10
You will be thrown into situations that will shock and unsettle you. It’s important to maintain your composure, no matter what you see, hear, or have splattered on your shirt.
—The Office After Dark: A Guide to Maintaining a Safe, Productive Vampire Workplace
I was not as good at office espionage-slash-witch-hunting as I’d hoped.
I searched every Internet database I could think of for Renarts. I even tried a few not quite legal avenues to government records, suffering the indignities of an Internet café/bait shop’s so-called free Wi-Fi because I didn’t want the search traced back to me. I even tried searching the descendant database to see if Marie Renart had children with Linoge and they might be listed in our information. No dice. The Renarts had disappeared entirely with Jennifer Renart. I found her birth record, evidence of her high school graduation, and then nothing. No college enrollment, no marriage certificate, no death certificate, no evidence that she’d legally changed her name. Her paper trail disintegrated into nothing, almost impossible in today’s world.
Had she gone into hiding? Had the vampires made her disappear? Why was she hiding?
I was stewing over this series of failures when my desk phone rang, and the Council’s front desk staff announced that I had a visitor. I pushed up from my desk, a confused frown firmly in place as I marched up to reception. Who would visit me here? Cal and Iris wouldn’t be stopped at the front desk. They had high-clearance credentials that let them sail through whenever they felt like it. Maybe it was one of my other vampire friends?
I poked my head through the reception door to find Nola waiting for me. She was wearing her nurse scrubs and carrying a medical bag labeled “Half-Moon Hollow Clinic.” She looked very official, and I was officially confused.
“No—”
Nola launched herself out of the chair and prevented me from uttering anything else. “No, Miss Scanlon, no refusals this time. The doctor insists that you get this treatment regularly. And if I have to meet you at work for your convenience, so be it.”
Clipping her visitor’s pass into place on her shirt, Nola made a very clear “just play along” face and gave Jerry the front-desk clerk the side-eye. I nodded. “Ohhh, I guess, if the doctor insists.”
“There’s a conference room on your floor that you can use for privacy, Gigi,” Jerry said in a helpful tone. “I hope you feel better.”
I made a weird raspberry sound. “It’s nothing,
really.”
“Pernicious anemia is hardly nothing!” Nola exclaimed, as the door shut behind her.
“Pernicious anemia?” I asked.
“It’s a real thing,” Nola whispered. “And the rumor of your having it will make you very unattractive to any vampires thinking of feeding on you.”
I pushed her into the nearest empty conference room. Why did my workplace have so many damn conference rooms? “Thanks, I think,” I muttered, making a mental note to text Nik a not really dangerously anemic message. “And as much as I appreciate visits in the middle of my workday, what are you doing here?”
She nodded toward one of the chairs. And when I didn’t sit fast enough, she pushed me down into a sitting position. Then she rolled up my sleeves and wiped my bicep down with an alcohol wipe.
“I started thinking about what you said at Jane’s shop the other night, that your office is full of receptionists and yogurt thieves who want to hurt you,” she said, whispering so softly I had a hard time hearing her. “And I thought it would be best to come by and give some of your coworkers a quick scan for magical residue so you can narrow your suspect list.”
“Aw, that’s so sweet!” I cooed, throwing my arms around her.
With me still attached to her, she pulled a rather large syringe from her bag and uncapped it.
“That is less sweet,” I said, pulling away. “What is that?”
“It’s a B-twelve shot,” she said quietly. “Perfectly harmless. In fact, it might help boost you up, considering your hours, but it’s also a plausible treatment for pernicious anemia. Though, technically, you would need injections on a regular basis.” With no warning, she jabbed the needle into my arm.
“Ow, sonofabitch, Nola!” I yowled. I hissed, “Why would you actually give me a shot? You could have just put a bandage on my arm and faked it!”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby!” she shot back. “And I gave you the shot because you’re not an awesome liar, and I’m worried about you, keeping such weird hours and working so hard and dating a vampire. The B-twelve can only help. Here, have a lollipop.” She waved a big shiny red sucker in my face.
