Only Oscar (Wattys 2022 Shortlist!)

Chapter Three

Oscar Levinson was a pretty smart guy.

Not many people knew how smart. The majority, if they even noticed him to begin with, took one look at his five-eleven height, messy dark hair, unremarkable features, and the run-of-the-mill suits which rendered him indistinguishable in the Manhattan office crowd, and immediately forgot about him. 

There was no need to take a mental note. He wasn't a threat to their job, their women or the scant few square feet of real estate they'd claimed as their kingdom. He was just a face in the crowd.

Wouldn't always be that way, but Oscar planned on enjoying it while it lasted. He didn't give a crap what anyone he didn't care about thought, anyway. Those who doubted his ability to make something of himself would be proved wrong soon enough, and he'd always thought it was better to be under-estimated than set on a pedestal so he had further to fall.

"Do I have something on my face?" he inquired. "Cos if it looks like cream cheese from the bagel I had on the way over, I'm saving it for later."

It was the third time in twenty minutes he'd caught Callie staring at him. Didn't take a genius to work out something was up.

She blinked. "What?"

Distracted, too. That wasn't good. Distracted paired with obviously working up to whatever the something was, usually meant an adventure.

"You've been staring at me."

"No, I haven't."

Oscar's eyes narrowed. If he didn't know better, he'd say the denial was accompanied by a slight hint of warmth on her cheeks. "Okay. Spit it out."

"Spit what out?" She blinked again, with more faux innocence than before, which meant whatever scheme she had planned was guaranteed to get him in trouble.

So much for that sweet little corner cubicle the guys in work seemed to think was his for the taking. They didn't know how much he hated his day job or how close he was to handing in his notice. But it would be nice if he could enlighten them in less than five-to-ten years.

"How big a felony are we talking this time?"

A sigh. "I've said it before and I'll say it again: It's not breaking and entering when you have a key."

"But we couldn't go during office hours."

"You work during office hours."

"And we couldn't turn on a light."

"I didn't want anyone to tell Rocko I'd been there. He might have thought I wanted us to get back together."

Ah, yes. Once met, who could ever forget Rocko? Large enough to be a one-man construction crew by day, with enough pent-up aggression left over to spew an endless stream of obscenities into a mike at the front of a grunge metal band at night. He barely made it to the six-week cut-off point with Callie before she decided he was less pussy cat than potential bunny-boiler. But truth-be-told, Oscar missed the guy. It was nice to have a visual reminder of how far man had evolved since the era of clubbing women over the head and dragging them back to their cave to feast on roast dinosaur. That, and Oscar never had to pretend he wasn't the smartest guy in the room when Rocko was around.

"You insisted we dress head-to-toe in black," he reminded her. "All that was missing was a sack with the word SWAG written on it."

"We didn't need a great big sack to carry one itty, bitty piece of jewelry." Callie pushed out her bottom lip and hit him with the soulful doe-eyed expression he'd never been able to resist. "And you know how I feel about my locket. If I lost it, I'd be devastated."