Kate Canterbary

"What's the real reason I'm a hard pass? Because it doesn't matter whether I find a pen and show my work all over the back of an arm-long CVS receipt right now. It doesn't matter whether I can remember where my stats come from. It only matters that you passed before I logic'd through the odds of us sitting next to each other on this flight."

I still had my coffee cup tucked against my chest like a shield…or a security blanket. I wasn't sure there was a substantive difference between the two, not in my current predicament. "While that was—uh—bizarre, I'm looking for a specific skill set."

Zelda's brows creased as a flash of understanding crossed her eyes. "Yeah, about that. Which job did I apply for?"

She had a streak of blue hair right behind her ear. I noticed it only when she tucked her hair back. I'd noticed it sixteen times. "Auditing assistant."

"—and push huge amounts of transactions through data-mining programs to identify trends and anomalies." I stared at her, waiting for another murmur. It didn't come but—twenty. "How is this even interesting to you, Zelda? That's what I don't understand. Even if your background and experience had the slightest bit of overlap with the role, I still don't understand how this job would interest you for more than ten minutes."

She scanned the document on my screen, touched her fingertips to her lips. She was quiet a moment. I had to believe she was searching for a way to agree with me while maintaining she was the ideal candidate. I'd let her have that. I could be right without being a jackass about it. I did it all the time.

But then she grinned. "I'll build you a spreadsheet right now. Tell me what you want it to do for you."

I gulped. Twenty-one.

"What? No. Don't—don't do that." I lifted a hand to wave away her reach for the zipper of her backpack but that sent a snap of pain through my shoulder. A snarl rasped in my throat as I eased back. "You don't have to do that. Okay? I believe you. You're an Excel ninja."

Bent at the waist with her hands frozen on her bag, she frowned at me. "I'm sorry. I didn't hear anything you just said because I think you growled. Like, a second ago. A growly-soundy thing. That came from you. Right? That happened?"

She reached over, patted my forearm. I tipped my chin down to match the sensation of her hand on my body to its physical form. It didn't make sense to me that it felt this way while looking like an ordinary hand. Her fingernails were painted mint green and, by my estimation, she wore at least twelve tiny rings, and she was going to melt my skin off.

"It's okay," she said, nodding. "We won't talk about it anymore." She removed her hand. I frowned at my arm because, for the first time in forever, I wanted to find out how it felt for my skin to melt off. I wanted to know the beginning and end of that sensation. "You tell me about these statements. That way, I can agree with you and you can have a single moment of happiness in your otherwise tyrannical and obsessively pessimistic day."

Well…fuck me.

Ash rubbed the back of his neck. "There was only one way to hear it, Zelda." A quiet laugh moved through him as he spared me a quick glance. He was frowning but it was still a smile. I kind of loved that smile from him. "I can't believe you said that. My god. 'Fresh wood for Grandma.'"

"We were talking about breakfast," I said, my tone tart.

"Yeah, that widower down the road eats well at breakfast," Ash replied.

With a gasp, I slapped a hand over my mouth. "Ash Santillian, you filthy bird."

"That wasn't what I meant. You heard it that way," he replied, feeding my words back to me.

That was before I reached for a woman's breast without her enthusiastic interest and then had to sit next to her for three more hours.

I was certain I could stare out the window that long. That was my only option as I saw it. I couldn't open my laptop and bang out a few reports while we pretended my hand hadn't been close enough to the underside of her breast to feel the heat of her. I couldn't pick up the mess I kept creating with Zelda

"It's funny that this is your chivalry," she said, paused at the entrance. "Of all the ways for you to show any gendered deference, you choose the ladies-first route here."

I had fifteen different things to say to her. Most of them contradictory and too opaque to form into clear thoughts. Most of them lurked around the reality that I didn't know how to interact with Zelda. She didn't fit into a tidy LinkedIn headline. She wasn't the standard formula of adjective, job title, career goal. And she was unlike anyone else in my life.

"We'll wait for you to get dressed, honey. I'm still waiting to hear about your injuries though it does seem Zelda has you well in hand."

If you only knew.

I was too busy scowling at my mother and begging her with my eyes to shut the hell up to realize Zelda was sliding out of my hold. "I should really"—she waved at her wrinkled clothes and ran a hand through her dark hair—"yeah, Ashville. I should really."

With more audience than I wanted for anything in my life, I reached out and twisted her t-shirt around my hand, yanking her back where I wanted her. "No, you shouldn't."

The itchy reality was I couldn't run the office on my own anymore and if Zelda was even half as proficient at management as she was at riding herd on me, I'd survive until I could get someone with an accounting background in there.

And then, maybe we could… No, probably not. Anything I might've interpreted as attraction was an illusion. Chemistry was a product of whiskey for breakfast and muscle relaxers for supper. This wasn't real.

"Are you sure you can't deal with the shirt for one night?"

"I don't know how to sleep with clothes on."

"Mmhmm." I nodded, murmured to myself again. "Mmhmm. This is perfectly reasonable information. Nothing about this is unusual, not when compared with the rest of this day."

Once the straitjacket sling was off, I started working the buttons loose at his collar, my touch professional as hell. I refused to let my fingers brush his heated skin or my mind wander to the fact he was nearly naked, in his bedroom, at night, with me.

When I pulled the shirt off his arms, he blew out a sigh of relief, saying, "This is much better."

"Please explain to me how you came to be bruised up and down and in a sling, right after introducing me to your lovely friend."

"We're not friends." I said this with my cheek on her head. I said this with my arm around her shoulders like she was my life preserver. I said this with a sharp edge in my voice as if I found the suggestion more offensive than the truth. As for the truth, I didn't know what the fuck that was. "We're—I mean, we're—"

"Zelda," she said, meeting my mother's outstretched hand. "I'm Zelda and it's very nice to meet you, Mrs. Santillian."

"Please call me Diana," she replied. My mother met my eyes with a smile that could power the entire city of Boston for a week.

I held Zelda closer. I didn't want to share her.