What the Heart Needs (12 page)

He smelled the coffee as soon as he opened his office door. He had figured Hannah must have just brought him his morning cup until he heard the five shrill beeps announcing the completion of the brewing process. He looked over and saw the pot and laughed a big, appreciative laugh.

It wasn’t often that someone got to him, but Hannah was a real card. He guessed she had chosen the “ignore it and let it blow up in our faces” option. And she was trying to distance herself from him as much as possible. He had to hand it to her, it was pretty damn clever. But it wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t going to let it work. She wasn’t going to win that easily.

Though what she was trying to win was beyond him. They were both attracted to each other. They both wanted more than a professional relationship. But, unlike him, he supposed… she had a job to worry about. There was no one who was going to fire him. There was no chance of him losing his financial stability. But Hannah did run that risk. And as much as he didn’t want to admit it, she was right. Even if they had an affair, the awkwardness of that situation would eventually lead to stress and mistakes which would lead to her termination. Or even if that wasn’t the case, she might hate him after and quit.

Either way it was definitely a lose-lose for her.

But that didn’t stop him from wanting to make it a challenge. Even if he wasn’t going to get her in the end, he didn’t want her to think she had the upper hand.

And there was something obnoxiously adorable about her when she got riled up. She always got very proper in her speech, almost haughty like a grammer teacher who corrects you when you say “who” instead of “whom”. Despite the complete serenity to her face, there was something in her eyes that suggested she wanted to throttle you, to verbally beat you down until you screamed “uncle”.

It was altogether too sexy to meet a woman who was not intimidated by him and could put him in his place in a way that you weren’t even sure it happened until it was over.

She really was a pretty phenomenal woman to have around.

She didn’t plan on EM playing games with her. She never would have even thought it was something in his wheelhouse. But then there she was, every half-hour, being summoned into his office to do some banal task- open the blinds, find his “missing” flash drive, to water the office plants.

He had an unlimited list of reasons he needed her to be in his presence. And evertime she walked in the room, he had a light in his eye and the edges of his lips kept twitching as if he was trying to hold back a smile.

Hannah walked in the room for the sixth time that day to find the paper he had somehow lost after she had handed it to him a few minutes before. She was getting fed up with the interruptions. She had her own work that she needed to get done and his voice over the intercom was getting more and more grating every time she heard it.

Though if she were being honest with herself, the constant demands really had all but eliminated the awkward embarrassment she thought she would be carrying around forever.

She grabbed a pile of papers off his desk, slamming each piece down on the surface looking for the missing page. She was on the second to the last in the pile when EM’s voice interrupted her internal string of curses directed at him.

“Oh,” he said, holding up the page. “I was holding it all along.”

Hannah turned away without comment, not trusting herself to speak because the only things she could think of were horrible ways in which he could rot in hell.

“Oh and please,” he said and she could hear the irritating humor in his voice. When did he suddenly get a personality? “Help yourself to a cup of coffee. I seem to have a new pot of my own.”

Hannah slammed her office door behind her and she could swear she heard a laugh from EM’s office.

“That son of a…”

“Now is that any way for a lady to talk,” Tad’s voice asked from her couch where he was, yet again, taking an afternoon siesta. She looked over at him, her frustration creasing between her eyebrows and her jaw in a rigid line. He smiled with a raised eyebrow. “Something wrong?”

Hannah made a long frustrated grunting noise, like one from a five-year-old when you tell them they’ve watched enough television for the day. She raised an arm and pointed toward EM’s office. “Him,” she said, sitting down roughly in her office chair.

Tad sat up, shaking his head. “Actually he seems to be in a weirdly good mood today. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile before. And I heard him laugh earlier right when he got in.”

“Yeah well he’s being a douche to me,” Hannah said, stabbing a pen into the holder.

“Now why would that be?” Tad asked, in a voice as much question as accusation.

“Do you ever see a cat when it catches a mouse? Like how it lets it go only to catch it again or pretends to eat it?”

“Yeah…”

“He’s the cat,” Hannah said, putting her feet up on her desk and staring at the ceiling.

