A smile threatens at my lips. Since I’m safe in the confines of my empty sports car, I let it out; that’s the freedom that comes with being the first person to the office in the morning. My heels are the only sound echoing in the parking garage and the elevator hasn’t yet filled with the smell of morning coffees and greasy breakfast sandwiches. By the time I arrive on the Hill City floor, the smile is almost real. Until Emily steps out of the elevator beside mine.
“What are you doing here so early?” I wince at the accusatory tone to my words but it’s too late to reel them in. Emily launches a sarcastic smile my way.
“Good morning to you, too.”
Her blond hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail and her blazer hangs over her arm. Bags dangle from each elbow and she holds a paper sack wafting breakfast sandwich smell at me in one hand, and a large coffee in the other.
“Do you need help?” I ask. If I must give up the unrestrained joy that is an empty office, I’d rather do it for Emily than anyone else.
“Please,” she says, relieved. Emily straightens her arm and unhooks one of her bags and her blazer.
“Why are you here so early?” I ask as she leans forward to jiggle her boobs in front of the door sensor. Her office pass dangles from her blouse. A beep and a click sound and Emily backs into the door to push her way through. “You don’t usually get in until Richard does.”
“Two words,” Emily spits. “Mark Gutterberg.”
“Who?”
“Richard’s intern.” Emily sounds disgusted. “I wish we had yours instead,” she says over her shoulder as I follow her to her desk outside Richard’s office.
I’m still confused. “How did an intern make you come in early?”
Emily throws her bag down behind her desk and slumps in her chair, pulling the lid off her coffee cup. “He didn’t.”
She holds the cup under her nose and sniffs like she’s huffing glue.
“He just ran me around all day yesterday, asking for clarification or help whenever Richard wasn’t around. He couldn’t even fill out his direct deposit form without my assistance. I came in early so I could finish up a few things from yesterday and get a head start on today.”
She winces as she takes another whiff of coffee.
“Emily, what are you doing to that coffee?”
“It’s too hot to drink,” she says as if this explains it. “So I’m smelling the caffeine.”
“I don’t think it works that way.” I place her bag beside the other one and hang her blazer on the back of her chair behind her, smoothing out the shoulders.
“The steam is burning my nose hairs off,” she whines.
She searches my now-empty hands and smacks her palm to her forehead. “I should have gotten yours, too.”
Emily is one of the few people who can get my order right.
“Oh.” I pause. “I was going to make Wesley Chambers do it,” I say quietly.
Saying it out loud makes it sound a little bit repugnant and a knot of shame unfurls in my belly. I’m already having second thoughts about the plan I hatched last night.
Emily frowns at me. “Why would you make Wesley do it?” she asks. “And why did you make me train him on admin tasks yesterday? I thought you wanted him to help you with accounts and expand the digital marketing department.”
Technically, that’s true. I wasn’t even going to mentor again this year after my experience with my intern last year. But Richard spoke so highly of him. After he showed me some of Wesley’s mock campaigns from his original internship application, I was sold. Mr. Chambers’s work was exactly the direction I want to take our department and he would fit in with many of the new hires. At least I’d thought he would, before he opened his mouth.
I thought we’d have a relationship similar to the one I’d had with Richard when I was his intern years ago. Before Richard morphed into the man he is now.
I look behind me even though there’s no one here. “I was in the elevator with him and Richard’s intern yesterday.”
Emily nods slowly. “Okay.”
“He didn’t recognize me. We never interviewed personally. Richard wanted to let him off the hook for it since he’d technically already interviewed two years before and his family had a tough time this year. Mr. Chambers expressed his extreme distress at being partnered with me rather than Richard.”
Emily pouts, distracted by her computer screen. “Shitty.”
“I think it had something to do with...” I gesture in the general direction of myself.
She frowns. “Your...blouse? Your pencil skirt!” she shouts like we’re playing charades.
I huff out a breath. “You know...” I raise my brows meaningfully.
She laughs. “I truly do not know.”
“Well, because I’m a woman.”
“Oh.” She makes this flat-mouthed face, very much resembling a frog. “Ew. Don’t we have enough of those kinds of guys around here?”
I nod. “And, Mark apparently is good friends with my intern from last year, Sean.”
“Oh.” Emily arches an eyebrow and I know I don’t have to say any more. Sean’s behavior was wildly inappropriate when we were in private. So much so that I started making excuses for other people to be in the room with me if I knew he and I would be alone together.
When his thinly veiled, lewd comments weren’t getting the reaction he wanted, he started talking about me to other people in the office. As far as I know, his words never got to Richard or any of the other executives. But I still feel like I’m picking up the pieces of my integrity. He made it easier for people who already didn’t like me to have another excuse not to like me even more.
“What does that have to do with Wesley?” Emily asks.
“Mark made a joke about me. Called me a name.”
Emily nods for me to continue.
“He called me a cunt. Wesley laughed.”
“What?!” Emily screeches.
She slams her cup down onto her desk calendar, spilling black coffee all over Tuesday and most of Wednesday.
“He called you the C-word?” she hisses.
I nod.
“Did you say anything?”
I pause before I shake my head. “No.”
“Did you report him to HR?” she asks, shrill.
“No.”
