As soon as the click of Casey’s walking cast was gone, I let go of my breath. The air rushed out so fast, I shot a look at Sarah, cringing in case she’d noticed. She was on the phone, though. When the hell had she gotten on the phone? Had I been that distracted by Casey?
Oh yeah. I had been.
Fuck. I’d come into the office today in the same funk that had kept me up half the night, but damn if he hadn’t cut through the heavy wet blanket on my brain. I hadn’t been checking him out like I had yesterday, but after less than a minute of conversation, he’d gotten me to joke. How the . . .?
And now that he was out of the office, I was mentally looking him up and down. My libido was pretty MIA right now—usually was after a night like that—but the thought of his body, his smile, his eyes? Oh yeah, that teased a few nerve endings to life. Not enough to get me hard or make me want to rub one out right here in the office, but enough to make it clear I’d be jerking off to him in the near future.
C’mon, idiot. Focus. On the work. Not the dude.
Okay, focusing on him was a hell of a lot more fun than wallowing in everything that had kept me up all night, but it was still an exercise in frustration. Clint was right that I needed to keep my head in the game. Dating someone in my office was asking for trouble. Hell, fantasizing about him was asking for trouble. That part wasn’t going to go away anytime soon, but—
No. It did need to go away.
I shook myself and focused on my monitor. Diego had given me some very basic record updates to do, and there was no reason I couldn’t yank my attention away from Casey long enough to get them done. Especially if I wanted to keep this job.
Yeah. Definitely needed to stop fantasizing about Casey. It was only my second day in this office and I was already losing it over him, and that did not bode well for keeping this job.
Couldn’t do it. Needed to focus on the job. Not on my coworker.
Not on my hot, witty, incredibly attractive coworker. Or his gorgeous ass, broad shoulders, cute face . . .
Damn it.
I closed my eyes and exhaled. I was so, so screwed.
I really did try to stop ogling Casey. At the very least, I made sure I was subtle. Didn’t need him catching on that I couldn’t keep my eyes to myself. When I caught myself thinking about him at home, especially when I was tempted to jerk off to those thoughts, I’d resort to anything from going for a run to taking a cold shower. At the office, I focused as hard as possible on learning the ropes and figuring out all my coworkers.
That last part actually did help, especially during working hours. Every office had its quirks, and I got used to the ones in the training department pretty quickly. The banter was nonstop and had almost no limits. Sarah teased us about refusing to bring her boyfriend into the office because she didn’t want “the gay” rubbing off on him. Diego usually retorted something about “you’d like watching and you know it,” and Casey would lament that while Rashad was perfectly nice and good-looking, Casey could not be seen with a man who voluntarily drove a minivan.
Then there was the way my coworkers handed off things like office supplies. Casey was the only one who had an excuse not to get up and walk around, but that didn’t stop Sarah or Diego from using “airmail” to deliver things like pens, candy bars, pads of sticky notes, or even the odd stapler. It was especially dangerous when Diego was “sending” something. His aim was pretty good considering he couldn’t actually see us, but still. Flying office supplies were hazardous. I learned that after picking the wrong moment to walk between Sarah’s and Casey’s cubicles and getting clocked in the temple by a flying dry-erase marker.
The “airmail deliveries” weren’t always in response to someone actually needing an office supply, either. Sometimes they were not-so-subtle messages to stop making a chair squeak or to quit tapping on something. Or just for the hell of it. By the end of my first week, I’d gotten in on it too, and Sarah had nearly choked on her coffee one day after I’d nailed Casey in the back of the head with a BIC pen instead of just throwing it past him. Even he’d laughed. After all, it was his own damn fault for singing along off-key to some ungodly pop song coming from one of the other departments. Oh yeah, I was going to get along great here, coworker fantasies or not.
Everyone was chill, but it was an office, which meant sometimes people got frustrated. If Casey was quiet and not joining in the nonstop banter, nobody pushed. If Diego started muttering to himself in Spanish, that wasn’t a good time to randomly toss a pen at him. If Sarah’s nails started clicking menacingly on her desk, we all stayed quiet, and even Diego wouldn’t swipe more than one candy at a time from the ever-present dish. Everyone was pretty good at reading the room, and nobody was really out to cause tension or piss someone off, so we got along great.
