I fled as quickly as I could, hoping that the words ‘social media’ would have confused him enough to keep from following me.
The best way to keep my boss from asking questions had always been to start talking about something he knew nothing about; better to let the flighty young lady do her thing, he seemed to think, than to reveal he knew nothing about it.
I was back at work, and with Hunter prepping production on a new test batch of the Dixie brew, there was nothing for me to do back at the manor house. Well, I could have stood around admiring Hunter’s profile and simultaneously being bored silly by all the beer jargon he spouted like an overexcited fanboy, but somehow that seemed less productive than heading back to D.C. and catching up with all the work that had piled up for me in my absence (I didn’t think that Hunter’s red alert levels of hotness would qualify as an emergency my boss would be on board with).
Well, trying to catch up, anyway. Enough stuff had piled up in my absence that I was starting to think they’d made my cubicle into a trash can and forgotten to tell me.
No one had done any work on that tampon line while I was gone and the other woman in the office was out sick—too afraid of cooties, I guess—and the client was irate, threatening to take their business elsewhere. I tossed off some copy for it, no big deal—I could’ve done another tampon line in my sleep—and sent Sandra an e-mail outlining what they wanted in terms of art. That barely dented the pile of work, though—it seemed that while I was gone, I’d been designated everyone’s official paperwork monkey, and those forms weren’t going to file themselves.
Lost in the daydreamy reveries of self-filing paperwork and coworkers who actually did their own damn jobs, I was so busy that it wasn’t until my stomach rumbled and I looked up at the clock that I realized I’d managed to skip lunch. I looked at the pile of paper on my desk and decided that I couldn’t risk the time it would take to hop over to the Chinese joint across the street that did the really good chow mein—if I stepped away from this desk for more than five minutes, the paperwork would probably start reproducing.
Cafeteria vending machine it would have to be. Maybe if I was lucky they would still have the Garden Salsa flavor of Sun Chips, and the Snickers would have been replaced recently enough that their peanuts wouldn’t have turned to brittle dust with age.
Yeah, I know, dream big.
I had almost trotted down to the cafeteria when I heard the not-so-dulcet tones of bragging Douchebros, their voices extra loud, like they wanted to make sure that no one suffered the tragedy of not hearing their extremely important conversation.
Worse, their voices were heading directly towards me.
I so didn’t have the energy to deal with their bullshit right now. Their ‘lighthearted’ teasing about my failure to secure the Knox deal, their leering comments about my outfit and my body, their sexist speculations about the way I had earned this job. All of that took way more energy than I had at this moment. It probably took more energy than a power plant produced in a year.
So I hid instead.
I looked around, rapidly locating a blind spot behind some tarp where the maintenance guys still hadn’t finished installing the new water fountain. I’d been annoyed about this for months—how hard is it to put the new one in after you’ve taken the old one out?—but now I sent a silent thank you to them for dragging their feet, and ducked behind the blue plastic.
Oh God, please let this tarp be too opaque for me to cast a shadow. If they catch me hiding out here from them, they’ll never let me hear the end of it.
As they drew closer, I began to be able to make out some words and sentences. Something seemed off about the conversation, though—there were long stretches of silence, something the Douchebros would normally never tolerate. Were they on the phone?
“Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome, Chuck,” Chad was saying as he and his entourage drew level with me. “So you got this takeover offer when?”
My blood ran cold. A takeover offer. That they were discussing with Chuck.
They had to be talking about Knox Liquors.
What would this do to Hunter?
“What’s the problem, bro?” another Douchebro put in. “Sounds like easy money, so why’s he dragging his feet?”
The distant sound of Chuck’s voice grew muffled as Chad covered the speaker with his hand. “Because of Hunter fucking Knox, bro, duh. There’s a lot of legal jazz that means we’d need Hunter’s agreement and voting shares to sell. There’s no way that tool’s going to go for it.”
Relief washed through me, and a spark of hope. So it wasn’t a done deal. There still might be a way to stop this.
“No, no, dude, I totally hear what you’re saying…” Chad’s voice and the footsteps of his coterie began to fade, and then die away.
My mind was already racing ahead of them.
I was furious, yes, and worried, and still guilty—but most of all, I was thinking.