I round the corner, and might as well have walked into a wall.
I know it's him before I even open my eyes.
I look up and he's got a monitor under one arm and probably a mile of DisplayPort cables bundled under the other.
Suddenly this building with dozens of floors is just too small, and we keep ending up in the same hallway, awkwardly trying to shuffle around each other. It hasn’t gotten any easier.
We don't say anything, we don't look at each other. We move past each other quickly, but also not so quickly like we’re trying to act like we’re avoiding each other.
I don’t know who the charade is for, each other or ourselves.
Gwen is waiting for me in the same empty conference room as before, etching something in the tiniest handwriting ever in her notebook.
She gives me the same polite yet unnerving smile she did when I first met her a month ago. I don't know what it is but I'm convinced she must not be human, even if she appears to be.
“Good to see you, how have you been?” She asks as I sit down, and the question stops me.
Is she asking to be polite, as a greeting, or in reference to the Blood Fever Fiasco?
It's incredibly tempting to just lie and say everything is going well, to whichever one she means. But if she's seen the elevator tapes she knows Khent and I haven't been avoiding each other the way we said we would. She knows how irresponsible we've been.
“Eh,” I say, as noncommittal as a syllable gets, after too many beats have passed. I pair it with a shrug. “Work, y’know.”
She gives me a light, undeserved chuckle, brushing past my terrible conversation to the point of this meeting. She flips a manila folder open. The document text on the inside is also smaller than I can read from across the table.
She interweaves her fingers, propping her elbows up on the table, and lays her chin across her knuckles. I half expect her to reveal fangs as she levels her stare at me.
I brace myself. She doesn't need fangs to terrify me, just the words “security footage”.
“So... out of the woods?” Gwen asks, eyeing me.
I blink. It takes a moment before I realize that she asked me a question. Wouldn't she be the one to tell me that?
“Sorry?”
“Well normally it's supposed to clear up pretty quickly after a bond is solidified, but the process of resisting it tends to draw things out,” she says, like she's informing me of the weather, glancing down to her documents. “And there's no real data on what to expect for how long it affects humans.”
My mind takes longer than it should to realize she's talking about the Blood Fever, and somehow we're not in the middle of firing me.
“So it's really up to you to tell us where you're at in this process.”
“Tell you if I'm still experiencing the Blood Fever,” I clarify, a little more bluntly than I should.
“Yes. And we had discussed it, rewrote some policies during the last month, since we didn't really have anything in place for this kind of circumstance. If you feel you still need it, you're free to take an extra week of sick leave.”
“Even though it lasted more than a week?”
The question falls out of my mouth because it would if this were a policy I was helping to write.
Gwen gives a little shrug, making a face briefly as if to say she knows it's not fair, but that's corporate for you. “You're able to still take that week if you feel you need it.”
Weirdly generous for Evil Inc., but then again that's the card to play to avoid legal action.
I contemplate it. I don't think I'm in a place where taking time off would be healthy. I'd wallow in my pajamas and rewatch twenty seasons of HGTV shows and order takeout for every meal and not shower once the whole time. At least going to work moves me through the motions of resembling a functional human being.
I shake my head.
“I just have a little survey for you to fill out,” Gwen says, and pushes a form across the table.