I’d been there all of two weeks when Diego snarled, “You have got to be fucking kidding me” into his phone. Casey, Sarah, and I all froze. We stared at each other, nobody making a sound.
Even through the high cubicle walls, we could hear a frantic voice on the other end of the line. Diego’s nails were tapping on the desk. When they stopped, all three of us gulped. Then came the long exhalation, followed by what I assumed was Spanish profanity. “Does the CO know about it?”
My spine stiffened. Casey’s eyes widened. Sarah stared slack-jawed at the cubicle as if she could see through to Diego.
“I don’t care what command he’s at now,” Diego hissed. “This makes it to Captain Rodriguez before we can unfuck it? I want his ass at Mast.”
Casey paled. Sarah turned to him, and they looked at each other in horror.
“What the fuck?” I whispered.
They both shook their heads.
No idea, Sarah mouthed.
None of us made a sound, and we all listened as Diego went back and forth for another couple of minutes, his voice hushed. Then he slammed the phone down and snarled something I didn’t understand.
Sharp footsteps were coming down the hall, and I had a feeling they were en route to our office. Sure enough, a second later, just as Diego was coming out of his cubicle with murder in his eyes, Clint leaned in the office doorway. They exchanged nods, and without a word to each other or anyone else, left in a hell of a hurry.
As they marched away, fast and angry, the three of us released our collective breath.
“I don’t even want to know,” Sarah said. “But I have a feeling we’re gonna.”
Casey and I both nodded but didn’t speak. The office was weirdly silent after that. For a solid hour, we all did our jobs without saying a word. Everyone kept shooting wary looks at the door Clint and Diego had gone through. What the hell was going on?
Gunshot-sharp footsteps raised all our heads, not to mention my pulse, and I was once again holding my breath when Diego swept into the office, fury radiating off him as he shut the door behind him. His lips were tight and his shoulders were so tense I was surprised he wasn’t shaking. His voice was a low, venomous growl: “We’ve got a problem.”
No one snarked back with “No shit” or anything like that. We all just stared at him and waited.
Diego wiped a hand over his face. He leaned against the door and sighed, and in the space of two breaths, went from looking supremely pissed off to exhausted. “MA3 Stevens fucked up the training records. If the auditors find that during the next inspection, we are screwed.”
My gut clenched. Sarah straightened. We exchanged wide-eyed looks—a failed inspection meant contractors losing jobs.
“How bad did he fuck them up?” Sarah asked cautiously.
“Bad,” Diego growled. “There are level II quals entered as level I. Level I entered as level II. Some of them are the right level but the wrong class altogether.” He threw up his hands. “We literally found it because one of the security guys looked at his own record and asked his LPO why he didn’t have his CPR qual, but somehow had a goddamned coxswain qual.” Diego muttered something in Spanish. “It’s like the fucker was just entering random shit and hoping nobody would notice.”
Sarah huffed, slouching back in her chair. “Was he trying to sabotage everything?”
“I don’t know if he was smart enough to do something like that on purpose,” Diego grumbled. “All I know is we have to unfuck this. And it’s . . .” He closed his eyes and sighed, deflating a bit. “We’ve got to fix it before the inspection. That means we have less than two months to go through and fix every single training record for anyone who’s been active on NAS Adams—including ships and civilians—for the last twelve months.”
“How many is that?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Diego’s voice was heavy with fatigue when he replied, “Thousands. Literally thousands. The ships alone have—”
“They have their own training programs,” Casey broke in. “We wouldn’t have touched their records.”
Diego shook his head. “There were some systemwide issues earlier this year, and the ships couldn’t access the certification modules, so their personnel came landside for a few classes. We ran the classes and entered their certifications into the system. And by we, I mean”—he nodded toward my desk—“Stevens.”
“Shit,” Sarah breathed.
I swallowed. “So what exactly do we have to do?”
