So, Was He Jealous?

'A mind as brilliant as his should have come up with a better way to get through this door.' Mickey was decidedly cross as she struggled to enter the five-digit door code to the warehouse while avoiding setting a precarious load of file folders down on wet gravel. It was an unfortunate merging of events, an assignment from the Serendip brass to relocate Austin James' project archives and the dramatic beginning of the Arizona rainy season.

She managed to poke each digit accurately, despite her compromised ability to see what she was poking, and the door unlatched with a solid clank. "Austin!" she hollered into the cavernous workshop of her employer. "Come give me a hand, will you?" She heard no reply. She was not terribly surprised.

The inside of the warehouse was alive with sound, with irregular beeping from a panel of circuit boards not far from the front entrance, hydraulic whirring from opposite the central living area, and the hissing of water vapor venting from pipes at the nether reaches of the expansive room. Overarching the laboratory racket, there played a classical ensemble of some sort, odds better than not it was Beethoven.

In the midst of it all, Austin sat cross-legged on the floor between the circuits and the hydraulics, with a bulky set of headphones covering his ears and all his attention tuned to the shoebox-sized electronic device in his lap into which wires from the headphones were plugged.

Mickey's mouth drew into a straight line of displeasure as she staggered in front of him with her cumbersome load and dropped it unceremoniously onto his desk. He finally noticed her and looked up from his work, his expression mildly interested, but far from impressed.

"Anything new I should know about?" he asked, pulling off the headphones and seriously mussing his hair in the process. Mickey resisted an impulse to repair the misplaced tendrils flopping over his forehead with her fingers. It was such a maternal thing to do. She wondered when she had developed such a motherly inclination toward her boss.

She dropped the more tender thought and returned to being perturbed. "Yes, there is," she replied, launching into a gripe. "When you send someone to represent you at the weekly board meeting and the board decides they like having your representative there, you get your secretary assigned grunt work and invited to come back again next week." With that, she held up one of the folders from her load. "These are the projects you once commissioned that were collecting dust in the office you don't use at Serendip. McKinley says it's time to find them a new home, so now I get to transfer them to microfilm."

The biting sarcasm was weak impetus to hold Austin's attention from his electronic device while she was speaking, but as she finished her complaint, he switched off the machine and addressed her mildly, "That will keep you busy for a while."

"Thanks a lot!" She could have continued in this vein, but decided it wasn't worth the effort to elicit Austin's sympathy. It would be a lot of work for an unlikely reward. "What are you doing, anyway?"

"Non-invasive, acoustic microelectrode assay," he replied, and added smugly, "But don't worry. I won't commit anything to writing." He promptly returned to tinkering with his box.

Mickey sat at Austin's desk, pulled a handful of folders off the top of the stack, and began skimming through them. "A lot of these look like they were never completed," she observed, crossing one leg over the other.

"They weren't," Austin agreed. "Those are projects the board either wouldn't fund or chose to abandon. Seems like a waste of time to archive them."

Mickey issued a long-suffering groan. "I'll be occupied with this for the rest of the week. I hope you didn't have anything else planned." She selected one particular file and began reading it in earnest.

As she settled into her work, Austin fixed his gaze on her, studying her unnoticed. After an extended moment, he suddenly asked, "What do you have planned for Saturday?"

"That better not be your way of hinting I'm going to spend my weekend with this," she responded, without looking up. Then she added brightly, "Actually, I have a date."

Just a flash of displeasure crossed Austin's face, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. "A date?"

Mickey looked up and smiled teasingly. "Yeah, you know? Those social get-togethers, usually with someone of the opposite sex, where you dress up and hit the town, have stimulating conversation, stay out too late." She smiled to herself. "Well, maybe stay out late. That depends on the conversation."

"How'd you meet this guy?"

"I haven't," she replied. "Not yet. My friend, Terri, set me up on a blind date with someone she works with." She wrinkled her nose. "She says I spend too much time working and need to get a life. All I know is she promised he's good-looking and lots of fun." Then she giggled. "I haven't been on a date in ages."

Austin set a hard stare on her. "What's his name?"

Mickey's smile morphed into dismay, her eyes widening, and she cried, "Oh, no you don't! The last time you took it upon yourself to research my date, you totally ruined it for me. Remember Richard?"

"David."

