Lucas – 1. chapter

She sat at her desk, listening to furious footsteps pounding toward her office.

“Idiot,” he bit out through clenched teeth.

He walked past her desk without stopping and disappeared into his office. She had never heard him slam a door before, but this time she expected him to. He didn’t. Instead, he turned right back around and came back out.

“That asshole didn’t do it. I’ve got the presentation of the year in half an hour, and I don’t have the materials for it!”

He didn’t wait for her reaction and stormed back into his office just as abruptly. She heard him drop into his chair.

“Hi, is your boss here?” a bright voice chimed from the doorway behind her.

She turned around.

“He is, but you don’t want to go in there right now.”

“Bad day?” the coworker whispered, leaning into the doorway, trying to peek all the way into his office.

Lucia simply nodded.

“I’ll come back later,” the visitor decided and vanished.

Lucia let out a deep breath and dropped her forehead limply onto her knees. Her thoughts started racing.

Help, don’t help, …

After a moment, she slowly stood and headed down the hallway toward the kitchenette. At the machine, she watched the stream of brown chocolate pouring into the cup, lost in thought.

If I help, he’ll start digging into it. Knowing his stubbornness, he probably will.

A shot of milk.

Everything could come out, and I’m out of a job. On the other hand, if I don’t help and this project doesn’t work out, heads will roll. His first. And I’ll be out of a job anyway.

And one extra shot of chocolate.

She picked up the cup and walked back to her office at the slowest pace imaginable. She sat down and stared into the drink.

And how do I know another boss would be any better? …Well, only someone from inside the company can move up. And given the options… my wonderful, quiet little job is gone.

From the boss’s office came the sound of furious rifling through papers and low muttering. She bit her lip thoughtfully for another moment, then sighed in resignation. She stood up, closed the door from her office to the hallway, and went to stand in his doorway.

He was sitting with his elbows on the desk, his face buried in his hands. Only when he lowered them did he notice her and look up. He would have sent her away immediately if she hadn’t been standing there in that particular way.

She leaned one shoulder against the doorframe, the thumb of that same hand tucked lightly into her pants pocket, just enough for the rest of her fingers to hang loosely at her side. Her legs were crossed, the crossing foot resting on the carpet only by the pointed toe of her high heel, and in her free hand she held some kind of drink. Whenever she stood in his doorway like this, she usually launched into a few sentences dripping with sarcasm. But if he didn’t interrupt her and managed to breathe through the unspoken mockery, he always had to admit she had steered him toward the right solution. He already suspected she had just saved him again. Except she was silent, and she even looked very uncertain, although this posture usually screamed ego.

“I’m listening?” he tried to prompt her.

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” she asked, trying to grab the last straw.

“The last time I saw anything like this was in my junior year of college. I don’t stand a chance of remembering how to do it that fast. Besides, I still need to finish something else, so I don’t even have time to think through a plan without tables.”

She nodded. Took a deep breath in and out, and her mouth made a strange little gesture of decision.

“I’m an assistant because I enjoy this job,” she said, trying to sound firm.

He watched her with increasing tension and nodded silently in agreement.

“If I had to change positions, or if my established job responsibilities changed in any way, I would have to resign. And I really, really wouldn’t want that.”

He thought for a moment and then, shaking his head, said, “I still don’t understand.”

“Could you please repeat that?”

She looked him straight in the eyes so seriously that he didn’t hesitate for even a second.

“You’re an assistant because you enjoy this job. Under no circumstances will anything about that change.”

“And if I were forced to, I would resign.”

He frowned, but repeated, “Yes, if you were forced to, you would resign.”

She nodded, satisfied. She straightened, and as she took the necessary three steps toward him, she moved the cup into her left hand. She reached her right hand across the desk toward him.

“Give me the assignment.”

He raised an eyebrow again, but this time it took him a few seconds to react. His hands moved chaotically over the desk, found a folder, and handed it to her.

“I’ve got twenty minutes, right?” she said, already turning away.

“Seventeen,” he corrected after glancing at his watch.

“I’ll make it,” she said calmly and walked back to her office.

He heard her sit down. The rustle of papers, then the sound of the keyboard. He stared at the empty doorway without moving for a senselessly long time. When he finally snapped out of it and replayed the last few minutes in his head, he decided he must have misunderstood something and needed to check.

He stood up, stood in his own doorway, and looked first at Lucia, more precisely, at her back, and then at her monitor. Yes, under her fingers and under his gaze, the thing that would save his neck in seventeen minutes was taking shape.

“Lucia, do you know how to make pivot tables?”

“I don’t like them, probably like no one does,” she answered the monitor without letting her fingers slow down, “but I’m afraid there’s no other way I can pull all of this together in seventeen minutes.”

She turned back to the assignment, scanned the second page, then the third, checked something again on the second. He stared at her in disbelief.

“You understand this?”

She stopped for a moment, looked in his direction, and then looked him in the face with badly faked surprise.

“And you don’t need to finish your part?”

As if in a dream, he walked back to his desk. He opened the papers and found the section he needed. He reached for a pen, wondering when and why he had decided that his Lucia was a sweet, caring, and meticulous girl who didn’t need to be given any more complicated tasks.

He pulled off the cap, touched the tip to the paper, and in his mind, an image surfaced of her face when she had tried to do the first analysis he had given her. She had screwed it up so completely that when he finally took pity on her after two hours of struggling and took it back, he couldn’t even tell what the original assignment had been. For the specialist department, he had to look it up again in the internal system.

Even a simpler table, one the specialists hadn’t had time for, he had to do himself after her attempts. He scribbled two or three notes on the paper, but his mind wandered again. Back to the time he had asked her to read an analysis and only needed her to find a few answers in it. After several days, she had handed him complete nonsense, which had infuriated him at the time.

He put the pen down and listened.