“Don’t patronize me,” I whined, as she slapped a Monster High bandage on my arm. Nola shrugged and returned the lolly to her medical bag.
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t take it,” I said, snatching it out of the bag. I unwrapped the sucker and shoved it into my mouth. “Now what?”
“Now you pretend not to be able to get me out of the office because the floor layout is just so confusing, while I try to get a read on some of your coworkers.”
She took out a tiny brown bottle and unscrewed it to reveal a dropper top. When she squeezed three drops on each palm, the conference room was filled with the sharp, green scent of bay laurel. I wrinkled my nose and waved a hand in front of my face as she massaged the oil into her hands.
“Yeah, I know, it’s pungent,” she said, waving her hands around to make the oil evaporate faster. “It’s a blend to encourage psychic openness, and the main ingredient is bay laurel. The smell will go away in a few minutes, and this will keep me from having to make physical contact with your coworkers to read them.”
“You are an evil genius,” I said, sticking the sucker into my cheek. “Shall we start with the yogurt thief in accounting?”
• • •
We wandered around the office, and I pretended to be unable to find an exit, as Nola scanned the yogurt thief, who was still pissy but showed no “spectral evidence” of casting spells. She scanned the operations department, including poor Joseph McNichol, who spoke with an exaggerated lisp around his missing fangs. She scanned my coworkers in the coding pit of despair; each one of them was pronounced clean as a whistle. This included Marty, who spent most of Nola’s visit explaining how he didn’t need modern medicine because he stuck to his mother’s holistic diet and medicinal plan.
“Nothing,” Nola said, as we approached Ophelia’s office. “Not a thing. This place is completely free of magic . . . and whimsy . . . and colors besides gray. I mean, really, how do you not get seasonal affective disorder the moment you walk in the door?”
“I plan on having a nice case of rickets by the end of the summer. Guys dig rickets, right?”
“So clearly, your next injection will be a massive dose of vitamin D.” She sighed.
“Miss Scanlon, who is this, and why has she been wandering around this office for the past hour?” Margaret asked, bearing down on us like a hall monitor from hell.
“Margaret, this is Nola Leary. She’s a representative from my doctor’s office. She was providing me with medical treatment, an exception to the no-visitors policy, which is outlined on page thirty-four of the employee manual. I was just escorting her out.”
Margaret’s whole face clenched at once. She hated it when people outpolicied her. I had known it would be worth it to peruse the employee manual very carefully. “What sort of treatment? Is your condition contagious?”
“I believe that falls under HIPAA law,” Nola said cheerfully.
Margaret gritted her teeth so hard I practically heard them crunching under the enormous pressure of her jaw. “Just get her out of the office, Miss Scanlon. And I will count this time as your lunch break for the day,” she sniped.
“It was so nice to meet you,” Nola said sweetly. She stretched her hand out to shake Margaret’s and let it hang there until it was so socially awkward for Margaret not to shake her hand that I felt sorry for Margaret. And I really didn’t like Margaret, so that was saying something.
Margaret finally gripped Nola’s hand and shook it, giving the biggest cat-butt face I’d ever seen. Nola’s grin ratcheted up to crazy Grinch levels, while Margaret tried to yank her hand free.
Just as she did, Ophelia stepped out of the elevator, barking orders into her cell phone in German. She was wearing a slick black silk power suit and a pink sequined T-shirt. She sounded angry. Then again, everything sounded angry in German; maybe I shouldn’t judge. She huffed out a question, rolling her eyes and pulling a small Hello Kitty notebook out of her purse. She spied the pen in the tiny penholder in Nola’s scrub sleeves and snapped her fingers at her.
Nola lifted one dark eyebrow. Ophelia rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers again, then pointed at the pen. Nola took the pen out of her sleeve and handed it to Ophelia. In the process, she let her hand brush against Ophelia’s wrist. She stared at Ophelia intently. But Ophelia just shot her an annoyed glare and marched into her office.
