echo echoing echoes

Ryland promptly closes his phone with a sigh, a hand over his face and his cheeks slightly flushed in embarrassment.

"So, does that answer your question on why I was fired?"

Tom, who had pestered Ryland continuesly about it, standing next to him, slowly blinks.

"Yes, but also, Ry-Ry—"

"Don't call me that,"

"Your angry voice makes me insanely hard."

..

"What?"

So Grace avoids set and only bring’s Colt lunch or visits him right outside to keep a low profile and Tom is agonizing over how to get this man to pay attention to him and starts doing what he can but not in a stalker ‘sends flowers to work’ kind of way because he might be a playboy but he isn’t dumb and knows Grace would find that distasteful so he starts doing other things;

Donating science equipment to Grace’s school district so there’s enough microscopes that kids don’t have to take turns.

Curating boxes of sample slides to send to the school (he has no idea what he’s doing or what it means but he pulls resources to get whatever he thinks is sciencey enough) and maybe one box is a bunch of flowers on microscope slides because he knows an actual bouquet would go unappreciated.

Finds some way to pick up gigs in science periodicals so his picture is in magazines that Ryder knows Graces reads.

Commissioning a script for a movie that would require a molecular biologist knowledgeable on non-water based life form (think along the lines of a Transformers movie) and maybe Tom doesn’t get to interact with Grace but just knowing that the creative team brought him on as a consultant is enough to get his heart racing.

The thing I drew for @stoblinarmyhub 's Across the Stobverse event X3 It's supposed to be Stobotnik as the characters from the Devilish Flash games >w<

Rambling under the cut XP