a moment I’m trapped between two versions of myself. One who’s still the blundering girl I was, shocked by the things Woods wanted her to do. And the other who sees with Woods’ eyes, and knows a million intimate things about a person before they know it themselves.
‘Of course,’ he says, once he’s reined that little response back in. ‘All you have to do is say the word, and I’m totally your man.’
He can’t possibly be saying what I think he’s saying. He can’t be. It’s all just my sex-fevered imagination; it’s my body missing Woods and wanting something to fill the void. There’s no heat in his gaze, no slow sensuality in his otherwise breezy voice. And by totally your man, he means: I love writing letters for you, Ms Harding.
Not anything sexual or suggestive at all. In truth I think he’s too boyish for those sorts of kinky games, too gauche. He doesn’t realise the double meaning of the words he’s saying.
Or at least I think so, until I open the letters.
* * *
I try to be calm about it at first. Any normal person would be calm and rational about the whole thing, I’m certain. Aidan, for example, would most likely give him a gentle dressing-down before offering him a biscuit.
And that’s what I need to do. I need to find some biscuits to offer him, after I’ve tried to strangle him with two bits of paper.
Because that’s what I want to do, of course.
I don’t know what he thinks he’s playing at by writing the letters in this way. But he’s playing just the same, and I know it. I can’t deny it. No one could write this way for their boss and fail to understand that they’ve made a complete mess out of it.
Most of what’s in the two letters isn’t identifiable as something a human being would do. There are sentences without endings, words misspelled so badly they’re not really words any more. Blotches on parts of the paper, as though maybe he drank a gallon of strawberry-flavoured liquor while writing them and some of it spilled out of his mouth – and the truth is, I can really imagine him doing just that. He’s so excessive somehow, so full of extra gestures and obvious greed. It’s like he’s just finished cramming a box of cakes into his mouth a second before you see him.
And the only thing he could find to clean his hands and his mouth were these letters, apparently.
I mean, they’re just an unmitigated disaster. But worse than that: he’s clearly done it on purpose. He wants me to tell him off, he actually wants me to – though if he thinks it’s going to be that easy he’s mistaken.
I’m a professional person, for fuck’s sake. I can’t be goaded into the kind of thing Woods did, by a misspelling of the word ‘potato’. Even if there’s no godly reason why the word ‘potato’ is there in the first place. Even if I can see his face behind my eyes when I close them, all heavy-jawed and somehow much more perfect than I’d ever allowed myself to think he was.
It’s the hair, I think; that thick maze of toffee-coloured hair, as though someone dipped him in something sticky and delicious only a moment before. Or maybe it’s the tender shape of his mouth, caught between the heaviness of the rest of his face – that near sullen jawline, that broad, clear brow.
Those eyes of his, all hazy with longing as though he’s been left out too long on a summer’s day. They say things he doesn’t want to or can’t quite make himself, those eyes, and they’re the first thing I think of when I picture myself going to tell him off.
Even though I’m absolutely not going to do that. I’m not. I’m just going to spend the rest of the day as I had planned – calm and collected. If he wants to do things like this, he’s entitled to. But he’s not getting a rise out of me in return.
He’s just going to get me walking to the cubicle he occupies at five p.m. Everything about me glacial somehow, in a way that should be comforting. It should, but it’s the strangest thing. By the time I turn the corner into his little nook – almost an office, if it were not for the lack of a door on one end – I’m not comforted by the coolness I’ve descended into at all.
It’s too cool. It’s almost as though I’ve coated myself in a pane of glass, and I can watch all of the things I’m doing and understand them. But I can’t control them. When I try to, my fingers butt up against that sheet of something see-through.
And this feeling gets a hundred times worse when I see him.
‘Hey, Ms Harding,’ he says, all innocence. That big body of his folded into his tiny little swivel chair, one side of his collar sticking up ridiculously. A hint of bemusement touching those soft, entirely fuckable lips.
Which is never a good thought to start things off with.
And then there’s the fact that he licks a stamp the moment I’m focused on him, in a very deliberate sort of way. His tongue curls out to cover the little scrap of nothing completely. Those completely innocent eyes intent on me the whole way through it.
Everything slow, so slow, and so … slick, somehow. Does he know how slick that looks, how lewd? He has to know, and yet sometimes when I look into his eyes I can’t be sure. It’s like there’s a veil over his gaze, and the second something dirty happens he just draws it all the way down, over that sweet boyishness.
Then waits, to see what I will do. He’s struck the match. Do I want to put the fuse to that little flickering flame?
‘Can I help you with something?’ he asks, and then he licks the damned thing again.
Would it be so bad if I just got a fistful of his hair and shoved his face into the carpet? He doesn’t look as though it would be a bad thing. He looks as though he wants me to grab a fistful of hair and shove his face between my legs.
‘I really hope I don’t have to tell you these letters are unacceptable,’ I start. It comes out much better than I thought it would. More like a boss and less like a sex maniac.
‘Really?’ he asks, and it’s then that I start to hate him. It’s not even a start, in truth. I loathe him already. I despise his fake innocence and his stupid handsome face and these letters, covered in stuff that most likely fell out of his gorgeous mouth. And unfortunately, all of these things make me ball them up and throw them at him before I speak.
‘I’m not sure how you could fail to realise. You’ve misspelled the word and.’
He blurts out a little oops, which seems to send me into some sort of tailspin of indecision. On the one hand, the word sounds genuine. The breath he puffs out sounds real, and his big eyes go bigger. In fact, by this point they’re so big that they’re starting to swallow me whole.
But on the other hand … he misspelled the word and. Twice. I’m not sure how that’s possible.
‘Do you have some sort of issue I’m not aware of, Benjamin?’
He shrugs. He actually shrugs.
‘Nope,’ he says, and I don’t know what I despise most. His sloppy, ridiculous approach to things, or his utter American-ness. Both just sing out of that nope, so blatant and too much for me to handle. ‘I guess I just made a mess of things, huh?’
‘You
