Page 32 of Wassailing We Will Go
Steven is…your cat, yes?
Yes. A cat I found in a Toronto alleyway that I initially thought was a raccoon, I explain. He followed me for a very long while before I gave up and brought him home. Are you alright with cats?
I like them fine, but they never like me, he says. I mean, they don’t dislike me, either. I lived with a roommate for two years, and in that entire time, I don’t think their tabby ever made direct eye contact with me.
I’d love to tell you that Steven would be different, but he’d likely be jealous and weird about you.
Such is my fate.
Thanks for the fries, I say. And for everything. I’ll see you tomorrow…as Boss Kate.
I do like Boss Kate, he says. She gets things done.
I sigh. She sure does.
Is…Boss Kate in the car with us now?
I look over at him, and he’s got a hopeful, sly little smile.
Not presently. I move away from the door and closer to him. Our cheeks are warm and rosy from being outside, and I feel like a giddy teenager. It’s an absurd setting for a first kiss: he’s in his ridiculous coat, and we’re parked on the side of a street in the most ridiculous vehicle, but I decide then and there that I will not let this go the same way as the sauna. So when his gloved hand softly lifts my chin, I close the distance.
If he’s surprised, he takes it in stride, and his other hand gently wraps in my snow-dampened hair. He kisses me softly, and I’m suddenly glad it didn’t work out back in the sauna. Would it have been sexy? Absolutely. But it would have happened too much, too fast, and risked feeling like a mistake afterward. This feels exactly right. For a few moments, I have absolutely lost sight of where I am and anything that exists outside the confines of the purple PT Cruiser, and when we break away, I’m startled to remember that people exist outside, and the radio is still playing, and the full-blast heaters are, in fact, responsible for the car being a thousand degrees, not just the kiss.
Steven is going to hate you, I whisper. But you’ll have to come over sometime to find out for sure. After this workweek, I add.
I look forward to giving Steven some friendly competition, he says. After the workweek.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I DON’T USUALLY DREAD WAKING up and going to work. Even at my old corporate job, I was never the I-hate-Mondays, TGIF type. I like problem solving, and I’ve always been lucky enough to work in roles that challenged me.
But that’s not how I feel this morning. I want to sleep in, and be lazy, and daydream about making out with hot dudes, and drink some hot chocolate, and…honestly, what is actually wrong with me?
After hitting snooze twice, which is another thing I never do, I go and shower and try and get my head in the game. Boss Kate time, I have to keep reminding myself as I drink my boss coffee and eat my boss croissant and dress for the day ahead.
By the time I pull into Sparks Cidery, my mental transformation is nearly complete. Nearly. Thankfully, Harrison is over in the tank room, and I head over to the office, and as soon as I enter, the switch is flipped. Wendy, Daniel, Chef Melanie, and I all gather to go over our plan of attack for the week, and we’re all hopefully optimistic about the numbers going into the week.
They are receptive to my comments regarding the bitter&sweet SoupGate situation, and thankfully, they all seem to have cooled off over their last two days off anyway. We all go in peace in the knowledge that everyone can have their tiny soups, because ours is probably loads better.
We break off into our respective departments, and the day goes on like any other Wednesday, and I can almost forget that there’s an insanely attractive Australian man about a hundred meters away that I could probably go make out with right now if I wanted to, if I were way less responsible of a human being and much more reckless in my concern about workplace propriety.
I shake myself out of it. The first weekend of Wassail awaits.
THE REST OF WEDNESDAY AND Thursday are busy, but not overwhelming. The Wednesday open mic night is decent enough for a weekday in late November, and the second weekend of Thursday karaoke is fair. Not as busy as the opening night, but a respectable turnout, nonetheless. Harrison did a great job hosting again, and his new best friend, Jeremy, and his date did a duet of Don’t Stop Believin’ that, despite the obvious cliché, was met with raucous applause. We have since been told that there would be a third date. Sparks Cidery karaoke night, the place for romance.
I continue to do a spectacular job of compartmentalization…most of the time. As we had discussed, when I run into Harrison on-site, we keep our conversations largely focused on cider and cidery business nearly exclusively. I am impressed by his commitment to the arrangement. Externally, we are platonic colleagues who respect each other’s professional skill sets.
Internally, I am fighting a war on a barrage of intrusive thoughts. For instance, when I went to visit the tank room to see how the bottling was going for the seasonal cranberry orange cider that is being released as a limited run exclusively for Wassail. It smelled amazing in there, all tangy citrus and tart cranberry juice mixing with the apple as the end product was bottled and then labelled with their very cute little seasonal labels. I caught myself watching Harrison perform various feats of manual labour for quite a while before I announced my presence and stopped being a weirdo. But even as Harrison was explaining to me a minor challenge with the bottling process that morning and the workaround he and Charlie had come up with to fix it, something I should have been paying rapt attention to, I had to keep bringing myself back to the conversation from the many different directions my brain desperately wanted to go instead.
One was that in the warmth of the tank room, Harrison was wearing the Sparks Cidery T-shirt without his usual five additional layers, and it suited him just a little too well. Our main brand colours are a dark forest green with the gold star-apple seed motif accent, and Harrison, all tanned with his gold hair and green eyes, looks like an actual poster boy for the cidery, and after seeing this, I truly believe he should obviously live here forever and only wear our green shirts for the rest of eternity and never consider living anywhere else, ever.
The other problem is that the reality of compartmentalization is much more difficult when Harrison is standing a foot away from my face and still looks and smells like Harrison, the date I recently made out with in a car, even while he’s there being Harrison, the tremendously competent employee performing very important work tasks. I try to spend more time working in the office after that.
Still, we make it to the weekend as valued coworkers only. On Friday morning, I sip my coffee and wait for the other department heads to show up so we can have our morning huddle before the busy day begins. However, 10:00 a.m. comes and goes.
And then the texts start pouring in.
Wendy’s is discreet: she mentions not feeling well and not being able to leave her house for very long periods at a time.
