Page 8 of Crawl for Me

Sable

M y inbox is already a crime scene by the time I finish my first coffee.

Forty unread, half of them flagged red, the other half CC’d with just enough passive-aggression to raise my blood pressure.

I rub at my temple with the heel of my hand, trying to ignore the headache crawling up the back of my skull.

Like I need more chaos than the last twenty-four hours have already spat at me—the clusterfuck of finding out Noah’s my account lead, dodging him all day by burying myself in client calls, then him offering me a ride to work this morning like we’re carpool buddies…

My head is so far up my own ass I might as well list it as my new primary residence.

“Pop-Tart?” Sam chirps from the other side of the partition. “Strawberry frosted.”

I stick my hand up without looking away from the screen. “Gimme.”

A silver packet lands in my palm a second later. I rip it open with my teeth and sink into the first bite, sugar hitting my tongue like a tiny mercy.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he says in a sing-song voice, smug as hell as he disappears again. “Gratitude noted.”

I sigh and click open my itinerary for the day, already bracing myself for the inevitable avalanche. Sam’s still chirping beside me—something about the vending machine eating his money again—when a shadow cuts across my desk.

I glance over my shoulder, and there he is, hands in his pockets, looking like he wants the ground to crumble beneath him.

“Sable,” he says carefully. “Could you, uh—come to my office? To start walking me through the coordination process?”

Sam’s brow shoots up over the partition. “Ooooh, the new boss man summons.”

I ignore him, roll my eyes, kill my monitor with a tap, and grab my tablet. “Sure. Lead the way.”

We move through the cubicle maze side by side. The low drone of keyboards and muted phone calls fills the air, the kind of soundtrack I usually tune out—but now it feels like it’s pulsing in time with the tension crawling under my skin.

He pulls his office door open for me and waits for me to step in. It’s sterile, incomplete, except for the half-unpacked box slouched in the corner, a lonely mug and a laptop on the desk, and a plant by the windowsill that still has a tag dangling from one leaf.

Silence settles in as he pulls out a folder from the drawer and flips it open.

He really looks like he’s trying to keep his shit together—all composed and efficient—but his knee’s bouncing like it’s running its own marathon under the desk and his finger’s traveling up, hooking under his collar so he can loosen it slightly as his throat works on a hard swallow.

My eyes stick there. The knot of his tie, the stretch of fabric at his throat. Fuck, it’d be so easy tocurl my fingers there, drag him across the desk, and put that mouth back where it belongs.

Stop it, Sable.

I blink hard and pull myself back, shoving that thought right into the mental shredder. “Right. Walkthrough. You seen the client lists yet?”

His shoulders hitch straighter. “Yeah, Marla forwarded them. I looked them over last night.”

“Good.” I swipe my tablet and flick through numbers, deliverables, more numbers. “So you’ve got a baseline, at least. Let’s run through the live ones first.”

For the next ten minutes it’s business—account A is spiraling, account B wants miracles yesterday, account C is the cat that refuses to be herded.

I keep it as polite as I can, but it’s impossible not to notice the faint sheen of sweat gathering under his jaw, how he’s clearing his throat every thirty seconds, and how I can feel the vibrations from that damn bouncing knee through the floor.

“You’re… uh… really good at this, you know that?” he blurts suddenly.

I glance up at him. “Yes, Noah. It’s almost as if I’ve been doing it for five years.”

The corner of his mouth tugs up in either embarrassment or nerves as color climbs his neck, but he ducks back to the screen.

“We didn’t run it like this at Westbrook,” he admits after a second.

“Processes were all over the place. A real mess. This—” his eyes flick to mine. “—this works. You make it work.”

I tip my head, fighting back a smile. “Of course I do.” I scroll further down, sliding another figure into view with my fingertip. “But you’ll have it down in no time,” I say, scrolling to the next column. “Then you can be the one telling me what to do.”

His hand stills, eyes flaring wide. “God—uh, no. I mean—I don’t think I could… tell you what to do.” The words stutter out of him, nerves awkwardly spilling all over the polished desk.

He clears his throat, shifting like the chair’s suddenly made of nails. His knee knocks the underside of the desk with a thud, and his hand shoots down to still it, knuckles white against his slacks.

My brow furrows. I know he’s a nervous person, but what the hell is he so?—

Oh.

Oh. Shit. He thinks I mean it like that. Telling me what to do. In bed. No wonder he looks like he wants to crawl under the desk and wrap a charging lead around his neck.

I let out a heavy sigh, rubbing the bridge of my nose. Great job, Sable. One harmless line about the chain of command and I’ve gone and launched him headfirst back into Saturday night, when all I meant was the damn job description. Figures.

