"Son, what are you standing around the water cooler for? You waiting to gossip?"
Alexander James Greenway was a powerful in voice and not so shabby in build, either. Brought up in Southern Kansas, his idioms were sometimes a little old-fashioned, but he was a progressive thinker--something his father had instilled in him as a boy. Alex's son, AJ, grew up much the same way as Alex did, although they'd traded the rural backdrop for the St. Louis metropolis when AJ was eleven.
"Hey, Dad. I just had some time to kill before my next meeting."
AJ expected his father to follow up on the obviously-not-answering-the-question answer he just gave, but Alex, Sr. surprised him.
"Well since you're free, what do you say to lunch?"
As AJ opened his mouth to answer, he saw a girl with chocolate-brown hair turn quickly from the direction he'd just come from. As she raised a hand to brush her hair from her eyes, he noticed red nails.
His dick got hard. It had to be her.
"You know what, Dad," he feigned, looking down at his smartwatch and pretending to receive a notification, "I've got to run--looks like they're gonna start the meeting a few minutes earlier. Um, dinner tonight, though? Jayhawks are on at Rook's."
He reached out for his dad's hand, a sort of ritual they had whenever they made plans to do something or a commitment of some kind. It had started after AJ's mom divorced and Alex, Sr. was getting ready to remarry. He'd promised AJ to never let his new wife, Shannon, get in the way of he and his mother's relationship, and since then, the motion had stuck. Today, it made them smile more than anything, as dinner plans were hardly the commitment that adding a new member to their family was.
"Let's do it--I'll see you for supper," Alex, Sr. said.
The chocolate-haired girl had already swung around another corner by the time AJ broke away from his father. Remembering that Mariah had mentioned a friend named Lindsay in the multimedia department, he decided to try his luck on the other side of the hallway. But how would he--
"Oh, my gosh, I am so sorry!"
He instinctively grabbed an arm of the woman who'd just knocked into him--they were headed opposite ways around the same corner. He managed to catch her binder, too, and looked intently at her hands as he handed it back to her.
Red nails.
"Um, hello? Are you hurt? I know I need to slow down around corners, but--"
"No, no, you're fine. I mean, I'm fine. You're uh, Lindsay, right? From Multi-Med?"
"Who? My name is Leslie."