several others that I won’t bother to list here, mostly because they were far more asinine than phone calls and flowers and fucking. And none of them started with the f sound, which ruined the flow. It didn’t matter. No amount of bullet points could navigate me through this one. I was going to have to try a decidedly un-Joe method. In a daring move for one so dependent on having all of his steps laid out on paper with little dots to the left of them, I ditched the entire list in favor of a more direct approach.
I just showed up at her desk.
How’s that for spontaneity?
I was far less nervous than I thought I would be. I was also a bit less excited than I wanted to be. I think overall I was… pissed off. Not at first, though. Walking through the doors in daylight hours for the first time since I’d downshifted to nights, I felt like I was reliving the last day we had seen each other, but in reverse sequence. I was downright chipper when I passed my old work station and saw the new guy sitting in my place, and completely sociable as I made the rounds to say hey to all my old workmates. But the closer I got to Chloe’s desk, the more I felt like the misunderstanding that led to the belly-down, broken-wheeled crash landing of us before we even got off the ground wasn’t entirely mine. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the distribution of confusion was equal across the board. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that the We should talk… in her card was purposely misleading. It was leading, though, and ambiguous at the very least. And at most it was hugely deceptive if she didn’t think as much as I did that our back-and-forth was headed more forth than back. By the time I took the last five steps to her cubicle, my hope for a potential relationship had cooled into an expectation of some reasonable clarification for why things should have gone the way they did. Besides the whole complication of the Tool being in the picture, I mean. There was no mistaking that what I wanted with Chloe was to reach the Soup Stage.
What I deserved from her, though, was an explanation.
You may think that sounds completely arrogant. I’m sure you’re right.
That’s just the way I am sometimes. Now I have my vampire parts to blame for it.
She was in the middle of a phone call, had a desk strewn with documents and a screen overloaded with content. And I just walked in and stood on the other side of her desk until she noticed me. She might have picked up on my indignant air, or she might have had her mind on other things. Either way, she didn’t light up at the sight of me like I thought she would. Like she used to. Waiting for her to finish her call gave me a chance to consider how purposeful I could make my newfound sense of irritation. All I came up with was, “We still need to talk.” Not exactly the burn I was going for.
She didn’t look game for this. “Can you wait until – ”
“I think now might be good.”
“I’ve got a meeting in ten minutes… ”
“You can cancel it.” That was just rude of me.
I didn’t seem to care all that much.
Chloe walked ahead of me to the kitchenette, and I had visions of my non-beating yet still-breakable heart being dropped with the get well card in the trash can all over again. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to go through a replay of all that. And though the anger in me had pushed aside the tidy speech I had prepared for the occasion, I was sure that whatever I would come up with instead was more than could be contained in a space the size of a not-walk-in closet – and with a drove of corporate drones staggering in and out to get more crullers or top off their French roast sludge. “Let’s go across the street instead. I’d rather not have the creamer witness my humiliation twice in one year.” She gave me a look that said she wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. But she must have been okay with it, because she headed for the door without protest.
I hate to sound like even more of a jerk,