Page 74 of Bound By Fire
She heads out, and I stand there, dripping coffee onto my carpet and feeling about as competent as a first-year intern.
I really need to pull myself together already.
I drop into my chair. Look at the brown puddle on my desk. Then look at the screen, where the spreadsheet I am supposed to be updating glares back at me.
I cannot do this.
Why did I tell Ridge that I’m still attracted to him? Why? I think I might even have referred to how good he felt inside me. That I bought all those condoms to get a rise out of him because he was so together, indicating that I’m not.
I pretty much told him I wanted him.
I close my eyes.
I am such an idiot.
What I should have done is keep up the boyfriend lie. Doubled down. Made up a name and a valid excuse as to why he couldn’t come over. Said he was on a business trip or something…anything except for what I actually said. Now Ridge knows that I still want him. He made it clear that he does not feel the same way, and there is nothing in the world quite as humiliating as that.
He isn’t even here right now, and I want the ground to swallow me whole.
How am I going to last the rest of the week?
“Here you go,” Carla says as she walks back into my office, balancing a fresh mug, a wad of paper towels, and a small spray bottle of carpet cleaner. “Service with a smile,” she adds.
“You are too good to me.”
“Never!”
I roll my chair away from the desk so she can get to the spill. She wipes the desk first, mops up the worst of it, then drops to her knees with the towel and the spray bottle and starts working at the carpet.
“You really don’t have to?—”
“Drink your coffee, Dr. Keller.” She doesn’t even look up. “And no spilling this one, please. The carpet has had enough.”
I smile. “You got it.”
I sip carefully. The coffee doesn’t taste as good, even though I’m sure it is.
I put the mug down as Carla starts on my desk. I roll back toward my laptop, opening the spreadsheet. I click on a figure, and the whole column shifts.
I push the undo button, but it doesn’t work.
Why not?
I push it again, and something I did earlier deletes.
“What? No.” I lean closer to the screen. “No, no, no. What did I just do?”
I scroll up. I scroll down. The data has cascaded into the wrong places. The formula has dragged everything one row off. I have just lost about an hour’s worth of careful work.
“For the love of—” I drop my forehead into my hand.
Carla looks up from the carpet. “What’s wrong?”
“I just messed up a spreadsheet. It’s going to take me some time to fix it. Time I don’t have. My admin is piling up.”
“Why not ctrl-Z it?”
“I can try.” I hit the keys. The cells obediently roll back one step, then another. I keep going until I am back to where I started. I exhale.
