Page 23 of Santa Baby Maybe
Then an idea struck. “I know what I can do to add to his Blind Date ornament. He’ll love it.”
“Look at you,” Sophie laughed. “You’re beaming. You are soooo into him.”
I frowned and glared at her. I wasn’t into W.B.
I just liked him more than I thought I would and it was surprising. I liked talking to him. And now that he didn’t seem to be avoiding me anymore, I had the impression that he liked talking to me too.
Was it possible that we were moving beyond being colleagues into friendship? Was it possible for someone like W.B. and me to evenbefriends? He’d seemed so utterly closed-minded when it came to me. But when he pushed through all his preconceptions about me, I think he started to see me as a person and not one ofthose sorts.
Why that was important to me, I wasn’t sure, but it was.
* * *
I wasat his office door the next morning. It was open this time so I paused before knocking and gaining his attention. He looked as he always looked when staring at his computer screen, like he was perturbed about something. For someone who’d been a finance major in college, which he must have been to land a job like this, he really didn’t appear to like numbers very much.
“Do you like your work?” I asked and clearly startled him by announcing my presence so suddenly. I walked further into his office and this time took the seat across from his desk. I set the box of ornaments I’d brought carefully in front of him.
“Joy, you scared the shit out of me. I didn’t hear you at all.”
“You were too busy frowning at your computer,” I told him.
He immediately locked it so I couldn’t see what he was working on. “It’s my job to frown at the numbers, until they give me a reason to smile.”
“I thought we were doing okay. At our last weekly meeting you said we were showing real progress. Wasn’t that true?”
“Of course it was true,” he huffed. “That’s another thing numbers don’t do. They don’t lie. They don’t spin. They don’t hedge the truth. They are always real and true and solid.”
I smiled. “You do like your job.”
He glanced at me with a confused expression, but then he seemed to give it some thought.
“I, yeah, I do. I really like my job,” he said, as if he was discovering that fact for the first time.
“Why do you sound surprised?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess, I never really thought about it. I studied finance because it was a means to an end. That end being money.”
“Figures.”
“Yes, sue me. I was a poor kid who wanted money. I’m sure to you that means selling out my soul or something. To me it means a luxury condo, an Audi, and never going hungry again.”
That squeezed my heart. “You were hungry?”
It was as if he hadn’t realized what he’d said, because he immediately looked for a way to change the subject.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the box on his desk.
“More ornaments.”
He nodded slowly. “I figured you were responsible for my office tree.”
“Guilty.” I turned to look at it, and saw the Blind Date already hanging from a branch. For some reason that made me happier than it should. I turned back to him. “But you’re going to need more than one ornament so I brought you a few. I happened to have extra at home so I figured you could use them. Again to represent something you’re seeking out. While also being office appropriate.”
He eyed the box suspiciously.
“Trust me. You’ll like them.” I stood and lifted the top of the box off the bottom, dug inside for what I knew was there, and pulled out the first ornament. Then placed it on his desk.
“A bride,” I announced.
