CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
TREVOR
“Hey, Trevor. Take a seat.” Gabriela from HR welcomes me into her office. Her dark hair is pulled into a tight bun settled against the collar of her black pinstripe power suit. She gestures to the empty leather armchair next to my supervisor, Miles, whose hulking frame barely fits in his. His salt-and-pepper goatee stretches around the smile he beams at me as I sit, bald head gleaming under the recessed lighting.
“How are you liking the team so far?” Miles asks.
Slinging my arm over the chair back, I turn to face him. “They’re great. I think we all work pretty well together. Can’t complain.” Despite having to deal with Marla every so often, her main focus has been putting out fires across the various training departments. I’ve had ample space to focus on building rapport with my teammates for the last two months.
“That’s great! I’ve only heard good things about you from everyone. How has the overnight traveling gone for you?”
“Again, no complaints. The overnights have all been simple to navigate.”
“Well, if you’re still interested, we’d like to finalize your permanent contract. I hear you have some stipulations we need to negotiate. Let’s hear them.”
“I really just need to be close to home until the baby’s born, and a guaranteed paternity leave with health care benefits for the duration.”
Gabriela nods while tapping on the tablet in her hand. “It doesn’t look like that should be a problem. You’ve been with the company long enough to qualify for all benefits. As for the traveling, that’s up to Miles.”
Miles clears his throat. “I’d really like you to have the full flex experience under your belt before paternity leave so you can hit the ground running when you return. How far along is she?”
“Uh, twenty-six weeks.”
“If we started you on the midweek travel schedule now until your wife hits the thirty-five-week mark, would that work for you?”
Wife? I try to consider this compromise, but everything gets tangled up in the word. Over the last few days, I’ve thought about marriage more than I’d like to admit, but hearing someone else refer to her as my wife does something to me. Nothing has ever felt more natural.Does she feel it too?
“Trevor?” Miles shifts in his seat, pulling me back to the HR office. “We’ll have to adjust for any team needs of course, but unless something crazy happens and every single person comes down with COVID at the same time, I don’t anticipate you needing to be far from LA when that time comes. Does that work for you?”
Wife. “Yeah. Yep. Sounds good.” Does Willa even want to bea wife? Would she want to bemywife? We’ve made some giant leaps in our relationship, but this is in a different realm entirely.
“Excellent!” Miles stands and offers me his hand. “I’ll leave you and Gabriela to finalize the paperwork. Welcome, officially, to the team, Trevor.”
I turn to Gabriela, who hurriedly scrawls the additional terms we agreed on just now. She walks me through all the parts of the contract, has me sign what feels like a thousand times, and finally shakes my hand before I’m able to walk out the door.
As soon as I step out of the elevator and onto the training floor, my coworkers, Bryant and Jared, swarm me. “Hey, Trev. Wanted to run something past you.” Bryant throws an arm over my shoulder as we walk down the carpeted hallway in between the glass partitioned offices. His dark brown skin and black fade is a complete contrast to Jared’s pale complexion and bald head. Oddly enough, they wear matching glasses.
“Let me guess. You need help swapping out the toner in the copier again?”
“Don’t remind me.” He shudders. The last time he tried it on his own, he was covered in toner. “It was in all my crevices, man.All.My.Crevices.”
“I’m pretty sure talking about your crevices at work is a straight shot to HR…” Jared chimes in, knocking his fist into Bryant’s shoulder.
“Naw, we wanted to know how you’d feel about a team baby gift,” Bryant asks.
“It’s kind of a tradition we started,” Jared adds. “We’ll take care of everything. Just wanted to check with you and your wife. Don’t want to overstep.”
Wife. What is this? I’ve never heard the wordwifeso much in my life, and every time someone says it, Willa’s smile fills my mind.
“Pleaselet us do one.” Bryant’s eyes light up. He and Jared both have kids, but I’m surprised how excited they are about this. “Run it by your wife, of course, but babies gotta be celebrated, man.”
There it is again, thrown into my orbit so casually, like it’s meant to be there. I could correct everyone—should—since I don’t know how she’d feel if she knew I’m letting people think we’re married. But with the way I feel about Willa, the longer I mull it over, the more the wordwifedoesn’t even come close to describing her position in my life.
“Uh, yeah. I’ll check and get back to you on Monday.”
The restof my day is uneventful, except for the incessant droning in my head about marrying Willa. It was all I could do to focus on my reports for the week without my mind drifting to rings and weddings and every single lyric on my comfort playlist.
Driving home isn’t too much better, and after ten minutes, I click to my worry tunes just to get a break from my thoughts. It works long enough to get me home, but walking in to see Willa lounging on the couch with a smile just for me ramps it all back up.
