I’d been at Mason and Associates for a few weeks and as far as I knew I was doing well. Ethan and I hadn’t encountered each other much and perhaps that was why. He’d been out of town for business most of the time. I couldn’t figure out if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Every time I thought he couldn’t be more of an asshole, he’d surprise me with some hint of kindness. What did that mean? Maybe he was just like that with everyone.
It was odd though. He’d been a pompous asshole when I’d asked about time off, then right when I was about to leave, he’d softened. He’d said the company would work with me about taking time off to care for my father. I’d gone in with every intention of telling him everything about my situation, that my dad had cancer and that it was terminal. Ethan was so cold and rigid that at first I was just focused on getting out of his office as soon as possible. I’d already been on edge about asking for help. It wasn’t something I enjoyed doing. I’d had to swallow my pride just to work up the nerve to walk to his office.
Ethan was confusing and constantly had my head spinning like a top trying to figure him out. Most guys were either assholes or nice, there wasn’t much middle ground. The ones I’d encountered anyway.
I didn’t know, but what I did know was that I needed to keep my head down and impress people. My first three months were a probationary period and they could fire me without reason during that time. All they had to say was that it wasn’t working out.
The company was on the bottom two floors of an old building that used to be a bank. It was an open floor plan with high ceilings, with the exception of Ethan’s office, which loomed overhead with a large window so he could look down on the cubicle farm.
Typical.
I’m sure he wanted to feel like he had control over everything and could always see what everyone was doing. By all accounts, he was an extreme micromanager. He wanted to know every detail of the operations and he wanted it all done his way.
The accounting manager’s name was Gina. I liked Gina. She knew what she was doing and her organizational skills were most definitely on point. She had a system and it ran like clockwork. My job title was staff accountant, though I was told I’d occasionally be an analyst. Most of the work was balancing ledgers and journal entries, and I’d yet to be given any type of analytical assignment.
I sat at my cubicle with a hip-high wall around it, so that we could all talk back and forth among ourselves. Occasionally voices boomed from the offices of the senior agents who made up the perimeter, usually yelling about some kind of deal and telling someone to stop being cheap.
Gina stopped at my work area and rested her hand on the wall. “You coming to eat lunch?”
“Sure. Give me just a second.” I saved the Excel workbook I’d been using to balance an account and logged out of my computer. Gina walked toward the breakroom, her heels clacking on the tile and echoing off the neutral-colored walls. The place had no personality at all.
I stood and adjusted my black skirt down my legs a few inches. I’d already fallen into a pattern with my outfits. Monday through Thursday were skirt days, all knee-length and rotated between black and gray. Fridays were reserved for slacks or khakis because I was a rebel.
Phones rang and keyboards clicked around me as I strode to meet up with everyone. The breakroom was off in the corner through a small entryway, and it consisted of one table that could seat about eight people, a refrigerator, sink, and dishwasher. It was also where the coffee was, so it was a pretty popular area to congregate when Ethan was out of town. I had a feeling the crowd was much smaller when he was in the building.
I walked to the refrigerator to grab my lunch, which I brought every day. A lot of people would order food to the office or go pick something up, but I couldn’t afford luxuries like that. Medical bills for Dad were adding up quickly. Once Gina bought me lunch and expensed it to the company. She would charge it to the firm and hide it in the office expense account. It was a perk of being accountants.
David and Jill—the other staff accountants—sat around the table, and the work chitchat had already begun.
“Davis is always late with his commission reports.” David took a huge bite of some kind of salad with fruit in it. His wife had been demanding he eat healthy. She went through phases like that, he said. He cringed and washed the bite down with a diet soda.
“Oh my God, I know. He puts me behind every week.” Jill shook her head and took a huge bite of a panini from a bistro around the corner.
David stared and practically salivated. “I will pay you fifty dollars for one bite of that sandwich.”
I snorted and pulled a ham and cheese sandwich from my baseball-themed insulated lunch box. It had been a gift from Kelsey to celebrate my two-week work anniversary.
