She takes a hasty sip of her drink and chokes on it, spraying chai everywhere. I feel a small smile tug at my mouth, which I quickly hide as I whip out a handkerchief from my back pocket and start mopping up the mess.
Lola waves me off, producing a wad of paper towels from her bag. “Are you eighty? Who owns a handkerchief?”
“No, and this guy.” I touch my handkerchief to the corner of her mouth. “You have a spot right here.”
I don’t miss the way her lips part.
I think she does like me.
Or parts of me.
She abruptly rolls her yoga ball backward, putting some space between us. “We need to discuss the rebrand of our packaging.”
Right. She’d given me some dumb-ass to-do about researching “cute little pouches women can tuck a spare tampon in.” I pull out my phone and look at her.
“You realize I’m a software engineer and not a graphic designer, right?”
She raises a brow. “Scared?”
I text her the list of options I’ve come up with. Hazel suggested I look on Pinterest for inspiration, and she’s a genius.
Drawstring bag (pineapples, llamas, dogs)
Velvet pouch (crazy cats)
Anything with pom-poms
Bag with stupid inspiration quote
Anything Kate Spade
I also have a spreadsheet, product cost per piece and production times. I nailed it. Packaging isn’t hard—it’s mostly point, click, shop.
She sets her phone down. “Wow.”
“Fuzzy bunnies, puppies, baby seals—cute sells to women. You can’t help yourself. Big eyes, chubby cheeks and squishy bodies activate your mesocorticolimbic system and give you a major high. The more that high gets triggered, the more you seek it out.”
“You think our tampon packaging should be addictive,” she says dryly and then ostentatiously taps the trash can icon on her screen. “You need a do-over. The African artisans creating our pouches encountered technical issues ordering supplies. They have two thousand units of pink beads we have to incorporate.”
“So now we have to redo the packaging to match. It’s like making the drapes match the carpet.”
Her face colors. “You’re disgusting.”
Okay, false alert.
My boss does pick up on some innuendos—and she doesn’t like me.
At all.
Dev
AT SEVEN IN the morning on a Saturday, San Francisco’s Mission District is torn between waking up and getting the day started and going back to bed to shake the Friday night hangover. When I park in front of Calla for some covert investigation, I spot two drunks passed out in nearby doorways. The snack vendors trundling their carts up the street bob and weave around them. Even the cinnamon scent of fresh churros can’t erase the stink of days-old alcohol and piss.
Lola gave me the alarm codes for the door on my second day of work. This might have been a gesture of good faith, or it might have been insurance against a repeat of what happened after I accidentally set the alarms off when I arrived at 6:30 a.m. on my first day of work. I’ve never needed much sleep—a good thing given my chronic insomnia—and I like an early start.
Just in case I run into anyone, I’m wearing my usual work uniform of jeans, a button-up shirt and a tie. Today’s neckwear selection is the horny prep school special—a big, bold, look-at-me-or-better-yet-look-down-and-admire-my-awesome-hugeness number with pink-and-maroon stripes. No one’s around to appreciate it, however, when I enter.
The building is quiet, the lights off. Sunlight filters through the skylights and ricochets off the stupid disco ball hanging from the ceiling. It’s immediately clear people have once again failed to clean up after themselves. In some start-ups, engineer ego and the bro-culture keeps trash lying around. Calla’s engineers are simply oblivious, pushing code and driving toward launch while their dirty coffee cups overflow the kitchen sink, spawning mold and mutant germs.
I rearm the door and wage brief but effective war on the kitchen. The sink takes heavy casualties—a Hello Kitty mug that resembles a petri dish and various fossilized Tupperwares. Once I’ve got clean coffee cups lined up by size to dry, I place an online order for disposable coffee cups—the organic, compostable, made-by-some-worthy-charity cups that Lola prefers. Order coffee cups is probably on her to-do list, but her action items list is long and she refuses help.
OCD temporarily placated, I prowl my workplace, looking for magically delicious clues. It’s really freaking quiet, despite the occasional siren or car horn burst from the outside world. Everyone seems to have dutifully taken her laptop home for the weekend. My spying plans were stupid anyhow and hanging around Calla is a colossal waste of time. I should turn the theft over to my lawyer, except I sort of like my ringside seat for the Lola show. I’m not sure what, if anything, is happening between us, but for the first time in a long time, I’m not bored.
Wait.
Maybe not everyone has taken her hardware home.
Light glows dimly from the far side of the workspace. I follow it straight to Lola’s office.
And...wow.
Lola is truly hard core. Or dead. She’s curled up underneath her desk in a ball. It must be more comfortable than it looks because when I check, she’s not dead—just sound asleep on a yoga mat, head pillowed on her arm.
It feels like eternity while I watch her sleep, staring at the soft curve of her cheek. Her lips part ever so slightly, Sleeping Beauty waiting for a kiss, although I prefer Anne Rice’s dirty version to the happy cartoon princess story. I itch to crawl under the desk with her, wrap my arms around her and kiss her awake.
Peel back the cardigan she’s draped over herself like a blanket and taste her from those perfect lips to her bare toes. There are so many places I could start. All I have to do is reach out, to begin. I’ve thought about it more than I’ll ever admit. What I don’t know, though, is if she thinks about me. I think she might have a crush on my body, but I could be nothing more than her intern.
The strap of her tank top slips down one strong, toned arm when she shifts. Lola may not make time to go home, but she definitely makes time to work out. There are sculpted muscles beneath the soft skin. Somehow she feels almost naked, as if sleeping Lola is magically more vulnerable than awake, working Lola.
I don’t need Jack to tell me this staring thing is wrong. You don’t creep on a sleeping woman, and if you do, a restraining order and a long talk with Officer Not-So-Friendly are just a few of the well-deserved presents Santa Claus will deliver for Christmas.
So I force myself to walk away and pull out my phone. Not to take pictures—although I’m tempted—but to call for reinforcements. Ten minutes later, I’m armed with a chai latte courtesy of Uber Eats and ready to poke Sleeping Beauty.
In the sweeter versions of the fairy tale, the prince awakens Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. Anne Rice’s prince gets straight to the screwing, crossing all dubious consent lines. My beauty is asleep, though, and that limits my options. As much as I’d like to kiss her awake, she hasn’t told me yes. Yet. I thump the door frame with my free hand.
“Room service,” I bark at her comatose figure.
Lola wakes in a rush, shooting upright and