Costars (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (91 page)

Chapter Five

Work,
Work

Leila

A couple of weeks have
gone, and I haven’t kicked Dane out yet.

That’s not a testament to
his improving manners: rather, my saint-like patience.

I’m walking down the hall
at the firm right now, hoping Mr. Kidman isn’t in his office.

Every time I pass, he
calls me in just to see if I’m going to take him to HR for sexual harassment
this
time.

To tell the truth, I
would—the man’s a degenerate—if I didn’t know he was just trying to get fired
so he could cash in his ridiculously bloated severance package. This may be the
only situation in which I’m willing to put up with his crap.

I pass the office, but am
immediately beckoned back.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kidman
is one of my many, many bosses. If he wasn’t, I’d just keep walking and let him
use someone else for his little game.

“Miss Tyler,” he says as
I poke my head into his office. “You look absolutely
fuckable
today.”

“Did you want something,
or are you just trying to make me think you have a less embarrassing package
than you actually do?” I ask.

It helps that I can give
as
good
as I get.

“You know I love it
fiery,” he smirks. “Why don’t you waddle that juicy ass over here and pick up
this file? It needs to go to Atkinson, so don’t suck any dicks on your way to
his office. This needs to go out today.”

Okay, maybe I can give as
good as I can get, but this jerk is so far past the line, I almost don’t care
that one complaint from me and he’d get rewarded with a check larger than what
I’ll make in my lifetime. It’s almost worth it just to have the man out of my
life.

This is really a horrible
position to be in.

I walk over to his desk
and take the file.

“Now, why don’t you give
me a little kiss,” he says.

“Try it and you’re going
to find the business end of my high-heel embedded in your left grape.”

He just laughs, and I am
so sick of it.

I don’t know if he
actually thinks I’m enjoying this or what, but I do know that things only got
worse when I told him to stop.

My only consolation is that
my silence is causing him pain.

“One more thing,” he says
as I’m almost out the door.

“What?” I ask; any
tolerance I had left now gone completely.

“Would you mind walking
out again, only this time with your skirt pulled up above that bubble butt of
yours?”

Leila,
don’t hit senior citizens. It’s not worth it. You’ll be the one to end up in
jail.

Oh, but it would be so
worth it.

“Screw you.”

As I exit the office,
fully intending to just give up and get the prick fired, I glance back: he’s
smiling and pumping his arm in celebration. Getting him fired is what he wants,
but I can’t deal with his crap much longer before I come in here and become the
latest office-shooting statistic.

And I’m really a very
calm, nice person.

I get the file to
Atkinson’s office. Luckily for me, he’s always been respectful.

The problem with Atkinson
is that he always has a couple dozen things for me to do, and I’m not sure he
realizes that I’m still an intern.

It’s not like I haven’t
told him a few dozen times.

He tries to get me to
make a call to the SEC and go over my monthly numbers as some part of our
firm’s latest investigation that I still don’t quite understand, but I have no
personal numbers to go over. To make the conversation go more quickly, I just
tell him that it’s already taken care of.

He smiles, and I only end
up getting coffee for him and half the floor, emptying his wastebasket, calling
his wife to tell her that he won’t be home until after midnight because he’s
slammed with work and then call his favorite drinking buddy to tell him that
they’re still on for six o’clock, water his plants, place his picture of the
Great Wall in a more Feng-
Shui
-friendly position,
explain to him yet again that I don’t know anything about money laundering, but
reassure him that I’ll look into it, tell him which tie is most appropriate for
a trip to a sports bar and organize his stack of subpoenas by date of
appearance.

This is my job.

And college was so
exciting.

I stayed up every night
before an exam to make sure I’d always be at the top of my class. A social life
was a concept that I only became aware of in a sociology class, and then only
as a study of human behavior. It was never a participatory topic for me.

Now, I’m the office bitch
and this is somehow supposed to prepare me for life as a big time broker.

“Hey, Lei-Lei,” Annabeth
says.

She’s the only one here
who knows the hell that is this job. By that, I mean she’s also an intern.

“Hey, Annabeth,” I sigh.

“Bad day?”

“I don’t know if I
remember what a good one is to make a suitable comparison,” I answer. “How
about you?”

“Well,” she says, “I
tried slapping Mr. Kidman, thinking maybe that would get him to shut his
fucking mouth without getting him fired, but that only seemed to turn him on.”

“What the hell is it with
men, anyway?” I ask. “I get that he wants the severance, but even in his
position, with that much money riding on it, I would never treat anyone that
way.”

“You and me both, girl,”
Annabeth scoffs. “Smoke break?”

“Please.”

I don’t smoke, but going
out on the roof with Annabeth is about the only time on the job where I can
pretend like I’m making some kind of a difference.

Annabeth blows out her
first puff before we’re out the door and I’m holding my breath.

“Have you gotten any
offers yet?” she asks.

“Nothing yet,” I tell her.
“I would say that I hope I can get something here when my internship is up, but
I really don’t know that I could handle working in this hellhole for the rest
of my career.”

She takes a drag. “I know
what you mean. If it wasn’t for Kidman, I’d say we could make it work, but
sometimes…”

“Have you heard back on
anything?” I ask, walking to the other side of her to avoid the cloud floating
by me.

