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He pulls his phone out of his pocket, navigates to something, and then holds it out for me. Reluctantly, with my hands shaking slightly, I take his phone and look at the screen. On it is the email from Fiona with the appointment, and sure enough, it says our meeting is five minutes from now.
That doesn’t make any sense. I checked the schedule repeatedly while waiting for him to show up, just to make sure I wasn’t crazy and he was late.
I turn to Fiona and show her the phone. “Can you make any sense out of this?”
“Let me see,” she says, her brows furrowing as she reads the email. “This isn’t right. Look, it’s on the schedule for 4:30.” She turns her laptop for both of us to see her calendar of appointments for today, showing the ‘correct’ time. “Maybe I accidentally typed the wrong time by mistake? I double-checked everyone’s email before I sent them, though, so I don’t know how this could have happened.”
It’s not like Fiona to make this kind of mistake. Sure, it’s an easy one to make, especially with the number of appointments she needed to schedule, but this is something she would have caught. Fiona is nothing if not a perfectionist. And from the doubt in her eyes, I don’t know what to think.
“Do you think this is something you could have overlooked somehow?” I ask, taking the phone back and handing it over to Cooper. I’ll need to deal with him shortly, but I need to figure this out first.
I can tell she’s still upset. Fiona does not like making mistakes. She launches in-depth investigations into what went wrong, where, and how to avoid repeating the same mistake. Sometimes, I think she does that to see if she really did make a mistake. And sometimes she’s right, and the fault is someone else’s. She has to check to give herself peace of mind.
“Wait a minute, let me see that again,” she says, tearing the phone away from Cooper.
“It’s a simple mistake, don’t worry about it. No harm, no foul,” he says, shoving his fists into the front pockets of his jeans, as earnest as the day is long.
Jesus. The forgiving side of Cooper is even more attractive than any other I’ve seen so far.
“No, no,” Fiona says, sitting at her desk and typing furiously on her keyboard. She stares at the screen for a long minute, scrolling on her mouse slowly and deliberately.
Cooper and I share a glance and a shrug, unsure of what we should be doing now. This seems like as good of a time as any to apologize, so I mouth the word ‘Sorry’ to him as I meet his eyes.
God damn, those eyes.
His lips twitch into a crooked smile that almost looks smug, but he controls it and gives a quick nod of his head as if he understands everything. Oh, if only he did.
I don’t know why, but suddenly, I think he would understand why I am the way I am. He would get it.
But, and this is the big obstacle, could he change it?
No. Too much has happened for me to change now. I don’t think anyone can pierce the barricade firmly set in place around my heart. Especially not someone like Cooper.
We stand here eyeing each other curiously, obvious ruminations happening in our brains about the other person but not vocalizing anything. It feels safe to do this openly with someone else in the room. Fiona is our buffer if we need one.
Cooper starts rubbing at the alluring scruff on his chin, the muscles of his bare forearms flexing with the movement. My eyes are magnetically drawn to the tattoos adorning his skin as they shapeshift with each stretch and contraction. It’s hypnotizing.
“A-ha! I knew it!” Fiona shouts as she bangs a fist on her desk, scaring the shit out of both of us. We jump at the sudden outburst, not ready for the interruption to our investigations of each other.
“What?” I ask. “What did you know?”
She motions us both to look at her screen, so we lean in, and Cooper lightly lays a hand on my back as he does. It takes every ounce of strength to control myself and not shudder at that lightest of touches like I really, really want to. I have to force myself not to inhale his cologne as it wafts past me and focus my undivided attention on whatever Fiona says.
“See this?” She points the mouse to her outgoing mailbox on the day she mailed out the appointment invites. As she scrolls to the bottom of the list, she highlights the email to Cooper. “Look at the time this shows as sent. Eight o’clock at night. I did not send any of these emails after five o’clock, see?” She goes back to the mailbox of sent messages, and sure enough, all of them show earlier times.
“I did think it kind of odd you’d send something like that so late in the day,” Cooper adds, confirming the strangeness of the event.
“Okay, so what are we suggesting here? Some sort of glitch in the mail system not only held onto the email and sent it later, but also changed the contents on its own? That’s not likely.”
“No. Somebody fucked with my outgoing email,” Fiona says, scowling grimly. “That’s what happened.” The sight of her angry now puts my nerves on edge. There’s been too much anger floating around today.
“Can we get someone from IT to look into it?” I ask, trying to think of solutions or explanations but coming up short.
“You mean Carl?” She asks, rolling her eyes. “Carl is our IT.”
A picture of the young guy, barely out of high school, who keeps our internet and Wi-Fi up and running and occasionally adds things to our website pops into my head.
We’re never going to get to the bottom of this.
