Chapter Text
50 more pages, and then I can go home.
The computer screen was blurring before his eyes, which had reached the sticky, burning stage of dryness.
49 more pages, and then I can go home and shower.
Arthur reached for his mug of coffee, which had gone cold. He’d lost count of whether this was his eighth or ninth cup. It’s not like he wasn’t well-paid for his work, but on days — nights? days? — like this, he took grim satisfaction from the thought that he was extracting even more pay from the firm in the form of free coffee from the fancy machine in the break room.
48 more pages, and then I can go home and shower and take a quick nap.
Someone needed to finish checking this contract before it was sent over to the client, and since he was the senior associate on the project the task fell to him. Of course, the client didn’t get the final details to him until 9pm the evening before the contract was due, so he was stuck working through the night. And into the morning, apparently, since the sun was rising in the sky and casting cold shadows across his desk. This was the downside of his new office; when he’d become a senior associate last week he was finally moved from his windowless closet on the fifth floor to a slightly larger office with floor-to-ceiling windows on the 20th floor, and while the natural light and the view of the mountains were usually nice, right now they served only to remind him of just how long he had been sitting at this desk staring at this document.
47 more pages, and then I can go home and shower and take a quick nap… and head back here.
Arthur buried his face in his hands, rubbing at his temples. Once he sent the contract off to the client, the client would okay it and then he’d have to start organizing the signing. At best, he had two or three hours of freedom ahead of him before he had to re-enter the fray. This was not what he had expected his life to look like when he’d decided to go to law school, and yet here he was. “Golden handcuffs,” lawyers called it — mostly muttered to one another when passing in the hallways at 3am. The work sucked, but he was being paid handsomely to do it. And he was good at it; he had a mind for organization, for keeping track of a hundred different things at once. He was born to play point on massive projects. Never mind the fact that he didn’t have any time to actually enjoy having money. He dreamt of traveling, of waking up in a new city every week.
Maybe when I make partner.
A strange noise coming from direction of the windows interrupted his train of thought. He raised his head from his hands and was startled to see a pair of eyes staring back at him. He flailed in shock, knocking the cold dregs of his coffee over onto a stack of files and nearly tipping his chair over backwards.
“Shit!”
As he rummaged through the detritus on his desk looking for napkins, he looked up at the window again. The pair of eyes belonged to a window-washer, who was still looking at him, dripping squeegee hanging at his side. Arthur shot him a frustrated glare as he unearthed a stack of only-slightly-used napkins and began dabbing at the ruined files.
The window-washer grinned and shrugged, mouthing the word “Sorry” exaggeratedly as he held his palms up in the air. Arthur noticed that his teeth were crooked, which was probably to be expected from a window-washer. As was the scruff on his chin. And the ink peeking out from under the sleeves of his snug t-shirt, winding down his admittedly well-formed biceps. His lips, on the other hand, would have been out of place on anyone not working in the porn industry. Could be a second job, Arthur’s brain added unhelpfully as his eyes skimmed down the man’s thighs.
Fuck, I should be working, Arthur’s brain slightly-more-helpfully supplied when his eyes reached the dripping squeegee once again hanging by the man’s side. He darted his eyes back up to the man’s face and tried not to blush when he saw that he was being watched with a smirk.
Arthur rolled his eyes and turned his head pointedly toward his computer screen. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the washer still standing there, motionless for a moment or two before he dipped his squeegee into his bucket and began soaping up the glass. Arthur let out a small sigh of relief, and scooted his chair a few inches over so that his monitor blocked him from view.
46 more pages, and then I can go home.