I get to work early enough that my brain feels fuzzy and my hair is still damp from a shower.
At least, I think I’m early, until I walk into her office and find Ms. Blunt at her desk, already elbow deep in work, her sleeves quite literally rolled up and her red glasses perched on her nose. I place a mug of coffee on her desk and take a step back.
She lifts her eyes slowly from the document she’s marking up with red pen. “What is that?”
It seemed like a good idea at the time, stopping in the office kitchen and making her a cup of coffee. But now that I see the look on her face it seems more like sucking up.
“Good morning, Ms. Blunt. I thought I’d bring you a coffee.”
Her eyes travel slowly up my body. I feel like a mouse, waiting for the cat to decide if it feels like eating me or not. I try to remember if the socks I put on this morning match when her gaze comes to rest on my face. I am six foot four, so it took a while.
“I drink a quadruple venti extra hot double half pump vanilla latte twice a day. If you want to get me a coffee, you can go to the Starbucks on Summer Street and get me one there.”
She looks back at the mug, her face contorting until finally landing in sneer territory. I follow her gaze and cringe.
The mug is brown and says, Coffee makes me poop. I scratch the back of my head because who thought it would be a good idea to bring that mug to work and why couldn’t I have read it before I brought it over to her? I resist the urge to wrap my own hand around my throat to strangle the nervous laugh that wants to bubble out of me at this horrible, awkward repeat of a day.
“Wouldn’t a double half vanilla shot be the same as a regular single vanilla shot?” I ask, hoping to distract her from the mug.
It works but only so she can turn her sneer on me. “It would not.”
Okay. So maybe this isn’t going to blow over like I hoped.
So far Day 2 has been almost as bad as Day 1. But no one has said the C-word yet so I’ll take that as a win.
By the time I make it to street level and head toward Summer Street, however, I’m feeling less pathetic and more pissed off. Nothing about getting Corrine Blunt her ridiculous coffee order or answering her phone is real marketing work.
Heat bakes off the redbrick walkway, but some of the trees lining the sidewalks are already starting to change their leaves. There’s a lineup at the Dunks across the street and something about seeing it makes me want to turn around and tell her exactly what I think about this “internship.” I stop on the corner and crane my neck up at the Hill City building. The sun reflects off the tall glass and I imagine Ms. Blunt, up in her office, looking down on me right now like a germaphobe barely tolerates a staph infection.
Someone bumps me from behind, the smell of pastry wafting from the white box in their hands. Not even the smell of cannoli can pull the burning feeling from my gut. But instead of marching back up there and tanking my career, I take Wendy’s advice. I count to ten. Four times. And then I swallow my pride and fetch her coffee.
Marisol smiles, a little patronizingly, and Mark and another intern, Chris, snicker, as I rush past them with this ridiculous cup of coffee in my hand. The desk phone is ringing as I approach but I ignore it, beelining for my boss’s office door. I rap my knuckles across it once before letting myself in. Ms. Blunt sits exactly where I left her, pages of mock-ups spread out around her, a pen sticking out of the bun in her hair, and her glasses still perched on the edge of her nose. Except as I place her fresh—and incredibly hot—coffee cup on her desk she already has a Starbucks cup in her hand.
“I...that...what?”
She blinks up at me slowly. “Are you having a stroke?”
I clench my jaw. One, two, three... Fuck it.
“No,” I say. “I’m just a little confused, I guess. I thought I was getting you coffee?”
Ms. Blunt picks up her cup, takes a sip, and sets it back down. She turns the cup around on the desk until the green mermaid faces me. Everything on her desk is like this cup. Each object precisely placed and arranged at right angles.
Must control urge to move stapler three inches to the left.
“I thought you were, too,” she says with a disappointed sigh. “But you were taking forever. So I had to get myself one.”
I check my watch to calculate my time. The coffee shop she sent me to was a ten-minute walk away. Plus the wait for the coffee itself put my errand at around thirty minutes total. “How did you get there and back before me?”
She may be good at her job but there’s no way she managed to hustle past me in those heels. They’re like red stilts.
Ms. Blunt sighs, pulling the pen from her hair and making a notation in the margin of a mock-up. “I went to the Starbucks on Federal,” she says, sounding bored. “It’s a three-minute walk.”
“Then why did you—” I cut myself off when she looks up at me sharply and the frustration in my tone echoes back at me in this quiet office. I swallow it down, the sour taste of my anger and the unfairness of it all.
“I’m sorry it took so long.”
If there’s a time to apologize for what happened yesterday, it’s now. I stand to my full height, throw my shoulders back, and look her dead in the eye. In this moment, I am thankful for my sister’s Meryl Streep obsession, because it means I can channel Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada when I say, “Listen, I wanted to apologi—”
“Your phone has been ringing off the hook,” she says abruptly.
Because of you. I glare at her and she glares right back.
“Fine.”
“Take that with you,” she says, pointing to the coffee I brought her.
Swiping it off her desk, I barely keep myself from slamming her office door as I leave. Dropping her absurd coffee in the trash can beside my desk, I count to ten again and I pick up the phone.