Gina shook her head at David. “She’s really sticking to this diet thing, isn’t she?”
David stabbed a piece of lettuce. “She’ll fold. Our anniversary is in two weeks and I’m taking her to the nice Italian restaurant where we had our first date.” He pointed at Gina with his fork after shoveling lettuce into his mouth. “The fettuccini Alfredo is going to knock her off the wagon. Then I’ll have freedom from this shit.” He stared down at the salad and sighed. “Fruit in a salad. This has to be a European thing.”
I coughed a laugh while Gina and Jill grinned at David’s possibly temporary misfortune. Mason and Associates wasn’t the most exciting job, I thought, but I was quickly falling in love with my coworkers.
“So, you’re a baseball fan?” David nodded to my lunch box.
“Yeah, you could say that.”
“Okay, just stop for a second.” Jill put down her sandwich and leaned in next to me. “Ethan’s out of town right now, and rumors have trickled down. Did you really school him on baseball stats at your interview?” Her eyebrows raised slightly.
My cheeks flushed with embarrassment. I covered my mouth and nodded.
“Oh, I bow down to you.” David smiled. “Those are brass balls you’re working with over there, Jackson.”
It was a wonder I hadn’t lost weight since going to work there. David was hilarious and I could barely eat during our lunches. He had two kids, three and five years old, and his wife stayed home with them. Apparently, he heard about it every day when he got home before he could even sit down, which meant we heard about it the next morning.
“I didn’t think he was going to give me the job or I probably would’ve let it slide.”
“Okay, first, I see what you did there. Nice.” He nodded his head up and down. He was such a manboy. “Second, where did you learn baseball stats?”
“From my dad. It was our thing after my mom left. We used to go to games and he taught me how to keep score. I was good with numbers even when I was a kid. Then we got into fantasy baseball.”
“You play that shit?” Jill nudged me with her elbow.
David glared in her direction. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the fantasy baseball jab or because he wanted to annihilate her sandwich. Probably a little of both.
“Anyway.” He turned back to me, his eyes trained on Jill’s food for a moment longer before looking at me. “What did you correct him on? Seriously, that dude is like the Schwab. I’ve never seen him make a mistake.”
“What is a Schwab?” Gina looked back and forth between David and me. Jill was in sandwich nirvana.
Both of us turned and stared at Gina like she’d just asked who George Washington was.
“He was a statistician for ESPN and had his own sports trivia show. People would come on and try to beat him at sports knowledge,” I said.
She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Oh, sorry.”
I propped my elbows on the table. “Mr. Mason was telling me about the job and the analytical aspects. And he said George Brett hit .380 in 1980. I got up to leave because he’d pissed me off, and I let him know it was .390 as I walked out. He hired me right after that.”
A wry smile formed on David’s face. “Impressive.”
“Mr. Mason,” Jill scoffed. “You say his name like he’s your teacher.”
“Sorry, what do you call him?” I watched her lick her fingers slowly after her last bite, purposely torturing David across the table.
“Mase.”
Gina cocked an eyebrow up and took a sip of her coffee.
“Why?” I asked.
She smiled like the devil and looked out the door and then back to us. “Because he makes everyone cry.”
Gina choked on her coffee and her face turned pink. David held out his fist to Jill and they tapped knuckles before blowing it up.
“Holy shit!” My hand shot over my mouth as I stared out into the bull pen of cubicles. I tried not to curse in the office, but it was difficult with this bunch. “Is that Matt Stallworth?”
David didn’t even look up. “Probably. Him and Ethan go way back.”
Everyone rose from the table. Jill and Gina threw their trash away and walked back toward their respective work areas. I glanced out at Matt and my heart could’ve given Secretariat a run for his money.
“Really?” I asked.
David grinned at me.
I folded my arms across my chest. “What?”
“Calm down, fangirl.”
I chuckled. “Don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“They hang out all the time. Come on.” David patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll introduce you.”
