Todos os capítulos de Taste Me Like It's Our Last Day On Earth : Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

Phoenix I'm not waiting in that office for someone to tell me what happens to my own project. I grab my bag and I'm three steps behind Victor before the elevator doors even finish opening for him, close enough to catch them before they shut. He turns, surprised. "Phoenix?" "It's my drawing on that petition, Victor. I'm coming." "This is going to get ugly." "Good. I've had practice." Surprisedly, he doesn't argue further. I think some part of him doesn't want to. The preservation board's emergency session is already half-full by the time we arrived, board members murmuring in tight clusters, and there, at the front of the room, standing far too comfortably for a man who broke into a building four nights ago, is Julian Vance. He sees me first. His mouth curls into something that isn't quite a smile. "Miss Veyl," he says, pleasant as a knife. "Didn't expect the intern herself to show up for this." "Didn't expect the man who stole our archives to show his face eith

Victor She's wearing the blue dress again. I notice it the second she walks past my office door, with coffee in hand, laughing at something Priya's said, and I have to physically stop myself from following the sound of that laugh down the hallway like some kind of trained animal. I make it through two meetings before I find an excuse to walk past the drafting floor. I tell myself it's about the project timeline. It isn't. Christ, it isn't, and I know it isn't, and lying to myself about something this small irritates me more than the actual want does. "Mr. Crowe." Priya spots me first, straightening slightly the way everyone still does around me. "Did you need something?" "Miss Veyl. A word." Phoenix looks up, something flickering across her face before she smooths it into neutrality for the room. "Of course." She follows me a few steps down the hall, out of easy earshot, and I make sure to leave real distance between us. A foot. Enough that anyone glancing over sees two colle

Phoenix I should have known it wouldn't stay contained to whispers. I'm at my desk, drawing table lit under the afternoon sun, when I hear her heels first — that unhurried, deliberate rhythm that means she's already decided how this is going to go before she's even in the room. "Everyone, gather round." Octavia's voice carries, pitched for an audience, and the drafting floor goes quiet the way it always does when she wants it to. "I think we should discuss what our star intern's been up to after hours." My stomach drops straight to the floor. "Octavia....." "Oliver saw it. Half the floor's already heard." She stops in front of my desk, close enough that I have to look up at her, close enough that her perfume hits the back of my throat. "Victor Crowe, hand over yours, breathing down your neck at seven at night in an empty office. Tell me, Phoenix. Was that before or after you decided sleeping your way into a fifty-million-dollar project wasn't quite enough anymore?" The room go

Victor The Ashford file won't open. I'm standing behind Phoenix's chair when it happens, close enough that I shouldn't be, far enough that I can pretend it's professional. She clicks the folder twice yet nothing. A third time, and the error message finally loads. *File corrupted. Unable to recover.* "That can't be right." She clicks again, faster now, some edge of panic creeping into her voice. "I saved this an hour ago. I watched it save." "Check the backup drive." She does and her face instantly goes pale. "It's corrupted too," she says. "Both of them. Same file, same error, same time stamp." I lean over her shoulder, reading the metadata myself. Same corruption pattern on both copies is not an accident. Corrupted files fail randomly. They don't fail identically, twice, on two separate drives, ninety seconds apart. "Someone did this on purpose," "You don't know that." "I know exactly what a coincidence looks like, sir Victor. This isn't one." She sits back

Victor It's been four days since the kiss. Four days of me keeping my careful distance by daylight and watching her too closely by lamplight. Both of us pretending the arrangement isn't costing either of us anything before Phoenix finally asks the question she's clearly been sitting on the whole time. "Why does Octavia still have a job?" I set my coffee down slower than I mean to. "Where's this coming from?" "I was thinking about the cliffside site visit. The storm." She doesn't look up from her plate, but her voice has gone deliberately careful. The tone she uses when she's been sitting on a question for a while before finally asking it. "You told her it would be over. I heard you say it myself, standing in that cabin doorway. And then the next morning, she was back at her desk like nothing happened." I've been waiting for this conversation since the day it happened. I didn't expect it over eggs. "I meant it when I said it," I reply. "For a few couple of hours, I meant it comp