“Pull up each hard copy,” Diego said. “Cross-check it with what’s in the system and what’s on the muster sheets. Make sure they match, and update them if they don’t.”
“And there’s no other way, is there?” Sarah slumped back in her chair. “It’s gotta be done manually?”
Diego nodded slowly.
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s going to take forever.”
“I know.” The resignation in Diego’s voice was unsettling to say the least.
I glanced at each of my coworkers in turn. “What if I do it?” They all turned to me. I shifted a little. “There’s no point in taking any of you away from teaching classes, and I’m not up to speed on that part yet. Especially if I come in on a couple of weekends, I could at least make a dent in it.”
Diego stared at me. “You know we can’t do overtime, right?”
I nodded. “But I’d rather we pass the inspection and keep our jobs.”
His jaw tightened. “Yeah, me too.” He chewed his lip, staring at the floor for a long moment. Finally, he took a deep breath and met my gaze again. “You familiar with the system? How records are set up?”
“Yeah. That’s all I’ve been doing for the last two weeks, remember?” I gestured at my computer. “I mean, I might need you to get me up to speed on some of the details, but show me what to do, and I can do it.”
He seemed to consider that, then nodded again. He pushed himself off the door and gestured for me to follow him into his cube. “Come on. I’ll show you everything you need to know.”
So that was my job now—combing through mountains of records to make sure certifications and qualifications had been entered correctly. Fixing the mistakes was relatively easy. Finding them was another story. It wasn’t just one or two quals that had been messed up. Basically anyone who’d gone through our training department for anything in the last year had the potential for an error. I had to comb through them by hand, cross-check quals with muster records to make sure the person had actually attended and completed the training, and then go in and fix it. How Stevens had managed to fuck up this colossally, I had no idea. It was the kind of fuckup you almost had to try to commit. I doubted it was deliberate, though. From the grumbling I’d heard about this dude, this was probably good old-fashioned dereliction of duty.
And chances were, no one would even bother trying to take disciplinary action. If he were still here, he’d be fucked, but since he’d already transferred out, any kind of action would mean a lot of hassle and headache. The higher-ups would squash any attempts to hem his ass up rather than deal with the expense, drama, or paperwork. Fucking typical.
But whatever. It had to be fixed so we’d pass the inspection.
Each department on-base and on the ships maintained their own records, but Diego and Clint agreed it would be more efficient to have those training departments bring the records to us rather than send me all over the base. That was fine by me; I didn’t have the clearance to get into some of the buildings, and I really didn’t have any desire to go onto the ships. Diego dealt with the deployed ships and chasing down records for people who’d transferred out of Anchor Point. I handled everything else.
Within two days of the error being found, a half-remodeled conference room down the hall had been filled with banker’s boxes stuffed with each department’s records. Since the inspection was coming up unnervingly fast, and our department could get a little loud during the week, Diego secured permission for me to also come in at night and on the weekends. He offered to help too, and took as much as he could during the week, but he couldn’t pull nights or weekends. Not with the construction going on after hours. I was fine with that; sudden loud noises had never been much of a trigger for me, and it wouldn’t do any of us any good if he stayed late and wound up with a flashback.
So for the most part, I was on my own. Diego promised that when the inspection was over, he’d arrange for me to have a few days off without cutting into my comp time. He and Clint had also been falling all over themselves to buy me lunch every day, so all in all, it wasn’t a bad deal. It would take me longer to learn the ropes in the classroom since I’d be busy with this job, but Sarah, Casey, and Diego seemed to have classes under control for the moment. As long as I was up to speed before Casey was off light duty, we’d be good.
And I had to admit, I was kind of thankful for this whole crisis. From day one, I’d been desperate to prove to everyone that I had my shit together and could make this job work. Fixing this issue would sure be a step in the right direction. Especially since I had this. I fucking had this.
Today was my second Saturday in the office, and I actually liked it. I could play whatever music I wanted at any volume. There were three different pizza places that could deliver right to the building. The construction didn’t really bother me, and they’d been working on the second floor for the last few days anyway, so I had almost no distractions.
