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Jonah
“No.”
This is how I go, suffocated by overpriced gray wool. Looking like a fucking asshole. My mom won’t even recognize me when she comes to identify my body. Then she’ll be likeoh, I’m so glad you finally decided to look professional for onceand I won’t say anything back because I’ll be dead.
The door behind me rattles. I may have locked my boss out of his own walk-in. It wasn’t the best move, but I panicked. It’s going to be the first time Gray laughs at me, realizes I could never live up togoodandperfect, and I think I’d rather keep my ass in the closet forever. In every sense of the word.
“Is there something wrong with it?” he asks through the door. I can’t tell how pissed he is yet, how close I am to some kind of punishment—a thought which immediately makes me hard because I have problems.
“Yeah.” I look away from the full-length mirror against the wall. I’m sick of my own face. I should have stayed in the park with Cooper the fountain and eaten out of a McDonald’s dumpster.
“Is thereactuallysomething wrong with it or are you just being difficult?”
Leaning back against the door, his voice right on the other side of it, I close my eyes. “Please can I just wear my old clothes?”
“Absolutely not. Open the door.”
I flip the latch and step out of the way as he comes in and examines me, arms crossed, face completely blank.
“I look stupid.”
“That’s because you’re not fucking wearing it right.” He straightens the shoulders of the jacket with a sharp tug, arranges my right cuff. The left sleeve ends just below the elbow in a subtle seam that doesn’t make everything look lopsided. It’s the only part of the outfit I don’t hate.
I stare at Gray’s powerful neck as he unties my narrow, black tie, which I spent a lot of time on, and redoes it into the same style as his, with a million extra fussy loops and flourishes in the knot. Turning me to face the mirror, he digs a knuckle between my shoulder blades.
“Ow.”
“Stand up straight and look at yourself.”
Squaring my shoulders, I glance at the mirror. “Cool. Can we go?” He doesn’t move.
“Look at yourself and tell me you look good.”
“You can’t make me say things, even if you’re my boss.”
His hand slides from my shoulder to my shirtfront, fingers splayed firmly against my chest, pulling me back against him just a little. “Tell me you look good.”
I don’t like to say things without meaning them, so I study myself more carefully. I’ve never had a piece of clothing made just for me by a kind of scary man with lots of scissors and tape measures who clearly thought I was a pain in the ass when I fidgeted too much. “I look… I don’t know. I look like someone else.”
“You’ll get used to it. This is my standard, as long as you’re working for me.” He turns me around and tugs the absurdly complicated knot at my throat. “Please learn how to tie this style yourself by tomorrow morning.”
“Seriously?” I call after him as he strides away. “Did you notice I only have one hand?”
“I don’t think that has ever stopped you before.” Fucking smartass.
The fucking smartass seems to enjoy how embarrassed I feel walking down the street looking like this, how the suit makes me walk all stiff and it feels like everyone’s staring at me. I have no idea how he seems so comfortable and effortless all the time. I take my jacket off as soon as we reach the office; he gives me an irritated look, but keeps his opinion to himself.
I set Gray’s daily lobby coffee on his desk. Today I put in less cream and he made a less offended face when he tasted it.
“I need to transcribe some voice notes,” Gray says, glancing around the room like he’s hoping to discover something useful for me to do. I’ve never met someone who needed an intern less than this man; his life functions like one of those perfectly tuned Rube Goldberg machines where every single mechanism is just Gray again.
“Let me do it. I’m good at typing.”
His expression makes me laugh. He wants so badly to ask how someone with one hand can type, but he doesn’t want to be rude. My middle school sent a note home to my parents excusing me from mandatory typing class, but I hid the note and practiced until I could type as fast as I could think. It felt like I was hacking my brain, bypassing the parts that didn’t work and replacing them with muscle memory. “I might not spell everything right, though.”
He seems relieved as he leans over and switches on his computer monitor, starts clicking through programs. “That’s fine; they’re just for my personal use. I have gigabytes of recordings, if you enjoy that sort of work.”
“Point me in the right direction, and I’ll—” I turn around from digging in my bag when I hear his coffee cup tip over. Instead of picking it up, he just sits there, staring at the dark liquid pooling across his desk and dripping off the edge onto the carpet.
