Fuck.

Just like that, the calm she had been struggling to maintain began to crack. An unusual pressure beat at her sinuses as each individual task on her to-do list seemed to multiply before her eyes like a norovirus.

Dan had left her to set up and wait on a party of forty people–alone. She had hours of studying ahead of her when she got home or she’d fail her bench exams and her first year of grad school would be an expensive bust. Her thesis was floundering and her advisor was MIA and her awesome summer practicum was uncertain. And she just knew that the mathematicians were going to ask her to reheat their fish again.

“Fuuuuck,” she exhaled.

The doors leading from the dining room opened and Ledi tried to pull her features into a smile. It was probably Dr. Zietara coming to check in on his kale.

But instead of a peeved researcher standing in the doorway, there was the finest man Ledi had ever seen outside of a social media thirst trap pic. For a split second she was hit with the sensation of greeting an old friend after a long absence, but she was mistaken: she didn’t know this guy.

He was tall, with the broad-shouldered, well-defined V of a body that announced swimming was part of his workout regimen. He wore a forest green T-shirt and straight-legged black jeans that fit snugly, but not enough to advertise his eggplant emoji. She would have thought the pants were tailored, but who would waste money on tailored jeans?

His skin was a rich, dark brown, slightly darker than her own, with hair that was shaved on the sides and twisted into short, perfect dreads on the top. A well-maintained beard framed his lush lips and highlighted the sharp angles of his wide jaw instead of hiding them.

That beard made her fingers itch to stroke it, or to grab her smartphone and photograph it for posterity. She wasn’t as good at social media as Portia, but she’d rack up a million likes within the day, for sure, if not some kind of award for heroism on behalf of male-attracted humanity.

“Um,” she said. Her general reaction to men she met in her daily life was indifference or tolerance, at best, but something about this man sent her thoughts spinning far, far away from lab work or serving or studying. The only data she was currently interested in collecting was the exact tensile pressure of his beard against her inner thigh, and the shift in mass of his body on top of hers.

He cleared his throat and she realized she’d been crouching and staring up at him with an intensity that might have made him fear for his well-being. She doubted it was a new experience for him, but it was for her, and her face heated in embarrassment.

She kicked Dan’s discarded shirt under the metal table and pulled herself up straight. “Can I help you, sir?”

It felt strange to address someone near her age so formally, but at the Institute you never knew who was a VIP. The most important researcher often came to the dining room in his bathrobe and nothing else. Besides, he had an air of authority about him.

“There’s a man outside who says he’s in need of kale? He’s quite insistent.”

Oh—he had an accent, too. Kind of British, but with something else just as charming layered over it.

“Kale?” Somewhere in the back of Ledi’s mind, a connection was sparking, but all pathways were currently occupied trying to process whatever was going on with the hot guy in front of her.

He smiled, the kind of smile that made little crinkles around the corner of his eyes, and Ledi felt it all throughout her body.

“Yes,” he said, in that deep, accented voice. “Kale. A leafy green, quite good in a moroko mash, but I imagine you don’t serve that here. Maybe you do, though? I haven’t had a chance to familiarize myself with the menu.”

Familiarize? Menu? Ledi’s scattered deductive reasoning skills slowly pulled the pieces together.

This was the new hire. She felt a brief pang of regret as her beard vs thighs fantasies collapsed like one of Yves’s soufflés. Now that she knew she’d be training him, he was firmly in the coworker zone.

“Oh, you’re already helping customers? That’s great, showing initiative,” she said. Her brain had registered that he fell into a group labeled “Nope,” but all of her cylinders still weren’t firing. She was trying to sound bright and in charge, but her vocabulary center was stuck on “Damn, he fine,” making forming sentences a bit difficult. “Um. Here.”

Ledi grabbed a fistful of kale from the chopping board on the counter and shoved it toward him. He looked from the greens to her face and back again, his brow furrowed in obvious judgment.

“You’re right, I should be wearing gloves,” she said. “I of all people should be enforcing that. Public Health! Germs are the enemy!”

She was fairly certain that the look he gave her as she dropped the kale onto the cutting board and snapped a latex glove onto her right hand was the same one she doled out to subway preachers with questionable knowledge of Biblical texts ranting about the apocalypse.

“No, that’s not it at all,” he said, shaking his head, and everything clicked into place for her. How had she made such a silly mistake?

“Oh, right!”

She turned and grabbed a small, round bread plate, slapped a thin paper doily on it, and then placed the kale on top, giving it a few gentle spruces before it went off to be used as an educational aid.

“Nice catch. Presentation is always important,” she said as she handed it over to him. “I’m usually more on the ball, but it’s been a long day. A long week. Month!” She reined herself in. “You seem to have some experience already, so you can take this over to the table, okay? Remind them that the dining room will be closed to members in twenty minutes and they have to leave. I’ll go get you a tuxedo shirt to change into, then we can start training.”