"David?" Mickey frowned, trying to remember. "Are you sure?"

Matter-of-factly, Austin reported, "You met him in the park, jogging. He pretended to sprain an ankle."

Chortling, Mickey replied, "That's right. I wonder if he knows he's going bald yet."

"A blind date sounds a little risky," Austin said, rising from the floor and heading toward his computer where Mickey sat with her files.

Mickey rolled her eyes. "Any date is risky," she said wryly. "Just going out to your car at night is risky." She smiled. "You can't go through life trying to avoid freak accidents. Besides, how often do things really go that wrong? It's just tabloid news stuff."

Austin reached over her, tapped at his keyboard a moment, and said, "Does your friend really know him that well? Maybe there's a reason he's single." He smiled, acknowledging a shadow of concern that flitted over her face. "Or maybe," he added triumphantly, "he's not single at all."

"What?!"

"Studies have shown, attractive men over twenty-five with no obvious social hang-ups who enter the dating pool are more likely than not either collecting partners or trolling for a replacement."

Mickey scowled in disgust. "Collecting partners? Austin!" Then suddenly her features changed, and she turned a lop-sided smile on him. "Are you jealous?"

"No," he replied instantly, with perfect impassivity. He didn't blink.

She narrowed her eyes and studied him a little closer. Then her face broke into a wide grin. "Yes, you are," she declared. "You're jealous."

"I am not!" he cried. He hit enter on the keyboard with striking force, then turned and stalked away to another part of the lab.

Mickey wasn't going to let him off the hook so easily. She uncrossed her legs, got up, and followed him. "All right, then why did you want to know what I'm doing Saturday? Did you have something else in mind?"

Austin shrugged, taking a sudden, profound interest in watering his plants. "I thought maybe you'd rather finish archiving those files over the weekend." He glanced up and noted her unconvinced expression. "Well, if you don't, you might still have this hanging over your head by next week's board meeting. That's all."

"That's all, huh?"

Austin's lips were pressed together grimly, and by all appearances he was sulking, but he offered no reply.

Mickey watched him go through the motions of spraying the broad leaves of his indoor jungle, then dousing the roots with water from a can. After a minute, she breathed a sigh. "Hold still," she murmured, reaching up and delicately flipping a wayward lock of his hair back into place. He raised an eyebrow at her and she shrugged back.

Austin set down his watering can, and just a hint of a smile passed over his lips before he turned back toward his desk. Mickey followed him. She moved part of her stack of file folders off his desk and onto her own and sat down with them. He dropped into his desk chair and leaned back.

Feeling nervy, and not quite ready to succumb to the drudgery of archiving files, she asked, "Austin, are you really that concerned about this date, or were you just trying to get a rise out of me?"

To his credit, he took the remark in good humor. He even allowed a genuine smile to surface. Then he cocked his head at her, his curiosity apparently piqued, and sat upright. His keen blue eyes regarded her with an incisiveness that almost made her wish she hadn't asked. "What makes you so ready to volunteer yourself to a total stranger, sight unseen, on account of someone who thinks you've got nothing better to do and no other prospects?" he demanded.

For a moment, her mouth hung open in astonishment. She withheld a reflexive, sputtered retort, but before she could formulate a more fitting response, Austin continued.

"And incidentally, what did you find so endearing about a man who lied to get you to notice him, and continued to lie to keep your good opinion of him?" He was very serious now, his stare level and expectant.

Had Mickey not known him better, had she heard hauteur instead of candor in his words, maybe she would have been angry. Instead, she swallowed hard and blinked against the prickling feeling in her eyes. "I see," she said slowly. "So, does this mean you don't approve of my taste in men?"

He shook his head and turned back to his computer, fingers diligently tapping the keys even before he answered her. "Not really," he quipped, his earlier heaviness suddenly dissipated. "I just think you can do better than that."

For a while, she watched him at his desk, his back turned toward her, hunched over his next project. The conversation was effectively closed, in part because he made it that way, and in part because she had no answer to the stinging truth of what he had said.

Years later, she would ask him again. "Austin, now tell me the truth. Were you jealous?" Of course he wouldn't give a straight answer. Not even then. He'd just smirk in that way of his and say, "I already told you the truth. Watching you date that bunch was like watching a Stradivarius at the hands of fifth-graders."

The End.

Happy Birthday, Vesper