But then my ‘You should be leaving now’ alarm starts to beep, making us shuffle away from each other. Overlord, I’m not even dressed yet.
“Should we both be late?” he hums, taking in my now borrowed-shirt-less body. One of these days, I’m going to convince him to leave without it.
“That’s a dangerous question,” I return, shivering as his gaze sweeps down my skin.
“We could be very, very late.”
I tilt my neck back and feel the way his tusks graze my skin as he trails kisses down my neck and collar. My hands trace down his shoulders... and start buttoning up his shirt.
We’ve already been very, very, very late twice.
“You go, I’ll catch up,” I tell him. “Probably in the parking lot because you’ll have passed out from not having breakfast.”
“Hasn’t happened yet.”
“One day,” I tug on his tie and he leans in for another kiss goodbye. He doesn’t even fully kiss me back, he’s smiling too hard, the nerd.
Then he’s out to go pick up a change of clothes from his place before work, and I’m standing naked in my kitchen, waffling back and forth between getting ready and kind of staring at the door after him.
I do mean it. I can see a day when our routines will have finally meshed together seamlessly. And I will finally make him see how vital a meal breakfast is.
This has been our routine for the last week or so. Somehow, I still get to work mostly on time, and Bill has observed my abnormally chipper mood of late.
“I don’t want to get into trouble with HR,” I text Khent during a particularly boring meeting, my phone hidden behind a stack of binders I have on the table. “Or Monsters Resources.”
Employee relationships aren’t exactly forbidden, but considering the bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through so the company can guard itself against sexual harassment lawsuits, personal injury suits, property damage filings, and other things, they might as well be.
I’ve led enough employees through exactly that kind of paperwork. I’ve done the explaining what it all means and the legal clauses and how all this is important to maintaining a professional evil work environment.
I’ve seen employees go from puppy love to falling out of love after filling out everything in triplicate. It’d honestly be easier just to make pre-nups for everyone involved.
“Think about the paperwork we'd have to do for MR and HR,” I type, not really giving him a chance to respond to my first text. “Especially after all the paperwork following up the filing cabinet incident.”
Especially considering we were instructed to avoid each other to avoid liability issues.
After a few minutes of me constantly unlocking my phone to see if he responded yet, he sends back, “We’ll be fine.”
He adds a smiley with a capital C instead of a singular parentheses.C:
I like his nonconforming smiley faces. They seem bigger and goofier than the standard parenthesis conveys.
“Still, maybe we can keep things on the down-low at least.”
A little bit later, he sends me a lowercase face.c:
I bite back against my own grin. Who knew there was this adorkable Orc hiding in the IT department all these years?
All around the meeting table, my coworkers look like they’re either falling asleep with their eyes trained on the powerpoint presentation, or like they’ve gone to some deep recess of their soul. No wonder nothing gets accomplished in meetings and we end up repeating everything again in follow up emails.
I school my face into something similarly bored. I wouldn’t want them to wonder what’s up with me by looking excited to get to work.
It was a feeling that was increasingly hard to keep under wraps. My mind would wander into coming up with excuses to interact with Khent at work. The next few days were a blur between the heightened moments of passing notes to each other tucked into documents, pretending not to look at each other too much when we passed in the hallway, but still brushing shoulders. In stolen moments, we’d been exchanging flirty emails that are not nearly as covert as we thought we were, about floppy drives and uploading my data onto his hard drive.
I'm happier than I’ve been in a long time.
The next day, I stop in the office lobby, lingering by the front desk. I’m pretending I have a reason to fritter away moments because I don’t want to go up to my desk just yet. I know I said I wanted to keep things hush at work, but I want one more glance at him before I start my day.
I catch Khent out of the corner of my eye and try not to look too excited at the prospect of running into him in the lobby. We see each other so sparingly in person during work, it gives me a little rush just to walk past him. Something about being around him makes the skirt I'm wearing feel so much shorter.