The Ice King's Chubby Fixation

Chapter 6: Mercury Eyes

POV: Elowen Hart

The door clicked shut behind me, and the silence of his office swallowed me whole. I had been in this room only once before, yesterday, when he told me not to break. I remembered the cold air. The wall of windows. The desk that was too big. But this time felt different. This time he had called me not to protect me, but for something else. I did not know what yet, and the not knowing made my palms wet. He did not look up. His head was bent over a stack of papers, his pen moving in short, sharp strokes. The sound of the nib against the paper was the only thing in the room. Scratch. Pause. Scratch. He did not say anything to me or tell me to sit. I stood in front of his desk like a schoolgirl called to the headmaster's office, my hands clasped in front of me, my heart knocking against my ribs. The seconds stretched. Ten. Twenty. The pen kept scratching. My feet began to ache in my cheap secondhand shoes. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and the small sound my shoe made against the floor felt like a gunshot in the quiet. He still did not look up. "Miss Hart," he said. His voice was low and flat, he said my name the way you might say chair or door or thing that is in my way. "Sir." "You will take notes." I fumbled for my notepad. The pages rustled too loud. My pen slipped from my fingers and clattered onto the floor. I bent to pick it up, my face hot, and when I straightened, he was still writing. He had not paused or stop to looked at me. "The Henderson file. I need the contracts from March, April, and June. Don't include may. May will be a mistake and I do not keep mistakes on my desk." I wrote as fast as I could. The pen was dry at first, and the first letters came out faint and scratchy. Henderson. March. April. June. No May. "The Tokyo proposal needs a full translation by noon tomorrow. I want it on paper, not email. Paper does not disappear when the server goes down." I wrote it down as well "Tokyo. Translation. Paper. Noon tomorrow." "Call the Renshaw Group and tell them their offer is an insult. Use those exact words. If they ask what I want, tell them to use their imagination." Renshaw. Insult. Imagination. He turned a page. The tasks kept coming. Twelve of them. Each one sharp and quick, delivered in that same low, bored hum. He did not pause between them. He did not check if I was keeping up. He just spoke, and I wrote, and the list grew longer and longer until my hand cramped around the pen. "And the Connolly contract," he said. "The blue folder. Not the green one. The green one is the old version. If you bring me the green one, I will know you cannot read simple instructions." My pen stopped. The blue folder. Not the green one. I wrote it down. My handwriting was getting messy now, the letters slanting and bumping into each other. I hoped he would not ask to see the notes. He set his pen down. The silence rushed back in. He still did not look at me. His hand moved to a crystal decanter on the side of his desk. Whiskey was there, the colour of dark honey. He poured a finger into a heavy glass. The sound of the liquid hitting the crystal sounded like a slow running water. "Pour," he said. I blinked. "Sir?" He pushed the glass toward the edge of the desk. Toward me. His eyes were still on his papers. "You have two working hands, Miss Hart. Pour the whiskey." I stepped forward. My legs were not steady. The decanter was heavier than it looked, the crystal cold and smooth against my palm. I lifted it. The whiskey sloshed inside. The glass was small. The opening was smaller. I tilted the decanter, and my hand shook. It was a small shake. I barely felt it but the decanter was heavy, and the tremor in my fingers sent a single drop of whiskey onto the polished wood of his desk. A dark amber bead, sitting on the mahogany like a stain on a wedding dress. The pen stopped. It was like my whole world stopped. He looked up. His silver eyes met mine, and I felt the cold of that parking lot all over again. The same stare. The same weight. The same feeling of being looked at and found wanting. The drop of whiskey sat between us, small and dark and damning. He did not speak right away. He let the silence do the work. His eyes held mine, and I could not look away. I could not move. My hand was still holding the decanter, frozen in the air. "Clumsy," he said. The word landed like a slap. Quiet, flat and final. "And cheap." My throat tightened. I set the decanter down before I could drop it. The glass clinked against the wood. My fingers left damp prints on the crystal. "Is that what I am paying for, Miss Hart? A clumsy girl who cannot pour a glass of whiskey without spilling it on a desk that costs more than her annual salary?" I wanted to