Everything Is Blue

Chapter 18

EcoTech's C.O.R.E project was scheduled to be finished in a month.

Thirty days.

Four weeks.

Seven hundred and thirty hours.

Forty-three thousand eight hundred minutes.

Two million six hundred twenty-eight thousand two seconds.

That's how much time Kimbra and her team had left to finish. Trying to process it all had been difficult. Years of work and pushing for approval, and now they had only a month left. They were pressured by the administration to finish on time. Harry Breen, the head of administration, liked to mock Kimbra that it was cute her little project made it this far. He didn't think she'd complete it in time. Just wanting any small reason to fire her.

Oh, she was going to prove the bastard wrong.

"Kimbra!" The loud voice of Bud Flud echoed throughout the lab from the corridor.

Kimbra sighed, pulling off her goggles as she approached the door, sticking her head out of the lab where she had been working for the past hour. She looked from the right, to the left, and back to the right again.

"Bud?"

Bud's dorky face poked out from the corner to her right. His facial expression lit up.

"I've been looking for you everywhere!"

Kimbra stepped out of the lab, and they met halfway.

"So you've just been running all around the facility like a lost child?"

Or an annoying pain-in-the ass grown man.

Bud clicked his mouth, and shoved his hands into his pockets. "No, but Ainsley asked me if Timmy fell in the well, and I'm not sure what that even means."

She did her best not to grin at his obliviousness. "It's a Lassie reference."

"A what?"

"You know? Lassie?"

"I don't know who that is."

"The classic TV show?"

Bud only stared back at her before slowly beginning to nod, but then decided to shake his head no. He had no idea what she was talking about and didn't want to risk pretending that he knew.

"Never mind. What did you want?" Kimbra placed her hands on her hips, mildly annoyed that Bud interrupted her work.

"Do you want to go get lunch with me?"

"No." Her response came without hesitation.

"C'mon Kimmie."

"Don't call me that and no." She chided at him with narrowed eyes.

"Please?"

"I'll think about it." The words came out as bland as she could possibly get them.

"Really?"

"No."

He whined. "Can I at least see how the project is coming along?"

"Yeah, c'mon," the scientist let out a little huff and walked by his side to the elevator.

Bud stepped in after her, and watched as she hit the button for the twentieth floor. She frowned as he stood a little too close to her.

"Your cologne smells even tackier today."

His mouth twitched. "I happen to like my cologne."

"A CEO can afford something that smells better than whatever the hell you're wearing."