Page 28 of From That Moment

I had to be okay with that.

I would work, I would pretend that my makeup and my hair being perfectly done wasn’t a symbol of what people needed me to be.

That it wasn’t a mask to hide behind, to conceal my dreams and my fears.

I chose my clothing with care, another type of armor, and ignored the fact that my hands shook.

This would mean nothing. It was only a blip.

I could go on living my life as I had before. Trying to find love when I had already decided I wouldn’t date. Ignoring a burning attraction to a man I should not want in the slightest and pretending that I wasn’t scared to death of everything.

Pretending that the people I worked with didn’t hate me or thinkIthought I was too good for them. Because that wasn’t it, even in the slightest. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Nothing I said would change things, so I rolled my shoulders back and told myself I didn’t need anybody.

Even if that was the biggest lie of all.

By the time I got to work, I had spread the lies so firmly over my body that I felt as if nobody could see under the layers. And that was fine with me. They didn’t need to know everything.

I went to my desk, keeping my office door open because I didn’t want those who glared at me—mostly Benji if I was honest—to think that I thought I was too good for them by hiding myself away. I’d heard someone mumble that before when I just needed some time to focus on my work, so now an open-door concept was how I needed to get things done.

I hated that I cared about what other people thought of me, but that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. If I wanted to do the best job possible, I needed people to be able to come to me if they had issues. Hiding from them wasn’t going to help my situation.

And if I focused enough on work, I wouldn’t worry about the fact that my father was out of prison and could be here at any moment.

It didn’t matter that I had a restraining order against him. In the end, it was only a piece of paper that other people would have to enforce. And it wasn’t as if, after all this time, somebody would sit there and watch me and ensure that I was okay. I couldn’t have security on me at all times—or at any time, for that matter.

So, I would just have to get over it and live my life without fear.

Or at least become better at trying.

“Because that makes complete sense,” I whispered to myself.

I sighed and then threw myself into my work, the project I was working on with Prior, something that made me happy. I liked Prior’s work. He was diligent, thorough, and always asked the right questions. Yes, there were bugs every once in a while, but finding them was my job, and he never complained when I reported them and opened defect reports. Sometimes, he’d get a little frustrated, but that meant I needed to be more specific in my questions and instructions for how to recreate the problem so he could find the spot in the code that needed to be tweaked.

The fact that both of us could be so open about what we were doing was surprising.

If I were honest with myself, I knew I had judged him from the first moment I saw him. And the second, and probably the third.

I had judged him because of the way he acted with his brothers as if he were carefree. Only I knew that wasn’t the case. He reminded me of people at my job, of the man whose place Prior had taken. But that was all on me, not him.

I was getting over it, slowly but surely.

However, others weren’t.

“Are you serious about this?” Benji asked, slamming the door behind him.

My pictures rattled on my walls, and I looked up at him, my face stony, my jaw set. My icy armor was the only way to get through to him, or at least make it through my day.

“Hello, Benji. How are you today?”

“Don’t give me that.”

“You’re going to want to watch your tone. Because Iwillreport you to HR.”

“You keep holding that over my head, and yet you do nothing. I want to know why you keep picking on this assignment. If you don’t think I’m good enough, then go to the bosses. You haven’t, have you? No. All you do is needle and nitpick, and yet look where you are. You’re still only the double-checker. Not a person with the brains to actually get shit done.”

On the last word, he slammed out of the room, and I sat there, wondering if he’d have let me speak at all.