
I finished making the tea and grabbed the bowl of fruit from the fridge before returning to the table. While I nibbled on the fruit and sipped my tea, I worked on all the things that needed to be handled—responding to emails, filing official reports for two other work sites, and confirming four meeting requests, including one with Von. It was the first of what would be many progress reports. I wished I didn’t have to report an attempted robbery, but at least they would know we were on top of our game and earning our coin.
After responding to Von’s message, which had included an inquiry about Raymond, I realized I hadn’t heard from him. Not a text, call, or even an annoying email. The man had been quiet.
“Maybe he regrets it as much as I do,” I muttered wishfully as I closed my laptop and headed for the bathroom. Though I would have preferred to hide away for the day, I needed to go to the office.
During the first hour, I was too busy to be concerned with Raymond. During the next three, thoughts of him would creep up then quickly fade away. Five hours into my day, I became annoyed.Where the hell was he?No, I didn’t want anything more from him, but how dare he not at least text to make sure I was okay?
“Just like every other man,” I huffed as I flipped through the papers on my desk.
“Who is?” Natalie stood in front of me.
“Shit!” I hadn’t heard her come in, and her voice had me jumping out of my skin. “Please don’t do that.”
“I knocked.” She pointed back at the door. “You’ve been really distracted today. You even made a mistake in the inventory calculation here.” She slipped the document over to me on the desk.
“I did?”
“That’s at least double what we need.” She pointed to the total on the page. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I guess I am a little distracted.” I leaned back in my seat. “Last night…”
“The incident at the studio?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I recovered. I’d almost slipped and told her about Raymond. I glanced at the couch beneath the window, which I had conveniently buried in random items throughout the day.
“Do you want me to clean that up?” Natalie followed my gaze.
“Oh, no.” I waved her off. “I’ll handle it. It’s getting late. You should get going. I’ll correct the inventory report myself.”
“You know I can do a lot of this stuff.” Natalie paused then quickly blurted out, “It’s what you pay me for.”
“Yeah.” I understood her hesitation. She didn’t want to feel like she was overstepping. “I promise to hand a lot more over to you soon.”
“Okay.” She chewed her lip, as if considering saying something else, but she didn’t.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yep. I’ll head home now.” Natalie turned and ran from my office.
“That was weird.” I looked at the door for a moment before returning to the work in front of me.
After another two hours of working without accomplishing much, I gave up. The entire time, I could only think of what both Natalie and Raymond had already said to me. Why was I spending so much of my time doing things I should have offloaded to Natalie already? She was more than capable, but there was something in me that refused to give up the work, some fear that everything would be ruined or worse—taken from me. What I needed was time to journal and work out my feelings. So, I cleaned up the couch, put away the documents, and headed out.
As I stepped out of my office into the waiting room, my thoughts shifted from giving up control to keeping control of myself.
“Did you have enough time?” Raymond spoke as he stood from the chair by the front door. I hadn’t realized he was there, and his presence caught me off guard. Exactly what he wanted, I was sure.
“Enough time for what?” I held back all expressions of how annoyed I’d been about him not reaching out to me.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t notice my absence.” He plastered on the fakest pout I’d ever seen. The expression looked painful on his face. “Here I was, thinking I would give you space to process what happened, and you weren’t even thinking about me?”
“Sorry to hurt your feelings.” I played it cool.
“I’ll survive this like I have so many other hurts in the past.” He walked over to me. “Nevertheless, I had to see you again.”
