Today a female, with hazel-colored shoulder-length hair, probably around her mid-twenties was occupying the empty desk outside Elliot's office.

"Hey, I'm here to meet Mr. Walters," I say to her.

She smiles her white teeth at me, a little too wide unnecessarily or maybe it's just the way she smiles.

Bad, you! Charlotte.

"I'm Katrina Batista, I'm his secretary and Mr. Walters has made me aware of your job here so I guess I should send you straight to your work unless you have a personal appointment with him?" She says with a tone that signifies that she is implying something here.

I bite the inner pulp of my cheek to stop myself from saying something rude. My day's going just fine and I don't want to ruin it by giving her a piece of my mind.

I lick my lips and reply to her, "I would like to be shown my place of work. I have no personal meeting with Ell- Mr. Walters," I correct myself.

She smiles her wide grin again at me. I have a strong dislike for secretaries who think they are novel creatures just because they work for the boss. Everybody in the company works for the boss, what's so special about them? They behave as if they own the boss.

Huh, I wonder why you're so upset about it, says that nasty subconscious waking up from its long slumber. I mentally scowl at her.

"Just take the elevator on the opposite side of the room. It's a horizontal elevator and it moves a bit fast so mind your head. Press "A" on the panel and it will take you where you need to be. Once you're there, somebody will join you," she says smiling.

This is the reason I have trust issues when it comes to friendships with women. They'll smile and you won't know what's going on inside their head.

I give her a curt nod and follow the orders she gave me.

As I wait for the elevator, I look around at my surroundings. Elliott's office in its entirety is pretty simple and a whole lot of white. I have to give it to Elliot, he put his money where his mouth was. I have seen lots of rich people renovate their office once they have a surplus amount of money coming in, and Elliot is loaded, so he could've easily upgraded his office with creative interiors from different parts of the world, European would've been amazing! But it's nice. It's simple and effective, extravagant but compact, incomplete but wholesome.

Man! I have so much to learn from him.

That's the reason he's a billionaire and I'm a millionaire.

Yeah, you got some extra zeroes and you filled your company garage with Teslas! Can that voice ever shut up?

I hear the ding of the elevator and my attention is back on the task at hand. The door opens to an empty cuboid. I do as the secretary, Katrina had told me. Carefully holding onto the handgrip hanging from the top I wait to have the experience of my life.

And man! She wasn't lying. This shit is crazy fast! I squeal internally as it jerks backward. The inertia of rest resisted my body to move backward but the acceleration on this thing is so fast that it overcame it, making my body lurch back a bit but I am able to control my body because of my hand holding the handgrip

Phew! I survived.

The elevator comes to a stop and I wipe off little sweat droplets from the top of my forehead. I don't even know if they were there or if it is one of my dramatic response moments.

The doors open bringing forth a magnificent view rendering my eyes wide as I view it hungrily, taking it in.

Elliot is standing in front of me, shirtless with his back to me. His jeans are loosely hanging at his hips and on his shoulder rests his folded shirt as he wears a helmet on top of his head, standing near the machinery.

Oh Newton!

The secretary told me that I follow her orders and I will be met by my work.

Such a yummy piece of work, right? My subconscious watches me from over her half-moon spectacles.

I sigh and exhale a loud gust of breath I had been holding as I stare at the sky.

The moment of peace doesn't last long because Elliot turns around, suddenly.

I didn't think I sighed that loudly!

Shit!

There he is, standing with his chiselled and toned chest, sweat dripping body, and that crooked yellow helmet.

But once my eyes are held onto his orbs, how am I supposed to look somewhere else?

Now, this feeling gets me worried. Why is this happening to me?

He brings his hands to his face and removes the helmet. Putting it back at the knob on the wall, he walks toward me. Just when I'm expecting him to stop , he gives me one fine glance and walks past me, brushing his shoulders against mine, softly.

I close my eyes as I inhale the fragrance that I was able to catch onto. He smelled sweet like some kind of flower but refreshing like a fresh morning smell, the kind of smell you get to breathe in if you wake up on an early winter morning.

He smelled like a whole lot of things and it scared me how I could stand here and enumerate all the things he smelled like just by the brush of a shoulder.

I shuddered at that thought. There was some intimate depth to this moment that got me feeling like this. But again, it's just my innate tendency to overthink.

One thing I cannot understand, for the love of my sneakers is, why the fuck am I romanticizing a whiff I got from him.

Something is wrong with me.

This time I can't even blame anybody else except myself.

Wait no!

I can blame him.

He. Elliot. He's the reason I'm going mental.

It's not my fault. The fault is his.

I followed him as I thought it wasn't just a simple - I meant to brush past your shoulder thing. That's what I made up, I think he wanted for me to follow him.

I knocked on the door of the tiny room that I saw him getting into. Gosh! Billionaire but working inside a tiny room inside a huge factory.

I'm genuinely impressed at how grounded he is with his money.

Don't be so quick to judge, maybe he's sitting inside on a million-dollar sofa, chirped my subconscious and for once I stand in agreement with it.

Here I am thinking that I would hear a classic 'come-in' and then I would enter the room and he would be sitting in his rotating chair, but I am frozen speechless as he opens the door and completely knocks out the breath from inside of me.

Talk about cliche, ew!

Fuck! He looks so well dressed!

I bet he looks even better when he's naked!

I blush as that thought crosses my mind.

I lick my lips and tug a piece of hair at the back of my ear. I bite my lip slowly. I don't know what to say, or how to react. This has never happened to me before.