say I am sorry. I wanted to say it was an accident. I wanted to say my hand shakes because I am scared of you, because I am scared of this room, because I have been scared since the night I stood barefoot in a parking lot and you looked at me like I was nothing. But the words did not come. They never came when I needed them. "No, sir," I whispered. He stood. The chair made no sound as it pushed back. He rose to his full height, and I remembered how tall he was. How broad his shoulders were under that perfect white shirt. He walked around the desk, slow, each step measured. My heart beat so hard I could feel it in my ears. He stopped in front of me. Close. Too close. I could see the fine weave of his shirt. The silver glint of his cufflinks. The small line between his brows that meant he was thinking something he would not say. Then I caught his scent again. Sandalwood. Cold sandalwood, sharp and clean, like a forest in winter. Under it, something metallic that was not his cologne. More like it was just him, his normal body scent... cold metal and dark wood and a smell that made my stomach tighten for reasons I did not know yet. He looked down lower for a dizzying second. His gaze dropped to the curve of my hip, where my skirt pulled against my softness.. his silver eyes traced the shape of me like a finger following a line on a map. My skin went from hot to cold then hot again. I should have stepped back. I should have looked away. But my body would not move. My body was standing in his office with his scent in my nose and his eyes on my hip and a drop of whiskey drying on his desk like evidence of everything I could not do right. He looked up. His face was stone again. The crack, if there had been one, was sealed. "Get out." Two flat cold words. I turned and walked to the door. My legs carried me across the floor, past the chairs, past the window that showed the whole grey city, past the decanter and the spilled drop and the man who smelled like sandalwood and ice. My hand found the door handle. I pulled it open. I stepped into the hallway. The door clicked shut behind me, and I stood there in the cold silence of my desk and my chair and Livia's closed door, and I could not breathe. I could still feel his eyes on my hip. I could still smell him on my skin. And I hated myself for the small, terrible truth that was already forming in the back of my mind, quiet and stubborn and impossible to kill. I did not want him to stop looking. ~~~~~ I sat at my desk and stared at my notepad. The list of tasks was there, written in my shaky handwriting. "Henderson. Tokyo. Renshaw. Connolly blue not green." Twelve things he needed me to do. Twelve reasons to stay busy. Twelve reasons not to think about the way his eyes had dropped to my hip like a stone falling into deep water. Livia's door was closed. The speaker on my desk was silent. The clock on my computer screen said it was 4:47 PM. Thirteen minutes until I could leave. Thirteen minutes until I could walk out of this cold glass tower and take the bus back to my room with the brick wall and sit on my thin mattress and try to forget this day. The speaker crackled. "Miss Hart." My heart stopped and started again. His voice was even colder through the cheap speaker, stripped of everything but the bare, hard sound. "Bring me the Connolly file before you leave. The blue one." The speaker went dead. The blue one. He was testing me. The green one was the old version, he had said. If I brought the green one, he would know I could not read simple instructions. I looked at my notes. Connolly blue not green. I had written it down. Thank God I had not forgotten. I found the blue folder in the cabinet and carried it to the double doors. This time, I did not knock. I opened the door just wide enough to set the folder on the small table beside the entrance. I did not step inside nor did I look at him. "The Connolly file, sir," I said. "The blue one." A pause. Then his voice, low and unreadable. "Good. You can read after all." I closed the door. I walked back to my desk. I picked up my bag, my jacket and my notepad with the twelve tasks. I did not look at Livia's door. I did not look at the front desk woman when the lift carried me down to the ground floor. I did not look at anything until I was outside, on the pavement, with the cold grey sky above me and the noise of the city around me. Then I let myself breathe. One day down. Many more to go. And somewhere forty floors above me, the man with the mercury eyes was probably still standing at his window, watching the city, thinking whatever cold thoughts the Ice King thought when no one was watching. I did not know if he was thinking about me. But I knew I would not sleep that night. And I knew I would be back at my desk the next day by eight.