“So his end game here is to eat you,” Tad asked in an altogether too derogatory tone.

“Oh, gross, Tad,” Hannah scoffed, throwing a calculator across the room at him.

Tad grabbed it and toyed with it between his hands, laughing. “Hey I’m just trying to get the whole picture here.

“Yeah well that is not the picture. This picture would be in an entirely different gallery. Like one of the French revoluation, the people being crushed between the boot of the monarchy or something.”

“You’re a mouse. You’re a destitute French civilian. Hannah-Banana, why would you ever accpet yourself as the victim?”

Hannah looked up at Tad then. For someone so silly and carefree, he really was wise in unexpected ways. And he was right. She was letting herself feel unjustly used. This wasn’t a monarchy. True, he was her boss but no where in her employment contract did it say she couldn’t put him back in his place when he overstepped his boundaries. She wasn’t going to be the goddamn mouse anymore.

--

But that was before everything changed. It had been a week since the making out in her office after hours. And it only took two days for EM to stop pushing at her buttons when she would no longer let herself be so frustrated by it. Eventually things slipped back into their usual rhythem and she could feel like she could breathe again.

Then, when walking across the floor lobby, she heard her name being whispered. Followed by “every guy who looks her way” and “I knew she was a slut the second I laid eyes on her”.

Hannah felt her spine straighten, her stomach doing flip-flops in a way that made her instantly nauseated. Were they actually talking about her? Why would anyone call her a slut? And no guys ever looked her way, let alone paid her any attention. Maybe she had misheard. There were so many women at EM Corporation. Hannah could easily sound like Briana or Joanna or any number of other names. Hannah shrugged off the incident as a misunderstanding and went about the rest of her day.

Though that wasn’t the end of it. Every day she would come into work, there would be something small. Things so small that, at first, she convinced herself it was just her mind playing tricks on her. That maybe she was feeling guility about what had happened with her and EM and she was projecting it out onto other people.

There were sideways looks and sometimes downright hostility aimed at her from other people’s eyes. And there was always a constant hush whenever she walked into the room or got on the elevator or walked into the lobby. The kind of hush one remembers from middle school caddiness when girls would gossip about other girls behind their backs.

Then one evening she was sitting in the stairwell, just trying to get away from everyone and everything for five minutes. And she heard female voices coming from below her.

“Yeah, I heard she had sex with Aaron from IT,” one voice said.

“Oh not just Aaron. It sounds like she’s slept with half of the guys at the company. Including both of the Michaels brothers. It’s disgusting.”

That did sound disgusting, Hannah silently nodded. Where did a woman think all that sleeping around would get her?

“Gross,” the first voice responded. “I mean both of the Micheals are hot as hell but why would they nail someone who has been with all of their male employees?”

“Yeah, well. Elliott I guess just reached for what was easiest. He doesn’t have the time to go out and wine and dine someone. So his assistant is the most logical choice. I guess he thought she was pretty.”

The voices got closer and closer and Hannah felt herself wanting to slink into the walls. She hadn’t been paranoid. The last few weeks of feeling like something was wrong wasn’t all in her head. People really were talking about her. Not only were they talking about her, because she could handle that, people talk. But they were spreading downright lies about her. Bad enough they might have thought she was sleeping with one person at the office, but how had it gotten to the scale where she had been in practically every man’s bed?

Who would start a rumor like that? Of course rumors spread and get fabricated until they are no longer even a hint of what they started out as. But still… someone had started it. Someone had disliked her so much that they had accused her of screwing around at work.

She had never even met Aaron from IT for god’s sake!

Just then the gossiping women came into view. The older of the two, a harsh brunette, nudged her red-headed companion and glanced pointedly down at Hannah. They opened the door to the floor and walked through and Hannah could hear as it closed, “Ew her? Really? She’s chunky.”

Hannah cringed. She had been called worse in her time, but women always knew how to hit below the belt. She wasn’t a lithe little supermodel, but neither was the redhead. What was it about women who down talked someone who wasn’t even that different from themselves?

