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  Curling up in her chair Cora flipped on her e-reader and got cozy, as she settled in Guinevere jumped up on the back of the chair and headbutted her looking for some love. “Oh sure, now you want to talk to me, are you done being mad at Mommy for leaving you?” She scratched her head and she curled up next to her while she settled in to while away her afternoon reading about star crossed lovers destined to be together.

  When she got up to get a drink and stretch she noticed it was pitch black outside, looking at the clock she saw it was ten o'clock, crap, she needed to pack her bag and get a good night’s sleep so she could be fresh for her wordplay with Kaelyn tomorrow. This had to be perfect.

  Chapter 5

  Alarm goes off, playing 'Tell me why I don’t like Mondays'

  Cora hops out of bed with nary a smack to the snooze, throwing on her workout gear she grabs her bag, her iPod, and lunch and heads out for her morning workout. When was the last time she bounded out of bed on a Monday? Probably the fifth of never, but today was ripe with possibility, wasn’t it?

  After ninety minutes of blood (stupid untied shoelaces making her trip), sweat, and tears, because well, falling down stairs hurts, Cora hit the shower and got dressed in another of her favorite outfits, a pair of dove gray slacks and a pink boat neck sweater. She blow-dried her hair again and considered getting it cut after work tonight, it had been a while and her ends were looking frayed. No makeup today, but some classic pearl jewelry and she was on her way to dump the gym bag, pick up her lunch and head to her building. She was trying really hard not to skip, and she didn’t, at least not all the way.

  After throwing her lunch in the fridge, grabbing her fruit and yogurt and a cup of coffee, she headed to her cube and booted up her computer. While waiting for everything to wake up she turned and noticed a bag of sugar free strawberry candies on her desk with a purple post-it, “These are to replace the giant handful I stole on Thursday afternoon while updating your anti-virus software. – D”

  Fuck, he was in her cube, on her computer, he had access to everything while she wasn’t around to supervise, did he read her chat logs? No, of course he didn’t he isn’t nosy like that, and when he works on someone’s computer he always logs in as the administrator, so he probably doesn’t have access to her personal files, right? For safety’s sake, she was just going to go and delete all those archives today. But before she did that…

  Cora: Get your tiny fairy ass over here young lady

  Kaelyn: What? I’m busy reading Perez before I start my actual work

  Cora: reading Perez is not busy and this is D related so hustle

  After going to the history and deleting everything between her and Kaelyn since the dawn of time, she closed the chat box and turned to face her “door.”

  “What is so important you had to tear me away from gossip about who John Mayer is fucking these days?” Kaelyn snorted.

  “That,” Cora pointed to the bag of candy, not touching it, too scared it wasn’t really there.

  “Oh that, after he worked on your computer he realized he’d emptied your candy dish so he asked where you got them so he could replace them for you, he said he’d have hated for you to come in on Monday and not have any to enjoy while you crunched your beans.” Kaelyn said with a self-satisfied smirk.

  “And you didn’t think to mention it any time we’ve talked or texted since then?” A death stare was what she was shooting at Kaelyn, because this was important news, as in we interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast kinda stuff, and yet not once had the broadcast been interrupted.

  “A. I didn’t think it was a big deal he was doing something nice, and 2. I didn’t want to muddy the waters or sway your decision, you needed to come to it on your own, decide that you wanted to be brave with no other forces at work.” Buffing her nails on her sweater and then looking at her garish blue polish Kaelyn plopped in the guest chair. She knew how Cora’s brain worked; this might be a long one.

  “Okay, you should know a correct ordering schema but that’s a broken record, but he was here, in my cube, sitting in my chair, touching my stuff, you should have told me. He could have read our chat logs.” Her stomach roiled in that nervous way as her crazy ramped up and up and up.

