Page 26 of V is for Valentine
“Tess and Stevie will be here this weekend to putty over the screws and sand, but I don’t trust them on the seams.”
“You can say it. You need me.”
She made a face at him, a half-hearted effort at best, but it conveyed that she liked it when he was flippant. When he wasn’t, when things got more personal between them, she tensed up. She did a decent job of hiding it, but they’d spent enough time at each other’s throats for Danny to recognize what was going on, and he wasn’t certain what to do about it.
Whatever it was, he’d think before acting. His time with Felicity was short, and he couldn’t afford to screw up.
“Any big plans for tonight?” he asked as they simultaneously began untying their aprons.
“I’m not going out with my coworker.”
“Knife to the heart,” he said, following her to the entryway where they dropped the drills into the chargers and hung the aprons.
She gave him a smirking smile and shrugged into her coat, zipping it to her chin. “I’ll just head home and continue my rigid ways there.”
“Kind of got you with the rigid thing, didn’t I?”
She gave him a withering look then pulled the bandanna off her head, stuffing it into her pocket. “I was being facetious. I’m not rigid.”
He merely lifted his eyebrows, and she put a palm on his chest, pushing him a couple of steps backward. Not as pleasant as the light touch of her hand to his cheek earlier, but he rather enjoyed it.
“See you tomorrow, Felix,” he said with a laugh.
She made a show of straightening her coat. “Yes. Your turn for donuts. I’ll pass on the cookie.”
*
Rigid.
No way. Rigidity meant that you couldn’t adapt as new circumstances arose, and Felicity most certainly could do that, as she’d demonstrated when Sean had pulled the plug on their relationship, leaving her alone in the new city she’d moved to for him.
Knowing this, she should have been able to laugh off the remark/judgment, but it stuck with annoying tenacity, giving her no choice but to come up with a way to demonstrate her extreme flexibility…or at least a minor bend here and there.
She couldn’t think of one. She had a project to finish in too short a period of time. Demonstrating flexibility would slow her down.
“Am I rigid?” she asked her dad, who was deep into a basketball game.
“What?’ he asked, tearing his gaze away from the game and blinking as if suddenly realizing that he was on planet Earth.
“Am I rigid?”
He gave her the cautious look of a man who’d been asked about one teenage fashion choice too many. A wrong answer and he was a dead man.
“You’re…”
“Focused. Right?” Felicity gave him an expectant look.
“I was going to say driven.”
“Hm.” She cracked open one of the pistachios in the bowl she held in her lap. “Not the same as rigid, which means that once you come up with a plan, you stick to it, regardless of new developmentsandcommon sense.” She was only rigid on certain matters. It was not a character trait.
“You aren’t rigid.”
“Thank you.” She popped the nut into her mouth as her dad yawned. It was going on ten o’clock and time for her to go to bed, since she’d decided to arrive at work the same time as Danny the next morning.
Danny who was not home yet. She’d checked when she’d opened the pistachios not that long ago. How did the guy function with no sleep?
It didn’t matter, as long as he did.
