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God, I swear I’m like that kid who can never remembernotto touch a hot stove because the pretty colors of fire are just so alluring.
Tossing my bag over my shoulder is followed by exiting my secure office for the elevators at the opposite end of the hall. Melisent Consuelos, the nightguard that works my executive floor over the weekend, offers me a respectful nod during her passing that I politely return.
Contrary, to her smaller build the woman is a weapon of mass destruction. She moonlights as a stunt double for action films, and once parkoured her way to the lobby to takedown an employee who was trying to steal office supplies. To this day, I can still remember watching the footage with Slater when he swung by to bring me lunch. We shared an order of shrimp fried rice – of course by share I mean I ate the shrimp while he ate the rice – and gawked at my computer screen in tandem, equally mesmerized by the scene. He spent the next ten minutes explaining to me why size isn’t everything – even in the security field – and then the next twenty recalling female soldiers who put many men he had come across to shame.
I also learned how many of those women he slept with.
And how many had slept with each other.
Interestingly enough sex has always been a rather easy topic with him.
Actually…everythingis an easy topic with him.
Everything except confessing the whole secretly in love with him bit.
That one has never quite managed to get discussed over hockey reels or takeout.
Everything else?
Without a single doubt.
From the moment we met on the elevator – where we then got trapped together for three hours – talking to one another has always been the most natural thing.
Again.
Except for confessing that I wish he would’ve just asked me out that day rather than where my office was to chat in the future.
I’m pretty fluent in rejection – call it the gift with no receipt courtesy of being uncomfortably awkward in social situations since the age of four when I realized not everyone saw the alphabet the same way I did – so I knew his choice of phrasing that day wasn’t a flirty attempt to ask me on a date in the future.
AndobviouslyI was right since it’s never happened in our six years of friendship.
On my way down to the main floor, I anxiously check my cell, once more wishing to be wrong about Harv.
Hell, I’dloveto be wrong.
I’d love for him to already be waiting in the lobby, ask me what took so long, and then hold my hand while walking me to my car underneath the moonlight with sounds of Evanescence playing in the background.
The elevator doors loudly ding as if thumping me in the forehead to get my shit together.
There’s no way in hell that scenario is happening, much like Slater standing on my townhouse porch, in the soaking rain, telling me some 80s movie cliché like “it’s always been you”.
Ugh.
Sometimes I hate how much I love those movies, although I primarily blame my condition for it.
See, they start speaking and rainbows of colors just burst through the air and flutter downward, entrancing me.
Hypnotizing me.
Imprisoning me in warmth until I’m paralyzed by passion.
The same thing happens to me with certain music.
Sometimes those colors lift me to my feet and spin me in circles that leave me breathless and grinning like a lunatic.
Which is the real reason why I’m usually gasping for air when people randomly knock on my office door, not because I was trying to squeeze in a Pilates workout on my lunch hour.
“Evening, Miss Carmichael,” Valentine Yi, the guard patrolling the lobby, pleasantly greets.