The best part was that being here meant I wasn’t at home with nothing to do. The busier I stayed, the less headspace I had for the past; and the less my demons elbowed their way in, the less tempted I was to drink myself numb. Nights were still a gamble—sometimes I slept like the dead, and sometimes I was sketching at two in the morning—but at least the daytime was full of something productive.
I finished another record, made a small hash mark on the lower-left corner of the folder to indicate it was done, and slid it into the box. Then I took out the next one, opened it to the right page, and started cross-referencing the quals and certs with the muster sheets. My eyes were getting a little tired, so I paused to rub them. I blinked a few times, took a deep swallow of lukewarm coffee, and kept going.
The elevator at the end of the hall dinged. I figured it was one of the construction workers, but the sound of Casey’s walking cast hitting the linoleum was hard to miss. Heat rushed into my cheeks. Why was I blushing? Or flustered? Just because my coworker was here?
My coworker who I ogle at every opportunity and may have been seriously tempted to jerk off to three nights in a—
“Hey,” I said when he appeared in the doorway, dressed in civvies. Holy shit, those jeans. Nom.
“Oh hey.” He did a double take. “I totally forgot you’d be here.” He gestured at the stack of folders next to my computer. “Making headway?”
“Slowly but surely. What’re you doing here?”
He smiled sheepishly as he hobbled into his cubicle. “Forgot my ID card again.” He plucked it from his keyboard and slid it into his wallet.
“And they let you on base without it?”
“The sentries know me,” he said with a shrug.
I chuckled. “Guess that’s good. Or else I would’ve had to bring your ID to the gate for you or something.”
He narrowed his eyes as his lips quirked. “Why do I get the feeling there’d be a price tag attached to that?”
I barked a laugh, hoping that masked the heat rushing into my face. I wouldn’t call it a price tag, but there are ways a man could pay for— “Oh come on. I wouldn’t hold a man’s ID hostage.”
“Uh-huh.” He tucked his wallet into the back pocket of his snug jeans. “After Highlightergate, I totally believe that.”
“Oh, come on. Those were highlighters, not your ID card, and to be fair, the ransom was the stapler you stole off my desk.”
He huffed, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t have swiped your stapler if you hadn’t ratted me out for bogarting the Baby Ruths Sarah brought in.”
I shrugged. “Don’t hog the Baby Ruths, and we won’t have a problem.”
Casey just laughed. Fuck, he was cute when he smiled.
A shiver ran through me, and I masked it by stretching, fingers laced together over my head. As I did, my spine popped in three or four different places. “Man. I think I’ve been hunched over for too long.”
“Yeah? Don’t you ever get up and move around?”
“Sure.” I flailed a hand toward the nearly full box of finished records. “Whenever I’m moving boxes back and forth.”
He nodded, and suddenly looked a little nervous. “So, listen. While I’m here, do you, um . . .” He cleared his throat, and a shy smile spread across his lips. “You want to grab lunch?”
I stared at him. Was he . . . Was this like a friendly let’s go have lunch because we’re coworkers thing? Or was I absolutely not reading too much into the possibility that he was asking me—
Hoping my cheeks weren’t as red as they felt and he couldn’t hear that my pulse had suddenly gone nuts, I checked the clock on my screen. It was almost one. “Sure.” I stood, sliding my phone into my back pocket. “Where did you have in mind?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Something easy. I don’t want to pull you away from this for too long if you need to get back to it.”
“Meh. I’ve been here since eight, so—”
“Eight?” He blinked. “You know it’s the weekend, right? You don’t actually have to come in early?”
I chuckled. “Yeah, but the sooner I get in, the sooner I’m done for the day.” But also the sooner I’m doing something other than pacing and trying to shake off a nightmare.
“Okay, fair enough.” He nodded toward the door. “Food court’s right up the street. We can take my car.”
Was this really a good idea? Oh hell. It couldn’t be that much worse than stealing glances at him while we were working. It was just lunch after all. And I was seriously getting hungry.
So I smiled. “Sure. Let’s go.”