Head Over Heels ✓

42 / after all this time

july, age 28

Lucas wished it was raining. At least that way he would feel a little better about being stuck at work, but the sky was bright blue and cloudless, the sun shining strong, and he was sitting behind his desk. He wasn't usually one to stare at the clock and wish away the time but when it was so close to lunch and he was so ready for a break, he found that his eyes naturally travelled to the digital time in the corner of his computer screen. Five to twelve. Three hundreds seconds.

He sighed again. That was too many seconds to waste watching the clock, so he dragged his stare up to the latest email in his inbox. A response from an author regarding the edits he had suggested. That one could wait until he had a little more time, rather than a rushed response hashed out in five minutes. Four and a half, even.

Instead, he scrolled down to something less vital, shooting off a cookie-cutter response that at least made him feel like he was doing something productive. Working his way through those kinds of emails was therapeutic in the most mundane kind of way, slowly and tediously emptying his inbox. He despised having a cluttered inbox as much as he despised having a cluttered home. Even more so, in fact: the inbox was totally under his control, whereas he wasn't the only one contributing to the mess in the house.

Three minutes to go. The clock seemed to had slowed down by about two hundred percent, the length of a song suddenly feeling like an eternity. Four hours into the day and he was already ready for it to be over but after his thirty minutes for lunch, he would be right back in that seat until three o'clock rolled around and he could leave to pick Lucy up from her last day of Nursery.

Lucas loved his job. Ordinarily, he loved going into work each day, working through manuscripts and communicating with writers, collaborating with the other editors at Chess House, but today he just wasn't feeling it. He wanted to be home with his family, and he couldn't wait for summer to start. Today was his last day before the summer holidays, when he would have six uninterrupted weeks off. He and Asher had arranged the contract once they had gone back to work after becoming parents, organising school holidays off, and that hadn't been a problem at all when Ishaana had been there to oversee the arrangements.

Lucas was fairly certain she would never leave the company. There were times she had vowed to retire and hand it over; there were times she had taken sabbaticals and ended up in a state of semi-retirement, but she would never fully leave it. She always came back to her baby. She could be seen around the office a few times a week, sometimes every day, and today was no different.

He had already spotted her twice that morning, and a third time when she had come over just to say hi. She was a big believer in befriending her employees and checking in with them on a regular basis, and she tried not to give Lucas special treatment just because he was his son-in-law, and the father of her only grandchildren.

It was about to be a fourth time. He made eye contact with her when he lifted his gaze from his computer screen and she seemed to lock onto him with a grin, walking straight over to him. She rested her hip against the desk, her arms folded.

"How's it going?" she asked.

"Fine, thanks," he said, a little put off that she was asking him again. He wondered if his boredom was written all over his face. It most likely was. He wasn't great at masking his emotions. "Not a lot of change from an hour ago, to be honest. Everything alright?"

"Yes indeed," she said tucking her hair behind her ears. Despite going grey more than twenty years ago, Lucas had never actually seen a grey hair on her head. Although Ishaana advocated aging gracefully, never doing anything to hide her wrinkles, she was determined to keep her black hair. "I have a surprise for you."