The Office Pool

The betting pool on Miranda's whiteboard had reached three hundred dollars. Who would be the first to crack after the restructuring announcement? Names were scrawled in different colored markers, odds updated daily with a ruthless cheerfulness that made Julie's stomach turn.

She kept her eyes on her screen, typing emails she wasn't processing. On her desk, her goldfish—acquired during a moment of misguided optimism about office aesthetics—swam in endless circles, its orange scales catching the fluorescent light. Sometimes she envied it. Three seconds of memory, if the myth was true. No forward spiraling, no backward glancing. Just now, again and again.

"You're not on the board," said Marcus, leaning against her cubicle wall. His smile was practiced, the kind he probably used in performance reviews. "That means something, doesn't it? Either you're stronger than you look, or nobody's thought about you yet."

Julie turned. Marcus had added himself to the pool at 3:1 odds, a joke that was only half a joke. His palms were pressed against the partition, fingers splayed. She'd noticed his hands before—how he used them when he talked, how he touched her shoulder unnecessarily in meetings, how they'd brushed against hers at the holiday party, brief and electric and utterly confusing.

"Did you need something, Marcus?"

"Just making conversation. We're all a little on edge, aren't we?" His eyes dropped to her hands, then back up. "I hear the pool's winner takes everyone out. Drinks. Proper ones."

"With three hundred dollars?"

"People have been adding side bets." He stepped closer, into her space. "I put fifty on myself not crying in the bathroom. Another hundred on you finally saying yes to dinner."

Julie's breath caught. The goldfish surfaced, blowing tiny bubbles.

"That's not funny, Marcus."

"I wasn't trying to be funny." He reached out, palm up, an invitation she hadn't expected. "I was trying to be obvious. Apparently I'm terrible at both."

She looked at his hand, then at the betting board with all its calculated odds on human breakdown. Some things weren't games. Some things weren't risks you weighed and measured.

"Seven o'clock," she said. "And you're taking me somewhere that doesn't have a happy hour sign in the window."

Marcus's smile changed—something real this time. "I can do that."

Later, she would feed her goldfish and wonder why she kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But for now, she let herself take his hand.