Page 38 of Hard to Forgive

I just found an entire pack of circus themed rubber ducks. There are clowns.

Matt

Do not test me.

Jonas

Fine…

After lunch, with Matt’s threat hanging over my head, I manned up.

“So, how long have you and Isabel known each other?” Okay, so manning up was small talk, but it was a start. Matt would be proud, and he wouldn’t hide clown ducks all over my apartment.

Silas let out a small hum before looking up at me. His brow was furrowed, and he studied me like I was speaking another language. Maybe I had been. Maybe I’d started speaking Klingon, which would be a problem as I didn’t know Klingon.

He recovered quickly and assured me, without so many words, that I was in fact speaking English. “We met the first day,” he answered.

“The first day of what?”

The look he shot me made it clear that it should have been obvious. “Of being on the team.” His voice was dry, and I could hear the undertones.

Idiot.

My heart began to pound, and my palms grew sweaty. I could feel it rising, that familiar tide of anxiety that was my near constant companion. I fidgeted with the pencil in my hand, trying to focus on the texture of the smooth wood under my fingers instead of the rise of emotions in my chest.

The wave began to ebb.

The fog at the edges of my vision began to recede.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I answered, too quickly to be honest, but I wasn’t going to open up about my anxiety to Silas. I was trying to be civil to him, under threat of rubber clown ducks, but there was a line. I was not going to cross over it just because he noticed my internal struggle. Instead, I changed the subject back to him and Isabel. “You two act like you’ve known each other longer.”

“She’s easy to like.” His gray eyes narrowed. “You’d know that if you weren’t a dick to her.”

So he was still upset about that, huh? That made sense. I still hadn’t managed to get her alone to apologize. Every time I went within twenty feet of her, she stilled me with a withering glare, and I scampered off with my proverbial tail between my legs. It turned out that while she seemed really sweet, she could be scary.

Or maybe I was just a massive wimp. Either one could be true.

I didn’t say anything, and he kept looking at me. I squirmed under the weight of his eyes, because my mind was trying to travel back to seeing those eyes filled with passion, reflected back at me through the bathroom mirror. I absolutely could not go there. “Let’s get back to work.”

Those pale gray eyes of his filled with confusion, but he turned his computer screen around and showed me the latest mock up we’d been working on. “So this is what we’re thinking, right? Do you think it’s good to show Yvette?”

I reached over and angled his laptop toward me so I could see it better. “Almost,” I said after a few moments of studying the screen. “We talked about the logo being a little more right aligned so the menu can go on the left. You have it centered and it looks off balance.”

He nodded and made the change.

“Do you think we’re good to show Yvette now?”

I looked at it again before nodding.

We went to show it to Yvette together. I could feel Isabel watching us as we crossed to where our project manager sat, reading through a thick paper document and marking it with a bright red pen. She didn’t look up as we approached, or even when we stood there. Not until Silas cleared his throat.

“What can I help you gentlemen with?” she asked, putting the thick stack of papers face down on her desk and resting her pen on it.

“We have the mock up to send the client,” Silas announced.

He passed the laptop to her and took a step back to study it. She took a few minutes, looking over it and reading the margin notes we’d put in. “I like it,” she stated simply. “But this is only the home page. Where is there rest of it?”

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