I deep cleaned the entire kitchen. When I was finally done it was one o’clock in the morning, and I needed to be at the hotel at seven to start setting up for the Fling.
Just enough time to get a few hours of fitful sleep, take a morose shower, and cry. A lot. I cried so much—in the shower, getting dressed, driving—that the second Jack saw me he pulled me out of the conference room and frog marched me to the onsite Starbucks.
“Don’t we have a million things to do?” I mumbled.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Declan, but I don’t think you’re going to be much use to us until you stop—” He waved a hand at my face.
“Oh god is it that obvious?” I scrubbed ineffectually with my sleeves. “Dammit. I keep trying to get my shit together and then...” And then I’d think of the way they pushed up their glasses, or their soft laugh, or the way they sometimes tugged their hair when they were thinking hard and I’d get all weepy again.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“No. I mean it’s stupid. I mean... I’m useless at dating and I really liked the person I was seeing but there’s no point in me trying to be better than I am because I’ll only fuck it all up again.”
He shot me an unimpressed look. “That sounded like a lot of words that spell ‘I got scared and sabotaged my relationship.’”
“That’s not what happened.”
He grunted a non-response and turned to order our coffees. I pulled out my wallet but he smacked my hand away like he was offended, and I was too tired to insist. I’d just have to owe Jack a coffee. Then I’d get him one and he’d get me one and—
Actually, today was probably the last day we would work together. He was still hoping Deb would offer him a permanent position, and I’d probably have to go back to the temp pool at some point, so maybe circumstances would intervene and I’d never end up paying off my coffee debt.
What a terrible thought. I hated owing people stuff. And I’d gotten used to Jack.
He handed me my coffee. I thanked him. We returned to the conference room, but sat down instead of continuing to work while our coffees got cold, as we usually did.
“My grandfather fell asleep in his chair in the living room with a lit cigarette in his hand on Sunday afternoon,” he said abruptly.
“Omigod.” Oh my god.
“They’re okay. The house suffered some damage, but nothing too terrible.” He sniffed at his shirt. “At least, I think I managed to get most of the smoke smell out of my work clothes.”
“That’s horrible, Jack, I’m so sorry. It sounds terrifying.”
“It was. It was. But, clichéd as it is, it was also, in a way, the thing that was going to happen eventually, and I’m grateful that it wasn’t worse than it was. It could have been... I’d been worried that they might...” He shook his head, sipping his coffee. “Anyway, I’d done a lot of research and I already had plenty of contacts so I managed to get them a temporary space in a building where they’re on a waiting list for an apartment.”
“That’s good. I mean, obviously it’s also really hard, but I’m glad they’re safe at least.”
“Me too. And it means I’ll probably need to go back to a more lucrative, shall we say, form of employment. But at least I won’t spend my sixteen-hour days worried they’re going to burn the house down while I’m at work.”
“Oh.” Jack was leaving. This was it no matter what. God, why was that so sad? We’d only been able to tolerate each other for the last few weeks! I was not going to cry over Jack leaving the company I didn’t even work for. Dammit.
He grabbed a couple of high-quality napkins and passed them to me.
“Sorry, sorry, it’s not you, it’s everything.”
“I wasn’t under the impression my departure was the thing breaking your heart.”
“I’m sorry.” I blew my nose and dabbed at my eyes. “But it is kind of sad. I got used to working with you.”
“I got used to working with you too. Kid.” He smiled.
“You were such a jerk.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry. The job felt like charity and instead of handling it with grace, I was a total dick. But you ended up being a pretty good supervisor. Though I’ve needed to ask you since we met—what’s up with the spreadsheet?”
“What? It’s a good spreadsheet!”
“Yeah, but most people use apps or email or something.”
“I don’t have the time to learn all that stuff when my list works really well. Don’t talk shit about my spreadsheet, man.”
He raised his coffee cup. “To your spreadsheet, the seed of all we see before us.”
“To my spreadsheet.” I clunked cardboard with him. “We should probably get going.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for the coffee.”
“It’s only what you once did for me.”
So in Jack’s mind, this was repayment for a coffee already offered in a moment of need. Maybe that meant it wasn’t a debt. Or maybe it didn’t matter.
We got to work, carefully crafting the best, most seamless and professional Spring Fling experience the board had ever seen. The food and drinks were on point, the goody bags were perfectly arranged (or sorry, the complimentary gift bags of branded junk because apparently if you’re on the board of a big company you’re too cheap to buy your own pens and USB sticks), the chairs were squared off to the table.
And, most importantly, the Fling bricks were in place. The symbols of so much strife, yet here they were, neatly positioned to the side of each seat, ready to be tossed into various garbage cans, filing cabinets, and piles of miscellaneous paperwork. A destiny hardly fitting to things we’d worked so hard on, but it was their fate.
* * *
Jack and I worked the next few hours making sure everything was going smoothly, and overall, everything had. We were just packing up when Deb walked into the conference room.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” Jack said to her as he erased the freestanding whiteboard we’d borrowed from the hotel.
“I have a thing. Can you two take a ten-minute not-break or will you be over hours for the day?”
I looked at my phone while Jack looked at his watch. “We only took half an hour for lunch,” I said.
“And we probably only have another twenty minutes here, so we can take ten if you want.”
She gestured to the table. “Have a seat.”