#lukecore

“Oh, fuck,” Allie hissed. The gingerbread house collapsed again, and—she held the wreckage in one hand and tapped her phone with the other—the gingerbread house competition was in half an hour.

Also, the rest of their team was suspiciously MIA. Amanda got pulled into a meeting—fine, whatever, her boss stressed her out anyway. Danielle went out to “go buy napkins for the potluck,” okay. Kyle… Well, Kyle was the programmatic guy, and she didn’t want him anywhere near her creative energy on a good day, anyway.

That left her alone in the office with—

“Let me help.”

—Luke.

On whom, for the record, she did not have a crush, thank you very much. The gravitational pull she felt from him was just creative compatibility. It was just how likeminded they were. It was just years of proximity.

Luke wound up next to her, entering her space like he’d done about a million times. While she sat, hunched over her desk to get the stability of leaning on her elbows, he crouched, eye-height with her destroyed gingerbread house. 

“Base’s fine,” he said. He reached for the cookies—the kind from a box; even though Allie knew Ines in HR baked all of their department’s cookies herself, which was totally cheating, there was no way she trusted her own baking in an actual competition—and the icing, then added, “Don’t move.”

Uh.

With how he had her crowded between her desk and his body, that sure wasn’t going to be happening. Still crouched, still less than an inch from her—she could reach out and run a hand through his hair, she thought, if she didn’t care about getting fired—he started drawing small icing squares on a gingerbread rectangle. 

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Making the Empire State Building.”

Oh. Right. Of course. Silly her.

Her mind wandered. She was amazed, not of her own accord but because the thought was so persistent, by how steady, how gentle his hands were. He had thick fingers, not that she was paying attention, and wide palms, such that he held the cookie-wall in an L made by his thumb and forefinger while the other made rows of perfect, identical squares. Following the arm that held the icing bag, Allie noticed the flex of muscle, skin, and veins below his sleeve—which he’d rolled up to avoid getting icing on it, not to give her an eyeful.

She wasn’t looking.

That would be weird.

“Thanks for taking over,” she blurted.