I tried to tamp down my excitement but it was a lost cause. Dad and I watched Matt play every chance we could and I always drafted him first for my fantasy team. He was a five-tool player and almost always led the league in every offensive category.
They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Kid reminds me of Mickey Mantle, Dad would say.
David must’ve sensed my reluctance because he grabbed me lightly by the arm and tugged me in that direction. “Come on. He’s super nice.”
“Oh my God, you’re embar—”
“Hey, Matty!” David released my arm and shook hands with Matt.
I attempted to hide behind him in hopes the pink from my cheeks would magically disappear. I’d never met a professional ballplayer before, let alone the best one in the entire league.
“Hey, good to see you.”
David tried to sidestep to introduce me and I moved with him, staying hidden behind his dad-bod. Good God, Jenny. It didn’t help with the whole blushing thing I had going on. I’d had some pretty embarrassing moments in my life, and this topped all of them times infinity.
“You okay back there?” Matt chuckled.
I held my hand out to the side of David and waved. With every second I became more aware that I wasn’t in fact going to come out from behind David.
A hand pressed up against my lower back. His hand. The hand that sent pebbles across my skin and nerves ricocheting through my limbs.
“Shouldn’t you guys be working?”
I glanced back to the face that made my brain short-circuit and sputter. It was sensory overload, and snark was how my body naturally combated being flustered. “We still have two minutes of our lunch break left.”
In the week Ethan hadn’t been around, I’d missed looking at him. Now that his cocky smirk and gorgeous face were locked in my memory, I’d have preferred to ogle him from afar. He had a way of making my blood boil, until steam practically shot out of my ears.
“Well, your desk is about a two-minute walk. So it’s probably time to head over, don’t ya think?” The billion-dollar (I guessed) fabric on his billion-dollar suit tightened against his arms when he crossed them across his chest. I felt the urge to trace my finger along his defined biceps, and decided that’d be a bad idea.
“Hi, I’m Matt. Nice to finally meet you.” Matt held out his hand and I shook it without fully registering that I was shaking hands with the best baseball player of the last thirty years.
Matt grinned at Ethan and Ethan’s stare hardened. I didn’t think it was possible, but apparently it was.
“Lighten up, bro.”
“Are you done? They have work to do.”
His voice should’ve been against the law. Why couldn’t he be ugly or stupid? I guessed if he was stupid, he might not have owned a sports agency. A sports agency that employed me. But why couldn’t he be ugly? Or talk like Pee-wee Herman? And why did he have to be so damn good at being an assface?
There was something going on between the two of them. I could tell by the way Matt kept smiling at Ethan, and the way Ethan looked like he was plotting Matt’s murder.
“Wait, is she the one who schooled you in her interview?” Matt glanced to me. “Up top!” He held his hand out to high-five me.
Ethan’s face turned tomato red, which both turned me on and simultaneously made my fingers tremble. Regardless, he’d seemed to enjoy jabbing me any chance he got, and I wasn’t going to pass up this moment.
I fived Matt and let out a quick laugh. “Yep, that was me.”
“Miss Jackson, to your desk. Now.”
I turned back and Ethan’s jaw flexed. I could practically hear his teeth grinding against each other. The knife ripping through my gut told me to do what he said, but a lifetime of defiance was difficult to get past. Heat rushed into my face. Pride was a virtue that ran deep in my family, and it was sometimes a detriment. I had a good feeling it might get me fired shortly.
“Excuse me?” My tone was anything but pleasant.
People started to take notice and heads craned up over the walls of their workstations.
Ethan’s face softened a bit, but even a child could see he was pissed off. “You have work to do.”
I nodded and turned to Matt. “It was nice to meet you. I need to go study some batting averages now. In case my boss screws up.” My nose crinkled and I continued my mocking tone. “He does that on occasion.”
Matt held a fist up to his mouth, trying to hold back a laugh. His cheeks were bright pink. I shot Ethan a “fuck you” glare and I made sure to sway my hips a little extra on the way to my desk—just to give Ethan a little something to stare at while I walked away.
You are so fired, Jenny.