The Grey- Noah Sebastian

six

*Sutton's POV*

The past week and a half has dragged by. Luckily work was busy enough with doing big floor moves for back to school, but it was hard to focus on work when all I could think about was Noah.

We went from having phone calls to Facetime calls once a day, while also texting throughout the day. I could tell from the band's Twitter and Instagram that they know that he's probably seeing someone, but because he looks a lot happier than normal. He's still putting on his more intense stage presence, but at the tent and in the boy's Instagram clips, he's definitely happier. That makes me feel really good.

They got home from their tour yesterday and our date is tomorrow! I told him that he could wait a few more days if he wanted to, but he insisted he didn't want to wait any longer to see me. Dillon swapped shifts with me so that I could have the whole day off tomorrow, but that means I'm working today instead. It worked out because we ended up having a super long holiday prep conference call that I probably would have had to join on from home anyway, so luckily I'm at work for it. 

Noah kept sending me Snapchats during it, just waking up for the day, but I also would sleep until 2 pm if I had slept on a tour bus bunk for 3 weeks. He was clearly shirtless, but that wasn't completely abnormal for him; if I had all of those tattoos, I would also want to show them off. I guess I got distracted with it because I heard my boss asking for my name over the call. "Sutton, are you there?" 

"Yes, sorry, I had to run out to the sales floor for a second," I lied. 

"Gotcha. Well, tell us what you've been doing at your store to help sales! Your transaction averages have really improved over the past two weeks." 

"I've just been working with my staff on more intentionally interacting with customers and having them recommend items as they go that go with the customer's interests, and it works well," which was an earnest answer, but I hoped that he didn't keep me talking.

"That's good! Keep it up and surely you guys will get that remodel in a few years." Our store was comically falling apart, much like the mall we worked at in general. Leaks, mold, cracks in the walls and floors; it was a fucking nightmare, but the vacant stores in the mall are even more horrifying. We're hoping to either move out of this mall or get a remodeled store soon. I put myself back on mute and went to go reply to Noah, trying to ignore how much his sleepy shirtless picture affected me. I just sent back a Snapchat that was a selfie of me doing a dead face and captioned it 'Good morning sunshine! Ready for this conference call to be over :(' He responded back really quick, and clearly in his bathroom, probably about to take a shower, and he captioned it 'Ugh, long calls are the worst.'

Here's the thing: I'm trying so hard to be respectful of Noah and not take things too fast, but he is so attractive to me that I know it's going to be considerably difficult to withhold myself tomorrow. I have no idea what we're even doing tomorrow, he wants to surprise me, but it's driving me crazy not knowing what to expect.

The rest of the day drags on, the conference call took an hour and a half and it sucked all of my energy out of me. Me and one of my other managers, Lexi, took it really easy today and hung out. There weren't a lot of customers today, which is great since I had so little energy, but we were finally at 8 o'clock, so we started folding t shirts and straightening the store since we closed in an hour. 

I ran to the restroom while Lexi folded t shirts really quick, but then got caught up looking around the stockroom to try and figure out what to put out on the sales floor. I grabbed a few t shirts that I knew we sold a few of today and started to go out to the floor, but I bumped into someone without meaning to. "Oh my God, I'm so sorry," I said, but when I looked up it was Noah.