The Gay Delusion

24: The Grub Delusion

Gingerly picking up a cupcake, I hesitated before sinking my teeth into it, ready to wince and spit it out.  I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have to do that, though: because while she wouldn't be winning any baking contests anytime soon, Nova had, for the first time in my memory, actually made something decent. Gosh, things were changing. Things had already changed so much.

Now, though, wasn't the time to think. Now was the time to go to bed, since I was exhausted from the drive home and had to get up for work in the morning.

And because tomorrow was definitely going to be something to behold.

*

I hadn't ever been this nervous to go to work - not even after The Kiss, which seemed like it had happened in some distant dream to some girl who wasn't me. Except it had. Even the memory of it - now slightly hazy and tinged from previous feelings which weren't meant to be there like guilt, fear, and an inkling of hurt - was still enough to make my hands feel like they were tingling with passion.

Taking a deep inhale, my chest felt tight as I stepped into the office building, waltzing into the elevator to head up to the twenty-third floor like it was a completely normal day. I could nearly pretend it was a totally ordinary day, if it weren't for the feelings of total déjà-vu happening.

It was almost nine o'clock when I got in, arriving just a couple of minutes before briefing was due to begin. It was safe to say I was bricking it as I walked into the office, keeping an attentive eye out for Griffin, who had been the subject of a few dreams last night.

When I spotted him standing in the corner of the room, though, talking to Kate and smiling at something she was saying, my knees felt like they might buckle. I was finally glimpsing him with fresh eyes, and my heart felt like it was actually expanding far more than usual.

It wasn't just the physical aspect of Griffin that had me so drawn to him - although that angular profile, and those shoulders which would be the perfect size just to hold on to, certainly didn't repel me. The easy warmth he exuded was what mattered the most.

All the people who were a part of my life -like Lewis, Nova, and Felicity - were warm. If they weren't, they certainly wouldn't be in it. (Probably because otherwise they'd quite literally be dead. Or dying from hypothermia or something at the very least.) They were warm, funny, caring, and most of all, they were good.

It was just that there was something different about Griffin's warmth: it was the perfect temperature for me. And right now, I wanted to grab it with both hands and wrap it around myself like a blanket.

'Pull yourself together, woman,' I muttered to myself, shaking my head a little to snap myself out of the Griffin-daze.

In those first couple of hours at work, Griffin was either making a serious effort not to glance over and look at me, or he had been so engrossed in whatever he was doing that he genuinely hadn't spotted my face. I knew it was almost certainly the former, though, because I had to walk past Griffin's desk to get to Kate's office when she called me in to see her. It had taken nearly all of my self-restraint not to turn around and look back at him as I strode past with my breath held, to offer him an olive branch in the form of a tiny smile.

'Hi Laina, come in, come in,' Kate said when I rapped twice on her open office door with my knuckles.

'Cara said you wanted to see me?' I asked, closing the door shut behind me.

Kate smiled and nodded. 'Just wanted to see how you were - I know you've been off sick these last couple of days.'

'Yeah,' I said, rubbing the back of my neck and trying not to wince as I lied. 'It must have been one of those forty-eight hour bug things, because I'm back to feeling one-hundred percent, now.'