41 - Commitments

                                    

                                          
M A R G O T – 2 0 2 4
HER fingers skidded across the keyboard. When Phillipe Pelletier had called his daughter angrily, asking for her late assignment, she had jumped out of Bennois' comfy and warm bed to immediately settle down in front of her laptop in her room. Eleven hours later, and she still sat in the very same spot, running the program for what felt like the millionth time to figure out what was wrong with it. However, the compiler kept running into error after error.
She sighed.
Frustration boiled in her stomach.
After nearly a month of no work, and one with just a few duties here and there, her father had gotten fed up with her irresponsibility and sentenced her to get back to it.
"Margot, Charles is here!" Bennois called out from the hallway.
Two weeks had passed since their karaoke night and the busy Ferrari driver had decided to head back to Paris after a messed up Italian Grand Prix and a home win.
Her nails were still bitten short from her nervosity watching Charles take the last corners before achieving his first race win in his own country.
"Hey, Mar," he greeted her when sticking his head into the doorframe to her room.
She hummed in response. Her fingers were glued to her lips, anxiously plucking the fine snippets of loose skin. The red lines all over her code almost let her lose her mind.
"She's been working the whole day. I wasn't even allowed to remind her of toilet breaks," Bennois mumbled behind Charles. His body muffling the low voice coming in from the entrance hall of the apartment.
"She does that all the time when she's stressed," her friend noted.
Margot groaned and pressed her fingers to her forehead now instead. "I can hear you."
"Oh fuck, it talks!" Charles gasped and squeezed closer to the doorframe. Only everything from his eyes upwards peeked out. 
"Why are you in such a good mood?" she asked instead and glimpsed at him before dedicating her full attention back to the screen on her lap. When realization kicked in, he had already spoken up, "I just won my home GP."
Margot jumped from the bed and basically ran into his arms. "I swear that I had just thought of it minutes ago. I am so sorry!"
She hugged him tight. "Congratulations, ChaCha!"
"Thank you, Mar," he whispered into her hair before letting the embrace go.
Bennois cleared his throat. "The vernissage is in two hours and Charles wants to get some rest and freshen up before we leave." His eyes slid to Margot as if her reaction should be clear. "He needs his room."
"Oh, damn! Yes, of course!" she called out in surprise and quickly grabbed her belongings from work all scattered out on the bed.
"No worries, you can stay here if you want. I'll just grab coffee and sit by the window for a bit," he announced and grabbed the notebook from her hands to put it back down on the bed. "I'd love some company actually."
Bennois scrutinized them intently. After Charles left two weeks ago, everything had kind of returned to normal. They got closer again, spent some time with Bennois' mother who had visited Paris to give a speech at a conference. Eventually, everything felt like before.
Still, there was something off.
Neither of them could pinpoint what exactly it was, but it was there.
And it felt like a spark that would let everything else explode in the end.
"Okay, then get ready, alright? We'll leave in two hours," Bennois reminded them of their schedule and pressed a gentle kiss to Margot's head before sitting back down in the living room to get some work done himself.
While Charles disappeared in the kitchen to grab coffee, Margot got back to her duties and focused on the red error lines again.
So far, she had tried everything from checking the counters on her loops to implementing external compilers to hopefully find an efficient way through this. Not even Reddit could help her anymore which could only mean one thing—she'd reached her wits' end.