AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Two months sounds like a long time.” Marsie’s shoulders, which she hadn’t realized were tense, relaxed as he sat in one of her chairs.
“It should be enough, but we don’t have the data we need, I keep getting told my budget is wrong and…you don’t need to hear the rest.” She waved away the litany of complaints. “Anyway, it doesn’t feel like nearly enough time or that people are working nearly as hard as they should be.”
She shrugged. “But that’s always how these things feel.”
She should have waited until after this application was finally in before signing up for online dating. Except waiting was what got her into this predicament in the first place. Not enough time.
When she’d been thirty, she’d felt like she had all the time in the world. Silly thirty-year-old Marsie.
He looked at his phone. “It’s one thirty. Have you gotten lunch?”
She flopped her back against her chair. “I don’t know if I’ll get lunch.” Then her stomach growled, both embarrassing her and giving away how much she needed food.
He lifted his brows.
“I’ve got a protein bar in my desk. I’ll be fine.”
“A protein bar isn’t lunch. It’s barely a snack.”
“It’s not lunch or a snack. It’s desperation, but it tastes vaguely like a brownie, so it’s okay.”
He laughed. “Right. Well, here,” he said, leaning over the arm of the chair and digging around in the bag at his feet.
Curious, Marsie sat up a little taller. She knew she wasn’t able to hide the surprise on her face when he set a small salad in a to-go container on her desk, then followed it with a roll, a pat of butter, a fork and a little container of dressing. “What’s this?” she asked stupidly.
“Salad.”
“Is it for me?” She felt like her brain was running two beats behind. She hated that feeling.
“Technically, it was for me. But a brownie protein bar is an oxymoron, not lunch.”
“It’s a small salad,” she said, still not able to stop the idiocy from coming out of her mouth. He was giving her salad?
He gave her a long, searching look, probably trying to decide how she ever managed to get a PhD in anything. Then he shook his head, reached down again and pulled out a sandwich. “Ham and cheese,” he said as he set it on her desk. “You can have this instead if you want. But not both. I need lunch, too.” He was smiling, so she didn’t think he was angry. “I’ve got a bottle of Coke in the bag, as well.”
“Coffee and coke?” she asked with a raised brow.
“A man’s got to get his addictions covered somehow. You can have the coffee if you want, but I like mine different than you like yours.”
“The Coke is good.” She’d left her meeting with the hounds of work on her tail and had forgotten that all she’d wanted the whole time had been a cold drink. Now that Jason offered it, a cold Coke sounded like the best thing in the world. More important than either a salad or a sandwich.
The bag rustled, then a sweaty bottle of soda appeared on her desk. She reached out for the salad, too, slow in her lingering disbelief. “And the salad is good, too. I don’t know what surprised me more, that you have a salad for lunch or that you’re giving it to me.”
He shrugged and set his sandwich on her desk. “I’m giving you a salad because a protein bar isn’t food.”
“I’m still going to eat it.” She pulled the salad across the desk toward her. The salad was a much better lunch than her nonbrownie. She often forgot to eat lunch, and her workday was almost always worse off for it.
“You can call it a crispy brownie and I’ll call it dessert and we’ll both pretend.”
She chuckled. “Okay. Want to split my dessert?”
“Ugh. No.” He shook his head. “I had a salad for my lunch because I’m not twenty-five anymore, and I need the vegetables more than I need the potato chips.” He unwrapped the waxed paper around his sandwich, and Marsie realized she must be hungrier than she’d imagined, because his sandwich looked delicious and she didn’t like ham and cheese.
