Page 34 of Charmed by the Obsessive Boss

The screen goes dark, square by square. The last to go is Margaret's and I catch the glint of her glasses, a nod, and then the wall is a black rectangle with my floor plan still ghosting across it. The room is suddenly enormous. The building hums softly around us and the sound of my own breathing seems to fill the glass.

Roman hasn't moved. His head is bowed, and under my palm the muscle in his shoulder is trembling very slightly. I take my hand away and he turns the chair slowly to face me. He's pale. His eyes are the gray-green of river water at dusk and they're red at the rims.

"You came," he says very low.

I don't trust my voice. I push the foil package across the table instead, the whole warm weight of it, and watch him look down. He doesn't touch it.

"Charlotte says it's extras," I say.

He makes a sound I've never heard from him, a small cracked breath that's half a laugh, and presses the heel of his hand against his eyes. I wait. The mill ticks around us. Somewhere below us, deep in the dark, the Drapers sleep in their long rows, waiting for Monday.

"I've got a lot to put in the vat," I say when I can. "If Maine wants yarn by Wednesday I can't waste the night." I tuck a loose curl behind my ear. My hand's still not steady. "You can come watch. You can't talk."

He looks up.

"Not yet," I say. "Just come."

Chapter 8 — Roman

For forty-one minutes I do the hardest thing I've ever been asked to do, which is nothing.

I follow her down the forty-two stairs in silence, through the dark carding room, into the dye house. She hits a bank of switches and the long low room blinks awake in pieces.

The steam comes first, rolling off the big tubs in slow white sheets. Then the smell, wet wool and earth and something sharp and green underneath, and the murmur of the vat itself, a deep, patient bubbling. She has an apron over my head before I can reach for it, knots it at the small of my back without a word.

The rubber boots are exactly where I left them on Friday. The only sign that she's remembered anything is the very slight twitch at the corner of her mouth when I sit on the crate and pull them on.

"Eat," she says. It's the first word she's spoken since the conference room. She puts the foil package in my lap.

I unwrap it. A cinnamon roll, the size of a fist, still faintly warm from the heat of the room.

The icing has been applied by someone with an abundance of goodwill and very little control of a butter knife. It's thick on one side and absent on the other, a long white trail runs down the back of the foil as if it tried to escape. I look at it for a long time.

I eat it slowly, in small bites, because I can't seem to eat it any other way. It tastes of butter and brown sugar and a nine-year-old's good intentions.

Somewhere around the last third my eyes sting and I look hard at a rack of dripping hanks until it passes.

She doesn't look at me. She's working.

I've never watched her work without talking. On Friday I was too busy pretending to be unimpressed. Now I just watch, with the apron stiff against my chest and the heat on my face. She checks the vat with the flat of a wooden paddle and tests the surface with a fingertip.

She skims something off the top, reads a dial and a thermometer and a notebook in her own crooked hand. She never hurries and she never stops. When she takes the first hank of wool and sinks it into the dark with both arms, I see the muscle in her forearms bunch under the freckles. A damp curl comes loose and sticks to her cheek and she doesn't notice.

She lifts. It comes up green.

And she holds her breath.

It's only a tiny thing. I'd have missed it if I weren't watching her instead of the wool. She's seen this ten thousand times, surely more, and she still goes perfectly still for the three or four seconds it takes the green to deepen and darken and turn that cold, impossible blue.

She still waits for it as though it might not come. Then it does, her shoulders let go, and the smallest smile crosses her face, private as a prayer.

I think: I'm going to love her until I die.

I sit there with an empty piece of foil in my hands and let the thought finish itself. It doesn't feel like a revelation. It feels like a fact I've known for a while.

She hangs six hanks on the rack, wipes her hands on a rag. When she turns there's indigo up to her elbows and the steam has curled her hair into a red halo, and she looks at me for the first time in forty-one minutes, directly, with her arms crossed under her chest.

"Okay," says Rosey. "Talk."