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I had told him that, hadn’t I? I had forgotten all about the meeting with the Japanese game manufacturer.
“Yes, but Tate said he’d think about it. Told me to give him a few hours to look at my proposal.”
“When was this?”
“About ten o’clock last night?”
That must have been before he came in to the office, to see me. Before everything happened.
“You haven’t spoken to him since?”
He shook his head. Haroon looked stressed and somewhat disheveled, like he had worked through the night.
“The last time I spoke to him, last night, he said he’d decided against it,” I said gently.
“But why?” Haroon’s voice filled with agony. I couldn’t think why he was so personally and emotionally involved in the app.
“He’s gone off education,” I said, making it up as I went along. I had to come up with something, though, I could see Haroon needed an explanation. “He says the market is saturated.”
I left Haroon in the cafeteria, nodding to himself and muttering furiously. If I had seen him on the street, I would have thought he was mentally unwell, someone suffering from a condition. But at HumanITy, he fit right in.
I went up to my desk, tried to focus on work, going through Tate’s emails as usual.
My phone pinged.
A message from Tate.
My heart started beating faster. Was this it? Was he going to fire me?
The message was curt, to the point:
Have decided against trip. Will be working from home. Am available on phone.
I read the message a few times. It was short, professional and direct. He was communicating about work and work only. I felt a huge sense of relief, a great weight lifting from my chest as I sat back in my chair and exhaled deeply.
We would carry on as if nothing had happened. Last night, having sex in the office, never happened. When I went out for lunch, I carefully looked around, checked the cameras on the floor and saw that they were angled away from the elevator lobby. The elevator doors would be visible, but we had been in the corner, against the wall. I couldn’t look in that direction, but my mind went there anyway, the way I had gripped his back with my legs, pushing him deeper into me, the smell of salt and soap as he buried his face in my neck.
No.
I couldn’t allow myself to go there.
I had to stop my thoughts from lingering on the way he had looked at me and kissed me. It was a moment of madnessand it was over now. I could focus on work again.
There couldn’t be anything more between us, obviously. We were too different, on completely separate walks of life. He was older, he had a child, a company and to him, the world was a juicy buffet from which he could pick whatever he wanted to eat. It wasn’t the same for me. I was young and inexperienced, trying everything for the first time, making mistakes, learning. I wasn’t fearless like him, I didn’t like challenges and problems, didn’t enjoy finding answers to complex riddles. I certainly didn’t like the idea of jumping from planes or plunging down gorges suspended by a thin piece of rope.
Life had been enough of an adventure for me so far.
Tate wasn’t scared of anything, and while I wouldn’t say I was scared of everything, there were a lot of things that made me nervous. Flying, for instance, was not something I was fond of. I didn’t like boats or motorcycles, I was not sporty at all. Reaching for a remote control was my idea of exercise.
I went down for lunch and saw some girls walking past me and looking at me strangely. I went to the bathroom to check and saw, much to my horror, that I had put on my top the wrong way around. I was wearing the back to front and the front to back. This is what happened when you didn’t look in the mirror in the morning! I quickly changed my top and put on some make up, fixing my hair as well.
Why hadn’t Haroon said something this morning?
Was it possible he hadn’t noticed that my T-shirt was looking all wrong, choking my neck in front, while hanging all baggy at the back?
More weird, was that I hadn’t noticed it myself, so obsessed had I been with what had happened the night before.
I took a few deep breaths, calmed myself down.
