Page 76 of Pick Me
“But what if no one plays with me or shares their treats at snack time?” I asked solemnly. Hearing my first name on his lips was still new enough to give me a little thrill.
Knox slapped my arm lightly. “Shush.” But then he added, “I’m just a call away if you need a ride at any point. Remember?”
I forced myself not to laugh. He was so damn cute sometimes, and ten times more nervous for me than I was nervous for myself. I was almost waiting for him to offer to come inside and hold my hand or to take me back to his incredibly expensive but weirdly sterile black-and-white condo.
If you’d told me a couple of weeks back that Knox Sunday could be this damn adorable, I’d have said you were a liar, but the man’s capacity for adorableness grew exponentially with every day we spent together.
“I’ll remember,” I promised.
“Seriously. I don’t know who else is going to be in that interview, but you’re gonna kill it.”
I leaned over the console and gave him a peck on the lips. “I know I will. Breathe, Knox. I’m chill, I promise.”
“Erection check?”
I laughed out loud. “Okay, I’m nowhere near calm enough to get a spontaneous erection.” But when Knox glanced appreciatively down at my charcoal-gray suit pants and licked his lips, my dick gave a half-hearted throb that said maybe I was underestimating myself.
“Yeah, you’re good,” Knox growled. “Go on, then.”
I leaned over and kissed him again, just because I could, and then I walked into the building as confidently as I could, practically walking on air.
The bored lobby receptionist took one look at me and said, “Interviewing?”
I frowned but nodded. “How’d you know?”
She rolled her eyes, handed me a visitor’s badge, and pointed at the elevators. “Seventh floor. Human Resources. Follow the signs.”
As I stood in the elevator, I tried not to fidget. I’d styled my hair more carefully than usual so it flopped nicely, but that meant my reflection in the chrome elevator door was so startling, I had to fight the urge to run my hand through it and mess myself back up.
I’d somehow thought that tech jobs were more laid-back, but when I’d mentioned that at the store the day before, Knox had laughed. “Not all of them. And definitely not for the interview.”
When I got upstairs and the elevator opened into a lobby that looked like the waiting area at the DMV—if all DMV patrons wore fancy suits and smelled like performance anxiety—I was glad I’d listened to Knox and gotten dressed up.
Holy shit. No wonder the lady downstairs hadn’t been surprised. The whole world was interviewing. We couldn’t possibly all be going after the same position, could we?
There was a reception desk up here, too, but it was unoccupied, so I headed for one of the empty chairs set against the window and asked the guy in the next chair, “Is this seat free?”
The guy shrugged, barely making eye contact.
I didn’t sit down right away, though, because there was a million-dollar view outside the window of bright orange and red trees waving against a blue sky and the Charles River rushing by—the kind of view I’d only ever seen in pictures, growing up in Florida—though none of the other people in the room seemed to notice it.
“Nice view, eh?” I said because chatter was my default setting when I wasn’t comfortable. “At least they gave us a decent place to wait. I bet they’re hoping we’ll all get seduced by the view, and then accept the job without thinking twice.”
The man did look up at me then. “I went to Harvard. The view of a dirty river and a bunch of Massholes driving smart cars doesn’t entertain me. The idea that you think everyone in this room will be offered a job, on the other hand, is hilarious.”
Ooookay, then.
Across the room, a girl who’d been tapping her foot like a tiny woodpecker against the marble floor stopped moving for a long moment… then clapped a hand over her mouth and darted down the hall.
“Puker,” my neighbor scoffed disgustedly. “Honestly, if you can’t handle the interview, why would you think you could handle working here?”
“Well, interviewing is different,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was speaking from personal experience. “I wasn’t expecting so many people, myself. Are you applying for the New York job also?”
“New York?” He snorted. “No. New York is where the R&D guys are. You don’t get hired into a position like that unless you’re a fucking genius.”
His look suggested I was deluding myself if I thought I fit that category.
“Be honest. In your spare time, you write inspirational quotes, don’t you?” I wagged a finger at him.