“Well, we will be moving along,” I told Margaret. “Have a nice night.”
“Make it a quick exit!” Margaret called grumpily.
As soon as we were out of earshot, I nudged Nola’s ribs. “So?”
“Come see me tomorrow morning,” she said. “We need to talk.”
“Well, that’s not cryptic at all,” I muttered.
“Just come see me,” she said again. “I’ll put the kettle on for you.”
“Why does my hand smell so weird?” Margaret yelled down the hallway.
• • •
I snuck back to my office, where Aaron and Jordan were hard at work. Marty, on the other hand, was pecking away at a “research paper” we’d asked him to do on potential fonts for our part of the projects. Never mind that the regional management had chosen the fonts weeks before. We didn’t trust Marty with anything we would have to undo later.
Marty’s work had not improved. He resisted all attempts by us to gently guide him through Basic Programming 101. And when gentle guidance failed, we tried blatantly telling him “You need to do this,” which also failed. He was completely immune to correction.
Aaron and Jordan were pretty unhappy about picking up his slack. Marty was friendly and helpful and always engaged, but he was also slow and didn’t meet deadlines. He always had an excuse, of course. There was always a perfectly good reason for him not to have completed something he was assigned. But it was starting to get on everybody’s nerves, particularly my own.
And no matter how many times I reported the problems to Ophelia or the HR department, nothing happened. We were all given our benefits packages, including Council-leased, environmentally friendly cars and “grand prize showcase” salaries. And I couldn’t help but be irritated on my team’s behalf. Jordan, Aaron, and I had earned our perks. Marty, not so much.
Marty was our group’s “missing stair”—the problem we all knew about but could do nothing to resolve. I wondered if Marty was related to a vampire or had incriminating pictures of Ophelia or something. It was hard to imagine what sort of act Ophelia would be too embarrassed to reveal publicly, but surely there was something she wouldn’t do.
Oblivious to our passive-aggressive pack maneuverings, Marty kept trying to take on new areas of the project. He wanted to prove himself with more responsibilities, but we had to keep routing him back to the things he’d already done. He was unhappy and griped constantly about how he could do more, but we were getting pretty good at changing the subject.
“Hey, y’all, how’s it going?” I asked.
“I’m three pages into my research,” Marty said, with as little enthusiasm as was humanly or inhumanly possible.
“I hit my benchmark for next week!” Jordan told me with a grin.
“Awesome!” I exclaimed. I jogged over to her desk and gave her an enthusiastic high-five and a gummy candy shark.
“I fixed that issue with the, er, last-name search window,” Aaron called over his partition. I nodded, knowing that he was referring to the spreadsheet of surnames Marty had somehow deleted. Aaron had managed to pluck it from the ether with his magical file-retrieving ways.
“I’d say our technical wizardry deserves a caffeinated reward,” Jordan said, her Rainbow Brite hair peeking out from behind her cubicle. She grinned winsomely. “Hint, hint.”
I laughed. “OK, OK. Sammy’s not at his post, though. So it’s Perk-U-Later, my treat.”
Aaron’s head popped over his cubicle like a groundhog. “Mocha latte, triple shot, with three sugars and extra whip.”
I checked the size of his already-dilated pupils. “It’s decaf for you, my friend.”
“Nooo!” He fell to his knees and shook his fist at the ceiling in outrage.
“Maybe some nice chamomile tea,” I said, shaking my head.
Jordan rolled her eyes. “I’ll take a vanilla latte, extra whip. Thanks, Geeg.”
“Marty?” I turned around to find Marty standing right behind me. I jumped and stepped away. “Yipe!”
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“Oh, no, that’s OK,” I told him. “I don’t mind going on my own.”
“Nonsense! I could use some fresh air. Besides, I’d hate for you to walk around the block in the dark on your own.”
Before I could object more, he exited the office and was halfway down the hall.
