"Yes. No. I don't know." Davina slumped forward, rubbing her temples with her light brown fingers in an attempt to massage away the stress building up in her tense muscles. She felt embarrassed and off-kilter, unable to focus on even the simplest thing--every time she looked down at the layouts and proofs scattered across Ken's desk, her vision seemed to blur as if tears were pricking at the corners of her eyes. Ken could clearly tell she was a total mess, and it felt humiliating to sit there and stammer out a confused and incoherent response to his perfectly normal question of 'Do you want to talk about it?'; but Davina thought that if she poked at the emotional time bomb sitting in the middle of her brain, it was going to explode. She didn't want him caught in the blast.
But thankfully, Ken always knew just what to do. "I think you need to take a little brain break," he said, cupping her chin in one strong hand and fixing his bright blue eyes on her. "Just focus on me, Davina. Look at me, look right here at me and let everything else fade away for a moment so you can relax." Normally that would be all Davina needed to sluice away the tension of another late night at the office; she'd gotten used to turning to Ken and his guided meditation techniques whenever she started to run out of steam during these crunch time all-nighters. But tonight, the sensation of Ken's pale fingers against her warm skin only reminded her of Lori's hurtful, hateful words at lunchtime. They lodged in her brain like a fish bone, preventing her from finding that delightful state of calm that she normally achieved so easily.
Even so, he managed to bleed off enough stress to allow Davina to talk about what was bothering her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know I'm a total basket case tonight. I'm just really ticked off about Lori. She decided to 'help me out' today by taking me out to lunch and repeating all the nasty rumors that are going around the office about you and I." A part of her felt guilty for even mentioning this to Ken--wasn't she really just doing the same thing to him that Lori had done to her by talking about this? But as she stared into his sparkling blue eyes, allowing the comfortable familiarity of his gaze to remind her of all the other times he helped her calm down when she was feeling overwhelmed, that tension slowly melted into warm, peaceful relaxation.
For his part, Ken didn't seem particularly bothered by the implications of Davina's words. "Uh oh," he said, a chuckle of amusement in his voice. "Is the rumor mill saying something about us?" A friendly smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, as though he knew exactly what she was going to say and thought of it as nothing more than a private joke. "Go on, spill the beans. Tell me what she said to you." His hand moved as he spoke, rotating her head in gentle circles that eased out more and more tension until Davina's deep brown eyes fluttered slightly in relaxation.
"She said, um..." Davina was surprised to find that for a moment, she couldn't quite recall her office acquaintance's words of this afternoon. They'd loomed so large in her head a few minutes ago, but now they faded into irrelevance next to the endless depths of Ken's sparkling blue eyes. She could feel the tension melting out of her neck muscles, allowing her head to move freely under Ken's gentle manipulation. He always worked such wonders. She was lucky to have a friend like him.
Friend. Right. "She said that everyone thinks we're lovers." Davina blushed, her tawny skin doing almost nothing to hide the flush of embarrassment in her cheeks.
Ken guffawed with laughter, and after a moment, Davina found herself giggling right along with him. "Well of course they do!" he said. "Any time a man and a woman spend more than five minutes alone together in this place, someone's saying that they're having an affair. It's like they've never even heard of a platonic relationship." Ken's laughter worked like a literal charm, banishing the anger and humiliation and anxiety Davina felt in a matter of instants. She couldn't bring herself to continue caring about what other people thought about their friendship, not when Ken thought their concerns were so clearly absurd. Another wave of tension washed out of her, leaving her slumping nearly boneless in her chair.
"I know," she chuckled delightedly, almost slurring her words in relief. "It's, it's like they think that everything a woman does just has to lead to sex or something." Her fingers began to move, slowly unbuttoning her blouse before tugging it over her shoulders and down her arms to drop it completely onto the floor. She understood why she hadn't done it before--normally she liked getting comfortable right away during their late night work sessions, but she probably had a subconscious fear that someone might see them and think that she had some kind of a sexual motivation for taking off her clothes. It was absurd, though. They were all alone, and the office door was locked. She could wear whatever she felt like. Ken wouldn't mind at all.