  “He didn’t read the logs. I would have seen your icon light up and it never did, and even if he did, we never mention him by name; there are like 5 guys who work in IT. You could be crushing on any one of them, and I did you a favor not telling you, and he did something sweet, which just gives more weight to the ‘answer the ad for fuck's sake already’ argument.”

  “I thought you wanted to edit it, tweak it?” Now she was wringing her hands, this was not good. She twisted the emerald ring on her right hand, around and around, a usually calming gesture, which was having no effect on her at all today.

  “I slept on it and decided it was perfection, it should come from you, and it shouldn’t be copy edited. You’re an accountant, not an English Lit major, it’s perfect, Cora.” Kaelyn got up from the chair. “Now if that’s all I need to catch up on what night club Paris Hilton was at last night.”

  As Kaelyn started to turn Cora whispered, “Good, because I sent it last night.”

  Kaelyn’s jaw dropped, and she shook her head as she walked away.

  Unable to sleep last night around two a.m. Cora fired up her laptop, copied and pasted her response, hovered the mouse arrow over the send button, closed her eyes and clicked send. That was why she bounded out of bed this morning, that’s why she needed to know when the candy arrived, possibilities—that was why.

  Turning to her computer, she fired up her email program.

  To: Daniel Santagata

  From: Cora O’Malley

  Date: January 14, 2008 9:15a.m.

  Subject: Thank you

  Daniel,

  Thank you, that was (artificially) sweet of you to replenish the candy stock for me, don’t know how you knew the brand but I appreciate the effort. You’re always welcome to steal the candy, replacement not necessary.

  Cora

  To: Cora O’Malley

  From: Daniel Santagata

  Date: January 14, 2008, 9:20 a.m.

  Subject: You’re welcome

  Cora,

  Only a cad steals a little girl’s candy and doesn’t leave anything in return. I’m glad I got it right; although I will admit that, I may have had some help.

  Please let me know if your computer gives you any trouble with the new updates. Sorry I didn’t tell you in advance. I don’t like to invade people’s space without them knowing about it but there was a critical update and I would hate for you to have logged in this morning and had your computer crash on you.

  Daniel

  “Deep breaths, Cora. That was polite, not flirty, don’t think anything of it. It’s unlikely he’s even seen your message yet, and if he did it’s not like he’s going to flirt via work email.” After one more deep breath, she opened her spreadsheets and started to count the beans.

  Chapter 6

  Noon rolled around and the lunch bell chimed, at least in Daniel’s head, he grabbed the guys and everyone went up to the eighth floor conference room to eat in peace and quiet and to shoot the shit about yesterday’s football game.

  “So what was up with Cora on Wednesday after the meeting,” Rajesh asks, obviously fishing.

  “What do you mean? She got a couple of departments, including us extra operating funds, nothing up with that but job security for you knuckle heads,” Daniel was their supervisor, technically, but he wasn’t a dick about it he was just one of the guys. A guy who had a real door and a bigger paycheck, but a guy nonetheless.

  “No, I mean after the meeting, you two were the last to leave,” Raj waggled his eyebrows at Dan. “You trying to make time with our shy bean counter? Or was she trying to buy your affections?”

  Daniel didn’t growl, though he wanted to, and Steve, Mike and Joe just sat there staring at Raj mentally placing odds on how long Raj had left to live. Daniel
was one of those old-fashioned guys, and he did not like it when anyone talked shit about the women at work, or any women for that matter, as the only boy with six sisters he’d had being gentlemanly beaten into him at a young age.

  “I’m going to let that one slide on account of you having low blood-sugar, or maybe a stroke for breakfast. She was collecting the copies that were left behind and we were just talking about winter break so shut your pie hole, or I will make it so you don’t have a hole for pie.” He hoped he sounded calm and level headed when he spewed all that out because what Raj didn’t know, what no one but him knew, and even he didn’t know until ten minutes ago, was that the shy bean counter might actually be interested in making time with him. Before lunch, he opened his personal email and had a reply to his dating ad. He hadn’t even realized it was still up, he created it one night about six months ago when he was kinda drunk; feeling lonely and sitting on the couch in his boxers watching TV while his cat Lancelot played on the carpet with a crumpled up piece of paper.

