Forget Me Not

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"Can you hear that?" P'Song asked Korn before their Monday morning meeting began.

"What?" Korn asked worried that something had gone wrong over the weekend and P'Song was about to commiserate with him on his upcoming misery.

"Nothing," she said dramatically, "It's so quiet."

P'Dan heaved a sigh then smile broadly at Korn, "The interns are finally gone."

Korn laughed at his colleague's exaggerations. His only experience with internships, prior to this, had been when he'd completed his own. It was definitely quieter. The manic energy the interns exuded no longer affected everyone within a few feet of them. There was no one asking questions every ten minutes or insisting on his company when he would have much preferred to sit by himself.

"It's nice not to have the children underfoot," P'Dan said sounding like a sagely old man.

Korn agreed—but only in part.

He was moving into a more sensitive phase of the company's certification process and he needed to figure out a timeline of events. There were stakeholders to approach and convince. Picking the wrong person could scuttle his entire plan if he didn't find someone receptive to his idea. Then there was the matter of the budget.

"There's a lot left to do," Korn reported to the group, "But I think there's enough progress to prove it's worth it."

Korn didn't mention that it was enough work to keep him busy for a long time to come. He should have been glad for the lack of interruptions and the stray moments with nothing to do while waiting on feedback. But all that extra space left him with too much time to think.

Thinking was dangerous, especially when it automatically turned to Mew.
Yet everything made him think about him.

Like his last conversation with Nack. It had been imperative that he shut the intern down to establish an appropriate boundary. But that hadn't been the real reason for keeping Nack at arms-length. Korn couldn't talk about Mew with anyone. Not when every thought, every feeling left him off balance enough to know the earth beneath him had shifted.

"I..." the words 'miss you' stuck in his throat when Mew called him, a regular ritual he liked more each time it happened. Instead, he admitted, "...was just about to call you."

"I missed you," Mew said, stealing his thunder and making him wonder why it was so hard to say what he thought and felt.

He had good excuses and bad ideas. Everything about their relationship was different from how it had begun. He wasn't ready to define the new terms of their association. He'd lived with the uncertainty for long enough to find comfort in the familiarity. But uncertainty was its own kind of hell.

It was the by-product of the haze he'd been in when it all started. Korn's grief and pain had coloured everything. Things were only starting to change around the time Mew showed up—or maybe they changed when he showed up. By the time he was more aware of his choices, being with Mew didn't feel like a choice anymore. He hadn't fallen in love. He'd slid into it with remarkable ease for something that terrified him so deeply.

Korn wanted to know when it had happened. When had he gone from thinking of Mew as part of his past, to thinking of him as part of his future? When had he crossed that line? If he could understand what he'd done (or not done) perhaps he could figure out what to do to make sure it didn't fall apart the same way it had before.

If there was a moment, he couldn't find it.
Perhaps there hadn't been one.

"How is work going?" Mew asked.