Dylan arrived at work late that Monday, having slept comfortably for the first time in weeks but had also forgotten what day it was. After saying his generic pleasantries to the security guard, Michael, in the lobby, Chris and Bryce were the only ones who watched him slip in with a frown on his face and rings darker than normal. Chris however, was the one who stood up from the meeting with the claim to go get him.

“Are you okay?” he asked cautiously as he approached Dylan’s desk.

“I have no idea how it happened, but I slept through my alarm clock,” Dylan whispered, his eyes squinting in concentration.

Chris frowned and shook his head. His hand rose towards Dylan’s face, as if to touch his face and check his temperature; he didn’t. “You look terrible.”

“You’re not really that much of a looker, either,” he snidely replied.

“Dylan, go home. You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“Gentlemen,” came Stevenson’s voice as he approached the two from the conference room, “would you like to join us?”

“Sir, I think Dylan should go home.” Chris gestured to the tired man. “He looks terrible.”

Dylan mumbled a clever retort, though no one heard it.

“He always looks like that,” Stevenson responded, waving away Chris’ concerns. “Come on, Matthews, we have work.” Their supervisor proceeded back.

Chris grimaced. “He can be such an ass,” he whispered, glaring at the entrance of the conference room. But he sighed, turned to Dylan and stressed, “You should go home.”

Dylan withdrew his laptop and papers and pushed past him. “Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered to himself, though Chris heard it.

Bryce feebly waved at his Soulmate when he entered the conference room. Dylan couldn’t meet the other man’s gaze and sat down.

The meeting was merely preliminary information from Stevenson, notes passed on to each person, tips on making their ultimate goal more successful, and so on. If Dylan hadn’t come in late, all he really needed to know was that the contact tab needed to be moved to the main menu of the website, and that the background colour, a lovely shade of Prussian blue, was too dark for the client’s taste, requesting a forest green.

Subsequently, that meant that he had to reorganize the colours on the website, including font colours. In Dylan’s head, it merely meant hours of coding in the ungodly hours of the morning.

Bryce watched Stevenson give Dylan his notes before they were all dismissed – a large stack of papers outlining every issue Dylan needed to change. Seeing his Soulmate with such a heartbroken, distant look about him, Bryce wanted to stand and insist that Prussian blue was the right colour for the website.

He didn’t. Bryce held his tongue and went to work, like any other normal day.

For Dylan, it was an unproductive day. He did about four long lines of coding, corresponding to the font colour on the home page and bringing the ‘Contacts’ tab to the main menu, before ultimately taking a prolonged break, deciding to formulate story ideas on a dream that would never come to fruition. He spent his lunch break in a quiet corner of the office, and the afternoon writing down plot ideas for the short stories.

“Dylan.”

Inhaling loudly, the man in question glanced up to see Bryce standing at the entrance of his cubicle, his bag slung over his shoulder. Dylan rubbed his eyes. “Oh shit. Don’t tell me it’s nine already.”

“It’s actually five o’clock,” Bryce whispered, sliding his bag to the floor. “I was just heading out now.”

Dylan inhaled again and nodded. “Oh. Okay,” he yawned, glancing back to his computer, which showed a black loading screen with a bouncing red, green, blue and yellow cube that was too harsh for his eyes. When he noticed Bryce still present, he looked back and asked, “What do you want?”

“I – ” Bryce ran his fingers along the seams of the plastic cubicle wall edging. “I, I was wondering if you had an answer. F-for me.”

Dylan blinked. “What?”

Bryce’s jaw tensed for a moment. “W-well, you said you’d pick a day.”

“Oh,” he whispered. Pulling out some Post-It notes and a purple Sharpie from his desk drawer, he wrote down the upcoming Thursday evening. Folding it, he offered it to Bryce. “I don’t have anything planned for that day.”

“Uh, do you…” Bryce wiped his face. “…may-maybe you should pick where we go?” asked Bryce. “I don’t…really know…any good ‘first date’ places.”

Dylan’s eyebrows rose in confusion. “I’m going to regret this, but where do you usually take first dates?”

Bryce tapped his fingers against the plastic cubicle edging. “Meeting them in the pub doesn’t count, right?”

Dylan nodded, mentally noting the honesty the nervous Soulmate was exhibiting. He quickly wrote down the name of a French restaurant close to where he lived. “I expect you to arrive punctually.”

“W…” Bryce smiled before he pointed out, “we’ll be working all day.”

Dylan swallowed his spittle. “Then I expect you to remind me at five. We can leave here, then.”

Bryce nodded. “All right. Uh, I’ll…see you Thursday.”

“You’ll see me tomorrow, Bryce.”

Bryce held up finger guns before pursing his lips. He opened his mouth to say something and then proceeded to leave. Dylan brushed his hair out of his eyes and returned to coding, where he accomplished three more lines before finally deciding to call it a night.