  Cora, sent him a reply, what the fuck was he going to do about that?

  “I didn’t mean anything crude by it, but you have to have noticed that she’s all curvy in that hot way now that she’s lost all that weight, red hair, quite the rack, a man could rest his head on those for days,” Raj said with a mouth half full of sandwich.

  Seriously, did he have a death wish today? Dan didn’t want to kill Raj, but he was pretty sure the other guys would help him hide the body if he did.

  “She was always good looking, being overweight doesn’t automatically make you ugly the same way being skinny doesn’t automatically make you attractive, take your bony ass for example.” Daniel tried his best to sound nonchalant. He had always thought she was pretty, but again that was his gentlemanly thing, all women were beautiful in their own way. Besides, with her red hair, emerald eyes and a smattering of freckles she was the quintessential bonnie Irish lass. He hadn’t really thought of asking her out because he hadn’t thought of any woman at work that way, for him that made a person automatically off limits, but perhaps he needed to revisit that policy.

  “All I’m saying is that you live like a monk. You’re a reasonable looking dude, you have a job, health insurance and you own a house, plus you have no felony convictions; so that makes you seriously desirable to the fairer sex. Plus, I read an article somewhere online that said women were more likely to date a man if he had a pet, especially a cat.” And with that Raj dug back into his lunch.

  Joe started talking about last night’s game and his little redheaded bean counter faded from everyone’s mind as they all boisterously went on about Tom Brady and what an amazing game he had the night before. Cora may have faded from everyone else’s mind, but not Daniel’s, he needed to decide what to do. She sent him that email this morning as well, thanking him for the candy, was she trying to feel him out? Nah, she wasn’t calculating like that, she was just gracious, she probably had a box of thank you notes at home that she hand wrote whenever she received a gift, she just seemed like that kind of woman, a little old-fashioned, just like him.

  Lunchtime ended and then men all went their separate ways to fix what needed fixing or to code what needed coding. Dan went to his office and closed the door. One of the perks of being head of IT and having sensitive server data in your control was that you weren’t relegated to a cube. He called his sister Maria; she would know what to do. He wouldn’t normally take care of personal business at work, but he knew he could catch her now while the kids were napping.

  He leaned back in his chair, put his feet up and opened the email with Cora’s ad response while he waited for Maria to answer.

  “It’s one in the afternoon, is somebody dead, or did you get arrested?” she said in a hushed tone, her kids were light sleepers, a poodle could fart two blocks away and those kids would wake up.

  “Neither, I need some advice from my favorite sister, and since she didn’t answer the phone I called you,” he chuckled. Maria and Daniel were twins and as such they shared something neither shared with their other siblings, no it wasn’t a birthdate because oddly enough five of the seven Santagata kids had the same birthday, apparently their parents had a set day of the year to have sex, he shuddered at the thought.

  “It’s about a girl,” it came out rushed, but he just had to say it, no dragging it out.

  “What is this seventh grade and you want me to ask Lisa Riccio if she likes you? ‘Cause we tried that Danny and she turned you down for that grunge kid who played in that crappy garage band.” She was trying not to laugh, besides not wanting to wake up the terrible twosome, she knew it wasn’t easy for him to have made this call. “Sorry, tell me about her. What’s the situation?”

  “So six months ago, before I decided to buy the house I was home and lonely, kinda drunk and watching TV and I decided to put a personal ad on an online dating site. I had quite honestly forgotten all about it, even though I was still apparently paying them fifteen dollars a month, I really need to actually read my Visa bill, anyway, someone answered it last night. Someone I know.”

  “Was it Lisa Riccio?” She was trying so hard to stifle the laugh, he was really twisted up about this, and he was never twisted up about a girl. Hell, half the aunts in Falmouth thought he was gay, a man his age living alone with a cat.