“Oh . . . OK.” I sighed. Jordan shot me an apologetic look. I drew my thumb across my throat in the international sign of “Imma cut you!”
Retrieving my purse, I caught up to Marty, who was walking past Margaret’s desk. She gave him a thumbs-up and a big grin, which was weird.
We walked out of the building and crossed the Council parking lot. I seriously hoped Nik didn’t accost me in the lot, because that would be difficult to explain to Marty. Then again, it was going to be difficult to explain my coffee run with Marty to Nik. So maybe it was better that we didn’t see Nik either way.
We managed to order the coffee without incident. I refused to order Aaron’s liquid crack, but I did get him decaf and one of the shop’s saucer-sized chocolate chip cookies to make up for it. I found myself antsy to grab the coffees and get back to the office. For some reason, being alone with Marty made me uncomfortable, even in the cozy, coffee-scented interior of Perk-U-Later. He wasn’t talking. He was just staring at me intently, as if waiting for me to tell him something. I sincerely hoped it wasn’t a performance evaluation for the job he’d done so far, because that was not going to end well for him.
Cup carriers in hand, we walked back to the office in awkward silence for a few minutes. “Nice night,” I commented, reaching for any topic of conversation. “I hope it cools off soon. It seems the buildup to August is always the worst.”
Marty didn’t respond, which was, again, weird.
Suddenly, he stopped and grabbed my arm. “I’m glad we had a chance to get out of the office together,” he said, his dark eyes shining earnestly by the light of the streetlamp. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Marty, if this is about taking on more responsibility, I just don’t think you’re ready for anything new—”
“Gladiola, I just wanted you to know that I love you. I’ve been in love with you for a long time.”
Shit. My mouth fell open, and I made a little squeaky noise. I only held on to the coffee carrier through some sort of miracle of muscle memory.
“You’re really pretty and funny and smart. And I feel really strongly about you. I think we would make a really great couple. And I was hoping that you might go out for dinner with me or something this weekend? I sent you some texts the other night to try to arrange a date, but you didn’t respond.”
Double shit. I would so rather give him a performance evaluation.
Suddenly, all of the coffee cups, the Facebook friending, the candy on my desk came together in one horrible puzzle. Marty wasn’t a nice, incompetent guy. He was “nice guy-ing” me—a condition that occurred when a guy’s definition of friendship was “I’m nice to you because I think there’s a chance you’ll have sex with me. And when I realize that won’t happen, I reserve the right to accuse you of using me.” Each of Marty’s considerate gestures had a bunch of invisible strings hanging off it, strings meant to pull me in and make me feel obligated to him. After all, Marty was such a nice guy—what sort of horrible girl would refuse to date someone who had made so many thoughtful gestures?
Maybe I could convince him that I was engaged to someone else or being deported? Any excuse that would let him down gently, because the last thing anybody wants to do is say “I don’t find you attractive.” I would scramble for any excuse besides that. I didn’t understand how the simplest answer was the hardest to give. But I didn’t want to give it, either.
“How did you get my cell number?” I asked.
“Oh, Margaret gave it to me. She got it from your employee file.”
Margaret really had to stop giving me reasons to be mad at her. In the face of my flabbergasted silence, Marty just kept on going. Oh, my God, did he keep going.
“We could go to the Noodle Palace, if you like. I know how much you like Japanese food, and I’m willing to make an exception to Mother’s meal plan just this once. But just so you know, the mercury levels found in sushi are very unhealthy. You’re risking serious neurological disorders if you continue to eat this way. I’d be glad to ask Mother to come up with a nutrition plan for you—”
“Actually, Marty, I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to go out. We’re not really allowed to date coworkers, according to the employee handbook.”
Never mind the fact that I’d literally played a game of grab-ass with one of our vampire colleagues not long ago. This was definitely a case for careful personal editing.
Marty brightened. “Actually, I checked with Miss Lambert’s office, and she said it was fine.”