Honestly, I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm feeling really shy.

Ever since he opened the door, I haven't looked up. I keep on looking at my feet. They have never seemed so interesting to me as peculiar as they appear to me now.

Just when I hear his raspy voice say, "Hi Charlotte," do I look up.

And man what a beautiful mistake!

A mistake that I would make again and again because it's my mistake and I should be allowed to make it as and when I require it.

This time, I didn't drop my eyes. I look at him shamelessly. Because why shouldn't I?

That body! Deserves to be seen. All I'm doing is just gratifying it.

Slowly, I look up to meet his eyes after shamelessly checking him out, and much to my surprise, I find him amusedly smirking at me. I'm sure my face says it all because his amused expression converts into a soft laugh. His laugh was so gorgeous as it was of the gentle kind. He was laughing sweetly, not embarrassingly loud.

There's something about his laugh that I can't stop a lopsided grin from emerging onto my face.

This is so tantalising on top of the tension that I feel whenever I'm in a tightly enclosed space with him.

"Please come in, Charlotte," he says, sweetly encouraging me to enter his cubicle.

I don't need to be told twice after the gentle moment we shared. I'll do whatever he says.

That's a thing about me, that I'm so weak to good behaviour.

You have to be nice to me, maybe smile a couple of times, but be warm about it, and I'm done.

I'm so busy looking at the tight room that I don't realise Elliot has stopped walking and I collide with him.

He turns around to see what has happened and me being the clumsy person I am, I step onto something on the floor and end up crashing my face against his chest. Instinctively, his arms wrap around my body, and not loosely. He engulfs me so tightly. Protectively.

It feels ...different.

It feels....nice to be cared for.

Whole my life, I have worked tirelessly and completely spent myself in the process. I didn't let anybody come in between me and my endeavours and just like that, I isolated myself from the charmers of the world.

But Elliot was no charmer. He wasn't even my warmth. He wasn't even mine, to begin with.

But he felt like comfort.

And this is when the real fear stirs inside me, I made somebody my comfort.

My eyes widened in realisation as my cheeks still rested against his chest and his arms hadn't loosened their grip on me, for reasons known to him. I realised that I had opened my door for him to come in.

After thirty seconds, I make some movements to pull away from him.

"Thanks," my voice cracked as I found it very difficult to talk. He made me forget what I came here to do.

"Charlotte, I can't work with you," he says suddenly, his voice loud and frustrated, but breathy at all at once. It was like he was throwing out the words forcefully, against his wish.

I widen my eyes, "what? I don't understand. What did I do," my voice was calm.

He grasps his hair and starts pulling on it, "It's ...you're frustrating. You talk to me like you hate me, you look at me like you want to know me but fuck! You shut me out like you want nothing to do with me," as he says this, I am stunned to my core.

I can't understand how I made him feel like that. Coldness from my frozen heart even hurt his feelings and I live with it every day.

I am so shocked but my mouth is faster than my thoughts are, " I...how? I didn't...," I stop because I don't know what to say.

He points darts at me with his eyes, burning holes at my weakened shield. He has me at his mercy this time with the words he spoke.

I look down, inhale a breath, trying to relax myself in this awfully tense situation. It's one of those situations where what you say can completely change the course of the future.

I must think and talk.

And just like that, the tension is gone because I know what to say.

"Elliot, I know our beginning was wrong but I genuinely don't know you that well to form any judgment about you and I think that's how you feel about me too?"

He doesn't say anything. He gives me a hard to interpret look but it's not gentle or sweet like hi behavior. It's something else and It frustrates me that I can't judge it.

His eyes flicker between mine. My mouth parts slightly and his eyes travel to my parted mouth, if I'm not mistaken. But his gaze doesn't stay there as he looks back up into my eyes again.

My breathing had turned erratic and loud akin to his. His harsh breathing dominated mine.

Suddenly something switches inside him, it's even visible to me. He tilts his body forwards, "so Charlotte, if we're going to be working together, I need something from you."

I search his eyes for some hostility but I find none. All I see is deep, deep, attention.

Damnit! How can I say no when he is looking at me like that.

"What do you want?" I finally say.

His eyes seem a bit victorious and his face appears calm now. Those furrows he had on his forehead, diminished.

He sat at the corner of the table in front of me, as he pulled onto my arm bringing me further to stand in front of him.

He kept an innocent distance between us, as it was mandatory on my behalf.

"I want to know you," he whispered.

He offered me a gorgeous smile after saying that and my stomach is in splits from the butterflies dancing here and there. There's a gleam in his eyes that reminds me of the moon and the stars and the complete lunar system.

When he brings his hand to tug at a strand of hair at the back of my ear, as I had done previously, I breathe out, " I want to know you too."

He smiles at me.

"And for the record, I would have to get to know you to be able to hate you, Mr. Walters," I tease him, carefully.

He is full-on grinning now. Whoa! He's even more gorgeous. What's a step above gorgeous? I wonder to myself. Breathtaking! Right. He's gloriously breathtaking.

"Come with me," he says.

"Where?" I ask him.

"Anywhere," he responds, lamely.

Grinning like an idiot, I nod.

He leads me out the door and I smile like an idiot as I glance at our joined hands.

I have never felt this way.

***
Author's note

Wrote this chapter while eating pizza and some tacos at 10.50 pm.

Perfect combination so this chapter is bound to be tasty. Lol 😂

I swear my sense of humor is funny to me.

Love, Leena ❤❤
Bye-bye, until next time.