  “No smartass, besides I think Lisa’s doing time for solicitation, but back to the actual important information. It’s a woman I work with. She’s smart, funny, pretty, doesn’t work in my department, and doesn’t have any supervisory links to me so we wouldn’t break the company fraternization policy. She’s in accounting, smart as a whip, a little bit of a geek and has a weakness for sugar free strawberry candies.” She could hear the smile in his voice as he talked about her.

  “So what’s the problem, is she a drug addict? The boss’s daughter? Moonlights as a stripper?” Maria knew about the work thing, but that was a long time ago, and that woman was an idiot anyhow, Danny was young and blinded by a pair of big tits that put out.

  “She is none of those things; the problem is we work together. What happens if things don’t work out? It could be awkward, and I’d hate for her to feel awkward about anything.” He already wanted to keep her safe from everything, he was halfway gone and he didn’t even know it.

  “Danny, if you never take a chance you and that fat, cranky, half blind cat are going to rattle around alone in that house forever. Go for it, trade some emails, have a nice nonthreatening cup of coffee. See if anything clicks and if it does take her on an actual date, you remember what those are right? If you do, can you remind Rocco, because since we had the twins I think he’s forgotten.” Maria always knew the right thing to say, calling her was the right thing to do.

  “Okay, I’ll keep you posted on operation bonnie lass,” he chuckled.

  “Her name’s Bonnie?” Maria asked fishing for more details to gossip with her sisters about.

  “No, her name isn’t Bonnie and I’m not going to tell you her name. I don’t need you looking on the company website and harassing her by phone and email. Bonnie lass because she’s a sweet Irish girl, red hair, green eyes, freckles, the whole nine.” He actually made a dreamy sigh at that last part, what the hell was wrong with him?

  “Irish? Ma’s going to have a cow, but if Sophia can convert and marry that nice Rabbi, Ma can deal with Irish, especially since she’s probably Catholic.”

  “Goodbye Maria, I’m hanging up, and not a word to the rest of the coven, I mean it,” he lovingly referred to his sisters as a group of witches, yup, lovingly.

  He hung up the phone, opened his office door and decided to make the rounds. Well, everywhere but Cora’s area, he needed to think on that one, decide the right approach.

  Chapter 7

  “It’s been three days, he’s not going to respond. That’s okay, I’m not upset about it, I knew he wasn’t going to anyway,” Cora was chain eating M&Ms on a cold park bench outside with Kaelyn.

  “First of all,
give me the candy.” She held out her hand and did that come here motion, grabbing them away, “Secondly, you didn’t answer the ad the first day you saw it, you thought about it, decided what you wanted to do. You need to let him think, don’t jump to any conclusions just yet.”

  “Okay, Okay, now give me back my candy, bitch,” Cora said through clenched teeth.

  “Nope, the baby needs these more than you do,” Kaelyn tossed that comment out there, like the sky is blue, or the apples are delicious.

  Cora squeezed her friend, “Again? You know birth control is legal, right?” She was happy for them, although she felt that twinge of sadness she felt whenever she found out any of her friends were pregnant.

  “We actually were using birth control. Tommy obviously has super sperm, he’s quite proud of himself,” she gloated, just a little, wifely pride and all.

  “Will you come back to work this time?” God she hoped so, this place would be much less tolerable without Kaelyn.

  “Probably, don’t know yet, we only found out yesterday. No plans for anything yet, just sore boobs and exhaustion.”

  “Okay, break time is over, let’s get back to work mama.” Hooking her arm through Kaelyn’s, they walked across the parking lot and back in to building A.

  At a quarter to five, the numbers on Cora’s spreadsheets were starting to swim. She closed down her accounting program and decided to check her personal email. Maybe he’d replied since she’s left home this morning. She was trying to be good today and not check obsessively like the last two days.