“Oh, that Ophelia.” My teeth ground together as I tried to smile my way through this horrific moment. “Wait, did you check with Ophelia or Margaret?”
He gave a stilted laugh, as if I’d caught him at something. “Oh, I’ve been talking to Margaret about you for a little while. She assured me that we wouldn’t be violating the spirit of the office fraternization policy, since we’re only here temporarily.”
“Well, I’m not comfortable with the ‘spirit of the policy,’ Marty. I’d rather follow the actual policy. So it’s still a no. But thank you.”
He gave me a constipated smile and patted my hand. “We’ll talk about it later.”
Talk about it later? Had I not just given my answer? I’d said no, clear as a bell. Granted, I hadn’t given a genuine reason for why I was giving him a no, but my answer was still no. It wasn’t up for negotiation.
I couldn’t speak. I was honestly afraid that if I said anything more to him, a torrent of cursing and shouting like had never been uttered by a human in the Council office would pour out of my mouth and get me fired. Blocking out Marty’s steady stream of reasons we should date, I carried the coffee into our office, carefully placed it on Jordan’s desk, and swept back out of the room.
I couldn’t breathe.
As foolish and silly as I’d felt after my first contact with Nik, at least then I’d known that the only person I’d hurt had been myself. I may not have been super-close to Marty, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. But still, what the hell? I bounced between feeling sorry that I might have misled Marty into thinking I liked him and wanting to punch him in the neck. I felt stupid for not seeing the signs. I felt even more stupid for mistaking Marty’s “overtures” for sucking up to his boss. I felt bad for letting him down. I felt guilty for actively trying to get him fired when he had a crush on me. I felt angry at Marty for putting me in this position. I was a blender of messed-up emotions, and they were all aimed Marty’s way.
I needed some fresh air, a walk to clear my head. I had to get out of the office for just a few minutes, even though I basically hadn’t spent more than five minutes at my desk that night. I didn’t even stop to talk to Nik when I saw him coming out of Ophelia’s office.
“Are you all right?” I shook my head and dashed out the door, ignoring him as he yelled, “Gigi!”
I walked blindly around the block, my legs pumping across the concrete, anything to carry me away from the viper pit of embarrassment. The Perk-U-Later door swung open, and I had to duck left to avoid being smacked in the face with the glass.
“Oh!” I yelped, as two strong hands clamped around my shoulders and kept me upright. I gasped, glancing up into warm green puppy-dog eyes. “Ben?”
“Gigi!” My ex-boyfriend, Ben, had one of those sweet, all-American faces that practically screamed “Trust me with your daughter, and she will return to you happy, early, and un-impregnated.” He had a cute little upturned nose, high cheekbones, and a wide, smiling mouth—a mouth currently making that awkward Ben face, where he smiled without actually showing any teeth. “Hi!”
The next few moments were a ballet of misinterpreted social cues. He went in for a hug, while I reached out to shake his hand. I raised my outstretched arm for the hug, but by that time, he’d switched over to handshake mode.
Right now, I would give anything for Nik’s Swiss-cheese memory. Because I did not want to recall this later.
Despite our promises to stay friends, I’d barely spoken to Ben since we’d parted at winter break. It was difficult to recover from a conversation that started with “Let’s get married” from one party and ended with “I think we should break up” from the other.
I’d beaten myself up over my feelings—or lack thereof—for Ben for weeks before his disastrous Christmas Eve proposal, which he saw as a Hail Mary play to save our relationship. I just didn’t want to be with him anymore, and that alone made me feel that I was giving girlfriends everywhere a bad name. Ben was a genuinely decent sweetheart of a guy, who did everything right—remembering birthdays, having sacrosanct date nights every weekend, and faithfully Skyping when we were separated by summer internships. He accepted all of the weird supernaturalness in my life without so much as a “Hey, Type O is sort of a weird Christmas dinner.”