“Not a damn thing,” she
says. “I always thought that summa cum laude meant I could walk onto any job I
wanted. Too bad everyone else had the same idea and we all moved to New York.”

The problem with Annabeth
is that she tries to work how she got summa cum laude and I only got magna cum
laude into every conversation. Still, other than Mike, she’s the closest thing
to a friend that I’ve got in this city.

“Things still bad with
your roommate?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t
believe,” I tell her. “Last night, he came in at like four in the morning,
drunk and knocking over just about everything that stands upright on the way to
his room.”

“Well,” Annabeth says,
blowing her drag out, “at least he was alone this time.”

“Oh, did I forget to
mention that every time he crashed into something, I could hear the chick
behind him running into the same thing?”

Annabeth laughs.

“It could be worse,” she
says, but doesn’t offer any proof to back the theory.

“I guess,” I tell her. “I
wish that just once, something could go right for me in this city. Everything’s
so competitive and everyone treats each other like dirt.”

“It’s not the city,”
Annabeth tells me. “You just need to get out there and get your freak on.”

“My freak,” I tell her,
“is permanently set in the off position. Besides, I think people stopped saying
that like ten years ago.”

“Whatever,” Annabeth
says. “I have the perfect guy for you.”

This is the other problem
with Annabeth. She’s always trying to hook me up with someone, and she has the
worst taste in men.

“My cousin just got into
town and he’s looking for someone to take out to a nice dinner. He’s a really
funny guy, and people tell me that he’s pretty handsome, too. He’s my cousin
and all, so I don’t really look at him like that, but I think you two would
really hit it off.”

“And now tell me what’s
wrong with him.”

“Nothing,” she says,
taking another drag. “Nothing’s wrong with him.”

Wait for it.

“Okay, I guess he can be
a little impulsive, but girl, you know spontaneity’s the spice of life.”

“You said he just got
into town. Where was he?”

“Upstate,” Annabeth
answers, looking at her feet.

I really hope I’m not
that bad at hiding things.

“Where upstate?” I ask.

And here it comes.

“Okay, he was kind of
locked up for a little while, but the whole thing was just a total
misunderstanding. He was drunk and thought the car was his!”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m
sorry, but I do have a no-felons rule in my dating life.”

“Oh, like you’re going to
find a good-looking single man in this city without a record,” she scoffs.

“I’ll take my chances,” I
tell her.

“I’m done. You
wanna
play hooky?”

“I still have to go
downstairs and help Atkinson write a speech for his son’s career day.”

Annabeth groans.

“I know,” I tell her.
“Maybe next time.”

“You always say that, but
you’ve never slipped out with me longer than a smoke break,” she complains.
“Who’s even going to know that we’re gone?”

“Everyone!” I snap.
“Every time you leave in the middle of the day, I have to pick up your crap
just to make sure no one wonders why
you’re
not here. Nobody’s going to do that for me, and they’re certainly not going to
do that for both of us. Maybe, with your
summa
cum laude, you might have better luck landing something if you ever did any
damn work around here!”

I don’t know what exactly
she said that pushed me over the edge, but here I am on my way down.

“Easy, girl,” she says,
holding her palms up and toward me. “I didn’t know it was such a burden for
you.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, not
knowing why I’m crying. “I just hate this stupid job and I hate this stupid
city, but I can’t leave or else I’ll always be the one who couldn’t make it in
the real world.”

“You think New York is
the real world?” she asks. “Hell, you think there
is
something called the real world? Lei-Lei, you
gotta
calm down and realize everyone out there’s going
through the same shit as you. None of us are going to land half what Kidman
would pull down with his golden parachute and that man hasn’t done a hard day’s
work in thirty years. What you’ve
gotta
do is learn
to find some kind of happiness for yourself. That’s the only way you’re going
to make it.”

“I’m sick of the
platitudes,” I tell her. “I get what you’re saying, but going out there and
hooking up with a car thief isn’t going to make my life any better.”

She laughs. “Fine, you
don’t have to go out with my cousin. Actually, he’s not really my cousin. Joe
just wants us to double with someone. Can you believe it? He says that when we
go out alone, I just dominate the conversation and never let him get a word in.
He tells me that I’m always trying to tell people what to do…”

She starts to trail off
as I roll my eyes.

“Listen,” she says,
“things aren’t that bad, okay? Yeah, we’ve got shitty jobs, but we’re working
for a company that moves millions of dollars around every day. The whole
economy can rise or fall depending on what mood the boss is in—yeah, that’s
terrible planning on a societal level, but
this
is where it all happens and we’re a part of it.”

“Atkinson wants me to
help him lance a blister between his toes.”

All right, I’m smiling.

“Okay, that’s
disgusting,” she says, “but you know how good this place looks on a
resumé
. Hell, getting kicked out of the lobby will land you
a couple hundred-thou anywhere else.”

“I guess.”

For all her flaws, this
is why I love Annabeth. She always knows how to cheer me up when I’m starting
to look at the edge of the building too seriously.

“There you go,” she says.
“Now you get in there, and you lance the shit out of that old dude’s blister!”

I laugh. “You almost had
it there,” I tell her.

“Took it one too far,
didn’t I?” she asks, smiling back at me.

As I’m walking back into
the building, the strangest thought comes into my mind.

I think it started as a
way to comfort myself and keep Annabeth’s pep talk going, but the direction my
brain just went is strange and I don’t like it.