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“What’s up?” Sabrina asked.
“Email from Greg reminding me to turn in my receipts from the trip,” Freddy groaned.
He typed out a quick reply, asking if he could just hand them over at their next Monday meeting. Greg’s response came back almost immediately, making Freddy’s stomach sink.
“I’ll be at family dinner tonight,” Greg wrote. “I can grab them then.”
Freddy stared at the screen, his jaw clenching. Family dinner. He’d forgotten about that. Fuck. So much for replacing stupid trinkets with puzzle boxes and hanging up posters before playing video games.
“Hey,” Sabrina asked, her voice cutting through his thoughts. “You okay?”
Freddy shook his head, trying to clear the bitterness from his mind. “Yeah, I just forgot about family dinner tonight,” he said,his tone clipped. “And apparently, Greg feels like it’s the perfect opportunity to collect my receipts then.”
Sabrina raised an eyebrow. “And that’s a problem because...?”
Freddy sighed, “I might not have filled out the expense reports to go with them.”
She stared at him, obviously aware that wasn’t all.
“And they might just be in a big wad smashed in a corner of my suitcase,” he confessed.
Understanding dawned on Sabrina’s face. She was aware of how anal-retentive Greg could be. It was probably a good trait for a CFO to have, but Freddy could not understand why receipts had to be sorted into gas, food, lodging, and whatever other categories Greg demanded. Heaven help anyone who didn’t sequence them by time and date too. Greg would straight up hand them back and make Freddy redo them.
But there was no real compassion in Sabrina’s voice as she said, “Sounds like you’re suffering the consequences of your own choices.”
Freddy rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks for the understanding. Might I remind you I was busy helping you pack up and move over here?”
Sabrina froze, and Freddy regretted his taunt. “‘Rina, I was teasing. I won’t joke about that again. I’m sorry. I like having you here.”
She shook her head and blinked before pasting on a grin Freddy knew was only half-real. Still, he accepted it when she joked back, “Ha! I’d be more inclined to empathize if I wouldn’t still be sitting here typing up your notes while you quit work early to clean up your own mess.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He couldn’t bring himself to go any further and risk hitting a sore spot. He couldn’t imagine losing all his belongings the way Sabrina had.
Keeping the mood light, Sabrina pointed out, “I tried to tell you to take that mini file organizer thing, but you wouldn’t do it.”
“And I told you I’d rather tape my glasses to my face and stuff a pocket protector in my shirt.”
Sabrina laughed hard enough to wobble precariously in her chair. “Oh my gosh! Your fear of looking like a nerd is seriously undermined by your enthusiasm when deconstructing the evolution of player interactions in Red Dead Redemption.” Glancing back at the notes she was rewriting into an actual manual, she shifted her gaze between them and him before asking, “How are you so smart and so dumb all at the same time?”
If she hadn’t been grinning, Freddy might have been insulted.
Chapter 12: Sabrina
Sabrina’s brow furrowed as she scanned Freddy’s notes in the margins of their old manual, before comparing it to his attempt at a rough draft and shaking her head. “Seriously, Freddy, do you even understand how sentences work? This makes zero sense.” She jabbed a finger at the screen. “I mean, look at this: ‘The user should click the button that is green and says start, which will cause the program to begin its startup sequence, and then the user should wait for the progress bar to finish loading before proceeding.’ It’s like a maze of words.”
Freddy snickered and shrugged. “Hey, that’s why I have you, right? To make sense of my brilliant nonsense.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes, but a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, so I’m just here to clean up after you, is that it?”
“Nah, I know you’re really here for the eye candy.” Freddy’s eyes sparkled with mischief as he flexed his lean bicep.
Sabrina’s heart skipped a beat at his words, even though she knew he meant them in a purely platonic way. If only he knew just how much truth there was to that statement. She forced a laugh, hoping he couldn’t hear the slight catch in her voice. “Yeah, yeah, you’re lucky I put up with you. But seriously?”
She waited until he was fully focused on her before continuing, “Let’s go back to using bullet points. I don’t know what I was thinking when I suggested you draft the first version of the user manual. Revising this is so much worse than drafting from your nonsense notes.”
“Ask and ye shall receive.” The way he didn’t even hesitate before agreeing made Sabrina suspicious.
He didn’t appear to notice her concern and returned to the sequence of tests he was running. She studied his profile, admiring the way his hair fell over his forehead and the concentration in his eyes as he typed while wondering why he was demanding she praise him for his attempts at using sentences.
