The app itself wasn’t much better. Even thinking about it gave him a headache. The FG artwork had helped, though. For weeks, they’d worked without a vision that made them care. Now they had one.
“Hey.”
Sacha blinked back to the present. Winona was beside him, helping herself to the coffee he’d neglected to notice had finished brewing. “Hello.”
“Did you get my email?”
“I did. We were in a meeting when it came through so everyone who needed to saw it at the same time.”
“And?”
Sacha reached around Winona and claimed the last clean mug. “We love what you’ve done. All of it. I did not expect so much.”
Winona snorted. “That’s what happens when Jonah gets involved with the creative team. He doesn’t get to do it often, so he overproduces. I didn’t even send you all of it. There’s more.”
“More? How can that be so?”
“He’s a frustrated genius.”
Sacha could believe that. In the rare moments he’d been lucky enough to glimpse Jonah across the shared office space, he was often hovering around his creative team, frowning at their screens, hands thrust into his pockets, lips pursed shut.
It was cute. “We will use as much as we can, even if I have to fund it myself.”
“That’s not good business practice, Sacha.”
Winona’s tone was teasing, but Sacha had left his jovial skin at home. He shot her a dark look. “Nothing about Blutecc is good business practice.”
“So why do you work there? I’ve looked you up. You’re, like, a head hunter’s dream. You could work anywhere. Why here?”
Sacha shrugged. “I liked the app and what it stood for. I did not realise it was so decimated until I got here.”
“But you can fix it, though, right? Helga told me you were smashing it out.”
Sacha snorted. “Helga is kind, but she cannot possibly know that until we reach the end of the build. We have passed no quality control checks yet. We do not even know if the functionality we started with has survived the layers we’ve added.”
Winona’s eyes glazed over. She laughed. “I have no idea what any of that means. And you’re wrong about Helga being kind. She’s pretty mean, so I’d imagine she wouldn’t say nice things about you that weren’t true.”
“She wasn’t talking about me, she was talking about the app.”
“Was she?”
Winona left her question hanging and left the room with her coffee mug. Sacha watched her float across the FG space and disappear into Jonah’s office. She shut the door, and envy hit Sacha so hard his hand shook.
He set the empty coffee jug on the counter. Picked up his mug. Changed his mind and put it down again. Dropped it, actually, sending it clattering to the floor.
The handle splintered off.
Cursing, Sacha crouched to retrieve the pieces, frustration boiling over in his gut until he feared he might vomit. You are a fool. If you were his friend, you could go in his office too, but you told him you weren’t. That all you had was sex. And now this—a working relationship that’s awkward as hell because you don’t know how you’re going to pay him.
You’re a fool, Ivanov.
“What are you doing down there?”
Sacha closed his eyes, bracing himself, then opened them again as he turned to face the new voice in the room. The smooth, gentle voice that belonged to the only person on earth who could rattle him so. “Tying my shoelace, Jonah Gray.”
Jonah raised a brow. “You don’t have any laces in those boots.”
“Clearly. I don’t have a full coffee cup in my hand either, it’s in pieces on the floor, no? So what I’m doing is fucking obvious.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“I heard you were in a bad mood.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everyone in your office.”
“What were you doing in this fictitious office of mine?”
“I meant the Blutecc office.”
Sacha suppressed a heavy sigh and collected the fragments of his mug. Then he rose and dumped them into the bin. “I’m not in a bad mood. In fact, the email Winona sent me this morning made my day. I like your work. It is perfect for the project.”
“Really? I wasn’t sure if we’d hit the mark, given that no one on your team except Helga seemed to know what your app actually was.”
“They do not care,” Sacha admitted. “Blutecc is company that harvests the bad fortune of others. The content is not important.”
“How does that work?”
“You do not know? Flash Gray has shared office space with Blutecc for three years.”
“And we’ve mostly ignored each other. It was a dynamic that worked until you came along. You’re more social than you give yourself credit for, Ivanov.”
“Not true.”
“It is, but I don’t want to waste time arguing with you about it.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know how a company can develop an app without having a vested interest in the content.”
“Yes,” Sacha countered. “But why do you want to know?”
“Because it’s hard to create a brand without emotion.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be. It’s corporate advertising. It is not meant to mean anything.”
“Then you shouldn’t have asked us to do it. FG doesn’t—”
“It was not me that asked you.”
Jonah blinked, and rocked backwards, as if Sacha’s snap had physically hit him. “What are you saying? That you don’t want to work with us? Because that’s easily fixed.”
“That is not what I said.”
“Then what? You’ve had your head up your arse since Wednesday morning, and, frankly, I don’t have time for it. My team doesn’t have time for it.”
Jonah spoke calmly, but anger spots reddened his pale, chiselled cheeks.
Sacha wanted to kiss them away.
He also wanted Jonah to shut the hell up and leave him alone. To walk out of the break room and disappear into a puff of smoke so Sacha could finish this goddamn app and put his brain back together again. He’d never lost his head over a project the way he was in danger of doing right now, and the only variable in his life was Jonah.
Leave me alone. Please.
Jonah stepped closer, narrowing the distance between them. “Look, I don’t understand what I’ve done to piss you off so much in the last week, but whatever it is, I’m sorry, okay? I get that you don’t want complications and I’ll back off.”
“It is—”
“I’m not finished.”
Despite the sharp-edged negativity spiking Sacha’s blood, a grin threatened to split his face in half. He stifled it, and gestured for Jonah to continue.
“We can’t let our failed friendship affect our work,” Jonah said. “If you don’t want to deal with me directly, that’s fine, but don’t make things difficult for other people, my team or yours. If you can’t do that, we need to draw a line under this right now.”
Sacha wondered how they’d gone from pretending to be lovers for the sake of Jonah’s mother to having tense conversations in a break room that smelt of old coffee and stale doughnuts. And why the words Jonah had chosen—“failed friendship”—hurt. Oh, the irony, when it had been him to stick a grenade under whatever they had become.