By 8:17 a.m., the office printer had jammed three times, my inbox was quietly on fire, and I was already sweating through my blouse.
Mondays at Fairmont Marketing were special like that.
“Good morning, Hannah! The coffee machine’s dead again,” someone called over the low buzz of keyboards and phones.
Of course it was.
“I’ll perform last rites after I fix the printer,” I answered without looking up, wedging my shoulder against the temperamental Canon like we were having a lovers’ quarrel.
Paper rasped, the smell of hot toner thick in the air. My fingers were already dusted gray. I bent, stuck my arm in up to the elbow, and tried not to think about the fact that my job title was "Office Manager" but my actual role was "human duct tape."
There was a thud and a muffled curse from behind me.
“Whoa—sorry, didn’t see you there.”
A warm baritone, unfamiliar. Definitely not one of my usual codependents.
I straightened too fast, banging my head on the open printer tray. Stars exploded across my vision.
“Yep. That’s my brain. Didn’t need that,” I muttered, pressing my hand to the sore spot.
“Are you okay?” The voice was closer now, full of genuine concern, not the performative kind I usually got from senior managers who thought my name was Heather.
I blinked and turned.
He was tall. That was my first thought, which was ridiculous because our cubicle farm leveled everyone into the same gray rectangle. But somehow he made the space feel small. Tall, broad shoulders under a pale blue dress shirt rolled at the forearms, dark hair a little too long to be corporate and curling slightly at the ends. There was a faint stubble on his jaw, like he’d either rushed this morning or wanted to look like he hadn’t tried.
His eyes were the worst part. Or the best. Warm hazel, ringed in darker brown, focused entirely on me as if there wasn’t a chaotic office humming around us.
“I’m fine,” I said, because that was my default setting. “Printer and I are just in couples therapy.”
One corner of his mouth curved up. “Do you take new clients? I have a deeply unhealthy relationship with spreadsheets.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. That alone was suspicious; Mondays usually wrung the humor out of me by 8:05.
He extended a hand, palm wide, fingers calloused in a way that didn’t match his pressed shirt. “I’m Liam. They told me to find Hannah, keeper of all knowledge and forms.”
Of course they did. New hire.
I wiped my toner-stained hand on my skirt, winced at the gray smear, and shook his anyway. Warm. Steady. Not too firm, not patronizing soft. He held my gaze when he smiled, like we were sharing a secret joke I wasn’t aware I’d made.
“Hannah Wilkes,” I said. “Unpaid therapist to printers and coworkers alike. You’re the new…?”
“Assistant analyst,” he supplied quickly, with the faintest grimace, like the words tasted wrong. “They said I’d be sitting next to you.”
I blinked. My brain did a short, dangerous list: Sitting. Next. To. You.
That would be the empty desk on my right — the one that had been a rotating door of interns and flight-risk hires for the last year. It gave me just enough buffer from the rest of the open floor to pretend I had some privacy. My little moat.