Maybe it because she had grown up in a very small, close-knit town but there had never been much bullying. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s mother. No one would be able to get away with it. Of course people talked, perhaps more so because everyone had everyone else in common, but it never got to the point where it was downright malicious. Apparently it had ill-prepared her for life in a big, bad city.

Around five that same afternoon, there was a knocking at her door from the main lobby. She mumbled a “come in” despite wishing for nothing more than to be alone. Tad popped his head in, his eyebrows furrowed.

“How ya doing?” he asked, closing the door quietly.

Hannah looked up at him, her face pale and tired. “Didn’t you hear? I’m the goddamn whore of Babylon. And apparently business is really good.”

Tad sighed deeply. He looked uncharacteristically solomn, sad. “I don’t know what the hell is going on around here,” he admitted, coming up to her desk and rubbing her shoulders. “It’s never this bad. Whoever is fueling this must really hate you.”

“For what?” Hannah exploded, spinning her chair around to face him. “I haven’t done anything to anybody here! I’ve been nothing but nice to the ladies. And I almost never even speak to the men. I don’t understand what I could have done to piss someone off so much.”

Tad shrugged, perching himself on her desk. “Women are terrible sometimes. Maybe you smiled at her boyfriend or she’s just jealous of you. Who knows really.”

“And I’m chunky,” Hannah mumbled, looking altogether mopey and sounding sorry for herself.

Tad scoffed, looking genuinely affronted. “Who said that?”

“That red-headed bitch from the fourth floor.”

“Easy, tiger. The last thing you want is for it to circulate that you’re talking crap about them now.”

“Could it really get any worse, Tad?”

Tad jumped up suddenly, pulling Hannah out of her chair and enveloping her in his arms. “Listen to me, Hannah-Banana,” he said, his chin resting on her head. “all of this is going to blow over if you don’t play into their hands. I know it sucks right now. You’re just gonna have to take it on the chin. Don’t let anyone see that it is getting to you. They’re like the lions. And you’re the gazelle with a broken leg. You cant let them see your weakness or they are going to take you down.”

Hannah nodded into Tad’s chest, holding on as if her life depended on it. She didn’t realize how badly she needed a hug, some comfort from someone who actually cared about her.

Tad let her go a moment later. Smiling at her, he playfully punched her on the chin. “You can take it,” he said with a wink, kissed her forehead and left.

She heard the elevator chime as he left. EM was at a dinner meeting so Hannah went into his office to grab the coffee pot and take it to clean in the kitchen. The office was pleasantly quiet. With no one there to glare at her or whisper behind her back, she felt the hours of stress slowly melting away. She rolled her shoulders as she stood at the sink.

Tad was right. She had to get over it. So what if they talked? It wasn’t true. She knew that. Tad knew that. What anyone else thought was irrelevant. She was there to get her job done, not make friends. And she certainly didn’t want to be friends with anyone in the building after how they were acting anyway.

Hannah put the coffee pot away and walked back into her office. It was then that she noticed a note slipped under her door.

With mounting dread, Hannah walked over and picked it up. She unfolded it to find a typed note with two lines:

Being a slut wont get you anywhere. HE’S NOT YOURS.

She felt her blood-pressure rise. She ripped the page into a hundred little pieces with shaking hands and threw it in the garbage.

Hannah reminded herself not to take the bait, to not let it get to her. People did things like that to get under your skin. And if they got under your skin, then they won. She would be damned if she let some catty coworker get the better of her.

It did bother her, though, that someone was lurking around the office after hours and leaving ominous notes to her. Someone was in her personal office. Someone defaced her property.

Hannah shook off the sensation, but couldn’t get rid of the pit of dread in her stomach as she drove home that night.

--

She had tried to let positivity be her prevailing emotion, every morning giving herself a pep talk on the drive to work, convinced it had to get better eventually. Only it didn’t. The sour looks from the women met her everywhere she went. The whispers became less concealed, more openly malicious. And then there were the men. Men who had never even cast a glance in her direction before were outright leering at her now.