But he still didn’t make my fickle self happy. I loved him, but I wasn’t in love with him, not in the electric, head-over-heels, launching-a-thousand-ships sort of way I’d seen in Cal and Iris or Jane and Gabriel or even Jamie and Ophelia. But as selfish as it might seem, I wanted that crazy, forever, epic sort of love for myself. When you were surrounded by eternally committed vampire couples, it warped your expectations a little bit.
Maybe it had been a mistake to switch majors so that most of my upper-level classes were also Ben’s classes. Maybe we’d spent too much time together. Maybe Ben got tired of seeing me perform so well in an area that was supposed to be his thing. Maybe we’d been doomed from the start, when I’d selfishly used him as my cover story as I secretly dated a very dangerous teenage vampire.
Either way, we hadn’t spoken, e-mailed, or texted in the six months since. We were still Facebook friends, but we avoided each other’s timelines. And none of this mattered now, because Ben was standing right in front of me, with a confused expression on his face.
“How have you been?” he asked, clearing his throat, gesturing for me to follow him back into the coffee shop.
“Great,” I told him, shaking my head for reasons I didn’t understand. “Great. You?”
“Great,” he said. “Are you working in the Hollow this summer?”
“Yeah, I’m doing some programming work for the Council. And you?”
“Oh, uh, I’m just packing some stuff up. I’ve got a summer internship for Microsoft, in their Atlanta offices,” he said, pinching his lips shut and nodding like a bobblehead.
“Great!”
“Yeah, I’m pretty excited about it,” he said. “And how do you like working for the Council?”
“It’s great,” I said, laughing in this awkward breathy fashion that made me sound slightly insane. “The other programmers made me project leader, which should be a nice résumé builder, if I don’t screw it up.”
Ben’s mouth curved up into that familiar fond Ben smile, and he finally resembled the boy I had dated instead of this stiff stranger. “You’re not going to screw it up, Geeg. You’re going to be great.”
If one of us said “great” one more time, I swear, one of our heads would explode.
Ben grinned and rubbed my arm, a gesture I stepped away from immediately. “I’m glad I ran into you. After last time, I had a few things I needed to say to you.”
I cringed inside. Honestly, I could only handle so many confessions of true feelings in one night. If he told me he loved me, I was going to jump through the window and run screaming down the street. I was practically twitching as he took a seat at a table near the plate-glass picture window. I remained standing, unwilling to spend more time than was absolutely necessary in this conversation.
He frowned when he saw my tense posture, but he took a deep breath and said, “I lied.”
My hands stopped twitching long enough for me to say, “I’m sorry?”
“When I said we could still be friends? I lied,” he said. “It was just too hard, and awkward. You seemed so happy every time I saw you, and for some reason, that really pissed me off.”
“I had to put on a happy face!” I exclaimed. “What kind of idiot breaks up with someone and then tells that person that she’s miserable? It’s against the girl code.”
“Well, I’m not going to lie, it took me a little while to get over it. I got drunk and cursed your name more than a few times.”
“That explains why so many of your friends glared at me all spring,” I muttered.
“But I just want you to know, I’m not mad at you anymore. I’m doing fine now. I’ve actually started seeing someone,” he said.
I expected some sort of pang, a twitch of irritation or jealousy. But I was happy for him. I wanted Ben to find someone. He deserved to be happy. And I wouldn’t make him happy. I was apparently some sort of romantic train wreck who violated office policies willy-nilly and led nerds to the romantic rocks like some evil cyber-siren.
“She’s really nice. She works in my office. Is that weird for you?”
“No, I’ve started seeing someone, too.” I glanced out the window to see Nik standing in the puddle of streetlamp light across the street, a concerned expression on his face. Triple shit.
“It’s a vampire, isn’t it?”
I turned to Ben and laughed. “Yeah, why?”
He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “I just figured you would end up with a vampire. They say that girls marry guys just like their daddies, and Cal is the closest thing you have.”
I shuddered. “For the sake of my romantic future and emotional well-being, please do not finish that thought. If necessary, I will emphasize my point by threatening to smack you.”