She leans back in her chair. “Corrine.” She says my name flatly. “You run this department single-handedly. You expect excellence from everyone who works for you. You take shit from no one.”
She ticks each point off on her finger.
“But when some fuck boy thinks he can say whatever he wants about you, you do nothing. You never reported Sean and he never listened to you when you asked him to stop. Are you going to let Mark do this, too? And don’t even get me started on Richard—”
“Stop,” I tell her. I hold up my hand to emphasize the point. “I don’t want to talk about Richard.”
She glares at me. “You won’t even acknowledge how inappropriate—”
“I’m not talking about this, Emily.” I straighten my spine. Discussing Richard’s increasingly inappropriate behavior these last few years will only cause me to pop more Tums and force me to give up coffee again.
The frustration in her face melts away. “Just tell me why you won’t do anything when a guy like Mark thinks he can speak about you that way. That’s not the friend I know... Is it because of what happened at that other agency? At Blitz Media?”
“Firing him will only prove to everyone else what they think they already know. That I’m too difficult to work with. Maybe instead I should just show them—show him—how difficult I really can be.”
Other than my mother and my brother, Sebastian, I trust Emily the most out of anyone. But I can tell by the way she studies me that she doesn’t believe I’m telling her the whole truth.
“I just feel like if I was a man in this situation it wouldn’t even need addressing. I would ignore it and keep working hard. I’d let my results speak for themselves.”
“Except,” Emily says quietly, “you’re not a man.”
I’m aware of that, thanks, I want to snap at her. But she doesn’t deserve that.
“So, Mark says this about you—not realizing who you were in the elevator. And Wesley laughs and now you’re...making him answer phones instead of working on ad copy?”
I nod. “Why? You think it’s petty?” I ask.
“No, no!” Emily shakes her head quickly. “Barring, you know, actually getting Mark fired...” She stares pointedly at me again. “I guess. I’m just surprised.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know him very well and obviously I wasn’t in that elevator and you were but...there was something so...so...” Emily pauses, smiling to herself. “Good, about Wes.”
She wiggles in her chair, a satisfied little smile on her face.
“He seemed a little disappointed when I told him he’d be your assistant, but he shook it off and got invested in the training right away.”
Doubt for my plan creeps up my spine so I shove it back down with the easiest explanation I can think of. “He probably doesn’t want to do a bad job and get himself fired.”
“Well, yes, that, too,” she concedes. “But I don’t know. There’s something about him. I’d call him an overeager puppy if it didn’t make him sound like a total dink. I just never took him to be that kind of guy.”
When I frown, she elaborates. “The asshole kind.”
A wave of defensiveness crashes over me. “I know what I heard, Emily.”
She nods, her hands placating. “I’m not saying you didn’t.”
“Well, that’s why I’m making Mr. Chambers get my coffee today,” I say and from the look on Emily’s face she knows that this conversation is over. “But at least my intern is just an asshole and not an idiot, too,” I say pointedly.
She sighs. “Yeah. And he’s kind of cute.”
I press my lips together. “He is objectively attractive. But that’s irrelevant at this point.”
Even saying that feels like too many words in my mouth. Bosses aren’t supposed to find their interns attractive, and considering the bullshit I’ve had to deal with from Richard lately, I mentally scrub any thoughts of Mr. Chambers’s appearance from my brain. It’s best if I only think of him as an asshole, anyway.
She pouts.
“Good morning, girls!” Richard calls from down the hallway. We blink at each other with wide eyes for a beat before turning to him with plastic smiles.
I am thirty and Emily is twenty-seven and we are definitely not girls. Richard stops beside me, squeezing my shoulder. His hand lingers like an anchor, weighting me to the ocean floor.
“I see you’ve hooked Phil Grimes for a meeting. Good work.”
I do my best to hide my smile. We’ve been working on landing this new client for weeks and he’s finally said yes to sit down and talk to us. Regardless of Richard’s sometimes questionable behavior, I’ll always be happy to make him proud.
He wraps his arm around me tighter.
And there he goes ruining it.
“I’d like to speak to you privately when you have a second, Corrine.”
Emily catches my eye again and I duck out from under his palm. I fill my lungs with air now that I’m not pinned down by him. I need to speak with him, too, but I’d rather do it now when Emily is here.
“Actually, I wanted to let you know. My mom is...” My brain stalls on the right word. Sick is what she is. My mom is sick but we don’t know from what or why yet. The not knowing is terrible. Maybe the only thing worse is saying it out loud. “Her health has not been well lately.”
Emily makes a sympathetic sound and her hand wraps around my wrist in a gentle squeeze. Definitely the right decision to do this now.
“There may be a time in the near future that I need to go home to Minnesota. Of course, none of this will affect my work,” I say in a rush.
“Corrine, honey.” His voice when he says the word is just as sticky. “You have nothing to worry about there. Let me know how I can help.”
“Anything, Corrine,” Emily echoes. My pulse beats hard enough I feel light-headed. I smile tightly at them both. The quiet sanctuary of my office calls for me.
“Well, you know where to find me. I’ve got to get to work, Richard.”
I throw a smile his way as I make my way down to my office and shudder when I see that his gaze is planted firmly on my ass. Even at a moment like this, he just can’t help himself.
Eyes up here, Dick.