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Esther didn’t turn around. “Working on my battery charger.”
“No, you’re not. You’re staring into space and sighing a lot.”
“Am I?” She hadn’t realized she’d been sighing. “Sorry, I’ll try to sigh more quietly.”
“Why are you sighing at all?”
“I didn’t sleep well last night.” Like, pretty much not at all. She’d tossed and turned with anxiety the whole night, and now she was exhausted and she had a dehydration headache from crying yesterday.
“I thought you were going to send that to me today for stress testing.”
“I know. I am.” Esther tried to keep the irritation out of her voice and failed. Which only made her feel worse. Yemi didn’t deserve to be snapped at. He was only trying to help.
She reached for her headphones and put them on. Maybe it would be easier to concentrate on work if she was listening to music. She had a whole playlist of soothing, unobtrusive songs she liked to listen to when she was working and needed to shut out the distractions of the earthly plane.
Yemi kicked her chair, and she took off her headphones again. “What?” There she went, sounding irritated again. She turned around and forced a smile to make up for it.
“What time are we going to lunch?”
Shit. Lunch. Would Jinny be there? Would she be able to talk to her? Or would she skip lunch entirely to avoid confrontation?
No way to find out but show up and see what happened. “The usual, I guess. Noon.”
“Okay,” Yemi said. “That gives you two whole hours to finish those changes. Good luck.” From anyone else, she would have assumed it was sarcasm, but Yemi didn’t have a sarcastic bone in his body. If he wished you good luck, he meant it.
She could use all the good luck she could get at this point. She put her headphones back on and tried to focus.
Jinny wasn’t in the cafeteria when Esther and Yemi got there a little after noon. There wasn’t any sign of her by the time they’d gone through the line and sat down with their food either.
“Where’s Jinny?” Yemi asked after five more minutes had passed with no sign of her.
“Avoiding me.” Esther stabbed half-heartedly at her Chinese chicken salad. She didn’t have any appetite today. Everything tasted like wet paper in her mouth.
Yemi’s brow furrowed over his glasses. “Why?”
“She’s mad at me.”
“What did you do?”
Of course he’d assume it was all Esther’s fault. Which it was, but that wasn’t the point.
She scowled. “I don’t want to talk about it. I did something stupid and now she’s not talking to me. Let’s just leave it at that.”
“You should apologize.” So much for not talking about it.
“I did.”
“You should apologize again. You should keep apologizing until she stops being mad.”
Esther set down her fork and reached for her Mountain Dew. She didn’t usually indulge in this much caffeine, but today she needed it. She twisted the cap off the bottle and swallowed a mouthful, grimacing at the sweetness. “Doesn’t that just make people more mad, if they want you to leave them alone and you don’t?”
She’d been trying to decide whether to go to knitting that night. She almost never missed knitting; it was one of the highlights of her week. But Jinny might be there, and Esther wasn’t eager to rehash their fight in front of everyone. The others would almost definitely take Jinny’s side. She could already imagine the looks on their faces when they heard what Esther had done. The judgment. She couldn’t face that right now, on top of everything else.
Yemi tilted his head. “Sometimes. It depends if they really want you to leave them alone or if they’re just saying that because they want you to work to win them back.”
“How do you know which is which?”
“I couldn’t tell you that.” He shrugged. “I tend to get it wrong a lot.”
