“And then flip it over, there should be a slider to release the battery, so you can remove it.”
The slider takes a moment to open, but then I'm holding the battery in my hand. It's heavy, and about as wide as the laptop. “Ok, now what?”
“Shake out all those electrons.”
“Your credentials are getting less believable by the second,” I mutter. That can't be real. That sounds so unsciencey. Is he pulling my leg, or do I actually need to do that?
Instead of just asking for clarification, I say, “I think you’re just enjoying telling me what to do.”
He just chuckles. “I have been known to abuse my power.”
A beat goes by, and I do end up shaking the battery, just in case. Then I feel like an idiot and put it down.
“What do I do next?”
“Now we just let it sit for a minute,” he answers simply.
“We just sit here?”
“For a minute.”
A few seconds of silence stretch before us. Somehow the quiet is what makes me squirm. It's just the sound of his breath and mine. It's comfortable, even though the memory of the other day lingers over our interactions.
I kind of want to apologize for making this whole mate bonding dilemma harder than it already is. But that apology has a number of other struck through thoughts that I didn’t get to first, about the broken nose and broken glasses, and honestly anything else I might have broken at this point.
“I gotta apologize again,” he says, like he’s thinking all the same things I was.
“Not again, you don't,” I return quickly, because he's beating me in the apologies department and leaving me in the dust.
“I have to,” he says, concern in his voice. “I mean, I understand the whole mate bonding thing is highly unusual to humans–”
“Oh, please. This is by no means the worst thing to happen to me at work,” I scoff, really just to get him to stop worrying about the comfort level of humans. It’s also kind of an attempt to get him to stop apologizing all the time. Really, I need him to stop.
“...What was?” Khent asks after a beat.
I probably should have anticipated him asking me that, I did put it out there. But my arms close around my chest and I have to stop myself from reactively turning away, the phone cord wrapping around my shoulder with the movement of my swivel chair.
“It was, uh, at the last company I worked at,” I say, my voice falling into a softer register, almost hushed. It's not a secret, but it's not something I exactly want to think about.
Sometimes I tell the story of my biggest dating mistake at parties or among friends, sometimes as my bid to win some verbal ‘Dated the World's Biggest Asshole’ contest. It’s usually a third glass of wine kind of story. Ultimately, I tell it to make people laugh, to gasp and say 'oh my god, what a dick'.
“I dated one of my coworkers for a while,” I admit out loud and cringe a little, the words like admitting some huge misstep. Still, I can't fault myself for choosing that relationship, I was younger and it had been exciting precisely because it was the wrong choice. “We were in the same department. At first that made it easy for us to talk to each other, we bonded over complaining about the same things at our job.”
Khent hums a little, a note of safeness that nudges me along.
I sit forward and tap my fingers on the desk. As much as revealing this in a plain, non-joking way makes me want to curl into a ball of shame, I want to see him. I want to watch his expression, to try to read his thoughts from his posture. But I also know that would be a mistake. We shouldn’t be trying to get to know each other any better.
“But he was a bit competitive with me. If our boss told me I did a good job on something, he would take it like some kind of personal insult. One day, our boss hinted that I was due for a promotion. And James– well. My ex went and told our friends that I had slept with the boss to get it. And when I confronted him about it, he said it was a joke. Just a joke.”
This is the part where my voice shakes a little as I tell it. In the quiet of my office, confessing into the receiver, it's much more evident than at parties, where my friends usually explode into outrage and giggle madly over another round of drinks.
I don't know what I want Khent to say in response to this. All I know is I hope maybe someone like him would understand. Maybe he'll see how these memories hang over me and steer me.
At worst, maybe he'll laugh.
“He said this while you were still dating?” Khent asks, and it strikes me as odd.
It's not something I had ever really considered. Would it have made more sense if it had happened after we had broken up?