I snap my fingers against the edge of the desk. “I meant because you’re the account lead, Noah. Telling me what to do comes with the suit and tie. Nothing more scandalous than that.”

A tight, strangled laugh slips out of him.

“Right. Yeah. Obviously that’s what you meant.

I know that.” He huffs out a breath, flexes his fingers against his thigh, then drags them back to the keyboard.

His eyes flick up to meet mine and his fingers slip across the keys, spitting gibberish into the spreadsheet.

“Fuck,” he mutters under his breath as he frantically backspaces. Then he clears his throat, plastering on a tight smile. “So—uh. Where were we?”

We slog through the rest of the files, the hours bleeding out half the morning, until the only thing anchoring me is the weight of my tablet in my hands and the steady clack of keys from his side of the desk.

I force my eyes to stay on the numbers, let the deadlines and client notes stack like sandbags against the pull in my stomach.

But every time I glance up, his gaze is already there.

Fixed on my lips, drifting to my chest, traveling lower before he jerks it away, cheeks flaring pink, face filled with guilt.

And fuck me if that doesn’t make it worse.

Because I love it—the squirming. I love how easy it is to tie him in knots without even trying. A beautiful, mean little satisfaction curls its way under my ribs every time he trips over himself, every time I catch him looking and see the panic stuttering in his throat.

Enough. Stop it, Sable. You’re at work. This is the kind of shit that gets people fired.

I lock my tablet and push back from the chair. “That’s enough for today.”

He blinks like I’ve yanked him out of a trance, head snapping up to meet my eyes. “Oh… we’re done?”

I huff out a heavy breath, steeling myself. “Yes, Noah. I have some deliverables to handle. I’ll CC you a few notes later so you can read through them.”

He stammers something half-formed but swallows it down, dropping his gaze back down to the pages spread out in front of him. “I uh… I haven’t stopped thinking about it... Saturday, that is…”

My stomach twists. There it is. The elephant in the room, stomping its way right across his desk.

His eyes lift again, locking right onto me, and Jesus, he looks like he’s about to throw up.

Heat crawls under my collar. Not the good kind. Not the kind from Saturday. I flick my gaze to the glass walls and the blurred outlines of half the office moving right outside. “This isn’t the place.”

“Sable—” My name fractures in his throat, and fuck if it doesn’t rake down my spine in a way I really, really don’t want it to right now.

I mean I did tell him he’d see me again.

I wasn’t exactly subtle about how much I’d enjoyed myself.

But this isn’t what I meant. Seeing him again was supposed to be in his bed, maybe mine—somewhere dark, behind a locked door, not under fluorescent lights with Marla breathing deadlines two doors away and ‘HR violation’ scrawled across every surface in neon.

But the thought slips past my guard anyway.

“I enjoyed it too, Noah.” The admission scrapes out before I smother it with a sharp sigh. I gesture vaguely around the room. “But all things considered, we should probably knock those thoughts on the head, don’t you think?”

“That makes sense,” he says quietly. “I—I just… I don’t want it to be over. It was?—”

“Yeah,” I mutter. “I know. Neither do I.”

Perfect. Exactly what I’ve been trying not to say since yesterday morning.

Just hand it over to him on a silver platter, why don’t you, Sable. Brilliant.

For a second, neither of us moves. There’s nothing but the hum of the overhead lights and the thud of my pulse in my ears.

Then he swallows hard. “So… what does that mean?”

“It means nothing,” I say carefully. “We have to leave it at it being just one night. It was fun, sure. But we can’t let it happen again.

Not now. You’re my account lead, Noah. If anyone got wind of this…

” I sigh heavily and square my shoulders, standing from my chair.

“HR doesn’t give a shit about context—they’d brand it misconduct before we even finished explaining.

Best case, we’re dragged through an investigation.

Worst case, one of us is out the door—or both. ”

“Right,” he says, jaw tightening. “It can’t happen again.”

“Exactly. So let’s move on.” I move to the door. “There’s an ass-load of work staring us down, and Marla’s not exactly known for her patience. The longer we sit here circling Saturday, the more likely we are to fuck up on deadlines.”

The glass door clicks behind me, sealing him in, spitting me back out into the hum of keyboards and the stale tang of burnt coffee as I weave through the bullpen.

I drop into my chair and force my eyes to the monitor.

Spreadsheets. Client notes. Blessed, boring normalcy. Maybe if I stare hard enough, I’ll forget the way his eyes looked when he said he didn’t want it to be over.