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Again, he was sitting at his large industrial desk, typing away on his computer keyboard. When he looked up at her, her heart skipped a beat and her insides warmed a bit, which was …weird and completely inappropriate, Sadie. God.
He was wearing a blue dress shirt that stretched across his lean, muscular frame. A couple locks of dark hair fell over his smooth forehead. His eyes looked tired under his dark-framed glasses, but he gave her a small, tight smile in greeting that stretched the slight divot in his chin.
She’d always noticed that dimple and had thought it was cute. Her insides warmed as she returned his smile and more fully pushed the door open.
He kinda looks like Clark Kent, she thought distractedly as he looked up at her expectantly.
“Come on in, Ms. Sullivan,” he said politely, pushing away from his computer and motioning to the chairs in front of his desk.
Rushing into the room, Sadie dumped her bags on the ground next to his desk and settled down into one of the chairs. It was dark outside, and with the bright florescent lights of his office burning, the tall windows that spread across one wall of the office looked like mirrors reflecting everything they did.
Looking away from their reflections, Sadie spread her most charming smile across her face and pushed it with all her might in Liam’s stiff, unmoving direction.
I will win all these people over, she recited to herself.Starting with this grumpy boss.
“I hear you’re going to Thanksgiving at Annie’s tomorrow?” She said the words much too brightly and cursed the way she could feel her head bobbing. She was using her teacher's voice on him, too, talking to him like he was a six-year-old.
“Yeah,” he replied, eyeing her warily. “She invited me. You’re going to be there, too?” There was a foreboding sense of dread in his voice, as if he already knew the answer to that question and wasnothappy about it.Well, that’s not very encouraging.
“Yep,” Sadie said with a pop of her lips, hoping it didn’t give anything away. “I’m making pumpkin pie … or some variation thereof. I like to experiment when I bake.”
“Great…” he said distractedly, his eyes shifting all over the room but refusing to land on her face. Sadie was sure his mind was racing as he tried to figure out a way to avoid sharing a meal with her.
An awkward silence followed as he stared just past her right earlobe. Sadie even looked behind her to see what he could be looking at. Turning back toward him, her eyes locked with his behind his dark glasses. At the contact, he looked down at his desk and continued giving her absolutely nothing, so she pulled her face into a weak smile and gave it another go.
“So, the play,” she said, holding her hands up in the air. “I was thinking we could have small groups of kids do a little spiel about different holidays going on around this time of the year: Christmas, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanzaa, and so forth.”
Some of the awkwardness dissipated a bit as Liam perked up at her words, nodding his head and actually looking at her face. It looked like the cogs in his mind were working their way towards something, and Sadie felt encouragement blossom inside of her.
“You know,” he said, holding up his hand. “I think I know what might help with something like that.”
Rising from his swiveling desk chair, he walked over to a tall gray filing cabinet on the same wall as his desk.
“Let me just take a dive into my trusty filing cabinet,” he said distractedly as he placed a hand on one of the drawers. “Unfortunately, in this school system, filing cabinets are still a thing.” He looked over at Sadie with a small, secretive smile and a twinkle in his eye, which she returned with an appreciative giggle.
Well, look at him making cheesy jokes.
Opening up the middle drawer of the filing cabinet, he reached into the back and pulled out a thick manilla folder stuffed with about three inches of paper. He walked over and dropped the folder down on his neat desk with a thud.
“Whatisthat?” Sadie asked with a shocked laugh, peering over at the folder without touching it.
“Official records,” he said, slapping his hand down on the heavy folder before he sank down in his chair. “These are the outlines of every play Christine put on for the past thirty years—she was a maniacal record keeper and dropped a whole drawer full of papers off at my office when she retired this summer. This isn’t even a fraction of it, unfortunately.” He paused for a beat, staring down at the folder before looking up at her, solemnly considering her. “This would have been incredibly helpful to you. I apologize for not sharing it sooner.”
“It’s okay,” she said, holding up a reassuring hand. She was willing to forgive anything now that he’d finally stopped scowling at her poor earlobe. “Do you think there’s anything good in there?”
“Well,” Liam replied, looking up at her with a smile. “There’s definitelysomethingin here, and when you told me your idea, I knew it sounded familiar.”
Opening the folder, Liam sifted through the colorful dividers separating chunks of papers until he found a green tab labeled1997.
“Here we go,” he said, pulling out a chunk of paper. “Christine put on the same play you described in 1997. I gave these a quick once over when she dropped them off and thankfully this one stuck out.”
“Oh,” Sadie said with a distracted frown. “I guess that means I should think of something new?”
“Absolutely not,” Liam replied with a smile. Now he had dimples in his cheeks to match the one on his chin, and Sadie felt her heart do that skipping thing again. “The students who acted in this play are probably some of our parents now. I don’t see any reason why we can’t repeat past successes.”
A relieved smile spread over Sadie’s cheeks, and she felt her cheeks burn a bit as she reached out her hand for the folder. “Can I take a look?”
The next hour passed swiftly as Sadie huddled over the outline with Liam, making notes and planning their version of Christine’s 1997 “Holidays Around the World” play. True, it wouldnotbe up to the same caliber of production quality that the community was used to. It would besomething, though, which was as much as Sadie could really expect at this point.