“You’re so violent now! You were such a nice girl before you entered Cal boot camp!” Ben snickered as we stepped back onto the street. “I’m sorry I avoided you, but I would like us to be friends again, Gigi.”
“I’d like that, too.”
He opened his arms wide to go for a very clearly communicated hug.
I shook my head. “We are the sort of friends who do not hug.”
“Fair enough,” he said, extending his hand for a shake. I pumped it up and down in a firm, nonmushy manner.
“Go home, Ben,” I said. “Say hello to your special lady friend for me.”
Ben unlocked his car. “No, no. We’re not going to do that. As far as she is concerned, you don’t exist. And vice versa. And please do not tell your vampire boyfriend about me.”
Ben climbed behind the wheel and drove away, waving to me. I rubbed my hand over my face. “So very awkward.”
I felt as if I’d been run through an emotional meat grinder. I’d been angry, frustrated, mortified, hopeful, happy, and sad all in one night. I didn’t know how to feel about anything. I wanted to talk to Iris about it, but I didn’t know how much help she would be, what with her blind hatred of Nik and her instinctual kill response to anyone who made me the least bit uncomfortable. I scrubbed my hand over my face again, wishing I hadn’t left my coffee on my desk. Then again, vodka might be better. Lots of vodka. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but tonight I could see the wisdom in blind stinking oblivion.
“Did you have a nice chat?”
I turned around to find Nik standing behind me. His brow was furrowed in concern, but he kept glancing over my shoulder toward the former position of Ben’s car. I groaned. “What? What can I do for you?”
“What is this I hear about you being ill?” he asked, cupping my face between his palms. And that’s when I realized I’d forgotten to text Nik. Wow, the Council office grapevine worked fast.
“It’s nothing.” I sighed. “Just something Nola thought would be funny.”
“Pernicious anemia is hardly funny!” he exclaimed. “Your friend the nurse finds illness funny?”
“I don’t have pernicious anemia. It was just something she made up so she had an excuse to come into the office to see me.”
“Why would she need to come see you?”
I shrugged it off, because there was no way I was going to tell him I had my friend magi-scan my coworkers on his behalf. Guys got weird about that sort of thing. “It’s a long story. Now, what brings you to my parking lot?”
“I came to see you, and I found you talking to that boy, the boy from the pictures in your room,” he said, as if I’d been having a conversation with a leper. A leper who liked dubstep.
“Trust me, that boy is no longer my problem or yours. I’ve got more pressing issues right now.”
Nik’s vaguely irritated expression changed to one of concern. “Such as?”
“Such as, I seem to have accidentally seduced a coworker, who wants to work around the spirit of office policy to go on a date I don’t want. My ex-boyfriend is hanging out at coffee shops near my office so he can tell me about the new girl he’s dating, which has been the bright spot of my evening. My undead boyfriend is cursed, and I’m actually pathetically happy right now that you haven’t attacked me in the last five minutes. I am stressed out to my eyeballs.”
“I did not understand any of that.”
“Of course you didn’t.” I sighed. “I just can’t handle one more upsetting conversation tonight, OK? So if you have a problem with me talking to Ben, we’re just going to have to discuss that at another time.”
“Do not shut me out, Gigi,” he said, sounding genuinely hurt.
“I’m not shutting you out, I’m shutting myself down,” I told him. “I just need some peace and quiet, just for a few minutes. I just can’t think about anything anymore.”
He nodded. “I will walk you to your office.”
“Don’t bother,” I said, walking away from him. “But I would consider it a personal favor if you don’t zombie out and chase me down like a cheetah while I’m walking back to the building.”
I hung my head the moment the words came out of my mouth. That was bitchy. It wasn’t fair that I was sniping at Nik for something he couldn’t help, just because I was frustrated and overwrought.
“Nik, I’m sorry. That was rude.”
He didn’t answer.
I turned around to find an empty sidewalk and a dark street. So we were back to disappearing Nik again. I groaned. “I suck.”