Page 37 of Little Miss Fortune

‘See, you just needed to put yourself out there for a bit of luck.’ Leon winks and bumps me with his hip.

Yeah. Luck. This is what that feeling is—complete and utter luck.

CHAPTER 12

Say hello to my work friend, Malik

Avoiding someone in an office with glass walls is a lot harder than one could imagine. Toby is easy to spot, but his height also makes it easy for him to spot me. I have used the I-need-the-toilet move twice in the last hour, which convinced Fawzia that I have a UTI.

‘My sister is an oncology nurse, so I know about the dangers of a seemingly small thing like a UTI, which needs to be taken more seriously. If you need to take the day off, just let me know.’

She is so kind. I can’t just leave over a fake infection I do not have (if I did, it would invite an actual infection due to my luck condition), just because I am trying to avoid my supervisor that I danced with last week.

I have also been short in my replies to both Leon and Sashka—I am too worried that they will see right through me. See my weird, weird feelings. Can I even call them that? I guess I have to. The best way to deal with my feelings is to avoid them and bury them under work.

I was given a work phone earlier today and have set up alerts on it to track the mentions of our celebrity, whose name I still don’t recall. The public perception is changing, thanks to Fawzia’s comms plan, but every now and again, a malicious meme sneaks through, and that means I need to log it.

‘You’ve spelt spinster wrong.’ A voice caresses my ear, making me jump and fall off the chair.

I was so absorbed in my work that I didn’t hear or see him coming. The office is staring at me as I slowly get up from the ground, ignoring Toby’s hand.

‘Why are you sitting here? I saved you a seat.’

‘Needed a change of scenery.’ That and I am avoiding you.

Not only did he hurt my feelings, but also I dislike how I felt after dancing. It’s wrong to have any physical reaction to your best friend’s almost boyfriend (and your supervisor!). They haven’t made it official, but despite that, they are pretty taken with each other.

Now that he is in front of me, he looks nice, a white formal shirt and dressy black trousers. I must have raised my eyebrow at the outfit, because he explains, ‘Opera is tonight.’

Ah. Of course. The big romantic evening. I think he is going to ask me to be his girlfriend tonight was the text from Sashka that flashed on my screen earlier today.

The office returns to their business, but I see people throwing glances at us from the corner of my eye.

‘Have you taken your lunch break yet?’ Toby asks; there is something strange in his voice, in the way his eyes look at me.

They are so disarming, his eyes, that I forget to lie. ‘Not yet.’

‘Let’s go. It’s on me.’

He locks my laptop and slides it into my bag, carrying it on the opposite shoulder to his.

There is a lovely Italian place not too far from the office. It is set up like a cafeteria or really more like Subway, where you can pick your own pasta, pasta sauce, and extra toppings like bacon, parmesan, olives. It’s usually packed, so people from the office get takeaway from here. However, when Toby walks in, two people stand and leave the table next to the window. He plops our bags down and turns to me.

‘What do you want?’

My normal order is a spag bol, but I don’t want him to know that. ‘You choose. I am not picky.’

I really am not picky; just look at John.

Toby returns with two plates of spaghetti bolognese. ‘It’s the best thing they make.’

Sashka said that his favourite was the puttanesca though, and afterward she made me sit down and watch a cooking video. The key was anchovies. ‘You could have gone for something you liked.’

‘I like more than one thing on the menu, Fuko,’ he says, and then sighs with annoyance. ‘Sorry, I feel like I keep saying and doing the wrong things around you. I didn’t mean to call you boring.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘It wasn’t. It was out of order. I just had something on that day and wasn’t really thinking.’