Of all the conceited--
“Let me guess: some overweight bore in a Star Wars T-shirt, practically wetting himself at the chance for an intelligent conversation with you. Or a limp-wristed mama’s boy too scared to tell his parents he doesn’t like girls.” He leaned back in his seat, satisfied with his judgment, and dug in with a little verbal twist of the knife:“That’s about the type of parasite to go for you, with your lack of confidence—”
“You have no idea who I am!” I burst out, tact forgotten. Tact? What was tact? Sorry, Doc, I must have been hit over the head and gotten a case of tact-amnesia.
The bastard just raised one eyebrow so perfectly sculpted that it would have Michelangelo smash his David in a fit of rage and sorrow at never being able to recreate it, and then go down an easier career path, like Renaissance-era Italian politics.
Grant leaned close, his eyes pulling me closer as well, like the Earth being pulled into the sun’s orbit.“Oh?” he murmured.“And who are you, then? Who’s Lacey Newman?”
I was definitely not going to be distracted by his proximity, or the way he smelled so good, like cologne and a hint of rum and just a hint of sweat. Like he was good to eat. Like— “Lacey Newman’s the girl who scraped and grubbed and fucking sweated blood to get the scholarships to go to Stanford.”
I felt all that old anxiety and anger and shame wash over me, the memories of sitting in the admissions office with my thrift-store clothes pressed and mended as presentable as I could make them, a smile pasted on my face as I prepared to scrape and plead and do whatever I had to do to make those moneyed old people feel good about giving me the education I needed to make myself the person I knew I could be.
“I’m the girl who worked five jobs just to make ends meet until I got this one, and I did a damn good job at every one.”
My anger mounted, heat building inside my head and chest as I remembered flipping those burgers, scrubbing the vomit out of those carpets, holding the phone to my ear at the call center and trying not to let anyone hear me cry as the person at the end of the line screamed profanities and abuse into my ear, knowing I wasn’t allowed to hang up on them.
“I’m the fucking person who has to clean up all your messes, and you know what? It is getting damn old!”
“You’re blowing it all out of proportion,” Grant protested, eyes flashing as he leaned further towards me. The top button on his collar was undone. I could see one tiny curl of chest hair, glinting gold against his tanned, muscled— “This will blow over, these things always work themselves out—”
“They work themselves out because people make them work out,” I said.“Including me.”
My heart was hammering and I wasn’t sure if it was because my mouth was kicking my job over a cliff like a crazed lemming or if it was his mouth so close to mine, his full lips slightly open in a pout as obnoxious as it was sexy. Damn, I needed to get out of this car!
“If you showed up for work once in awhile, you’d see how precarious the whole company is.” I couldn’t stop myself from glaring at him after this last outburst.
For the first time since I’d met him, Grant looked lost for words. He looked lost in general. He opened his mouth to respond, then closed it. I thought I saw his expression shift like he’d made a decision—his jaw tightening, his chin setting, God, why was determination so attractive?—and he opened his mouth again, but at that moment the driver braked, and I saw the neon lights of the Steddy TattsParlor just below my apartment.“Goodnight, Mr. Devlin.”
His hand was on the door handle before I’d even gotten it halfway open. His fingers were over mine. They were warm and strong.“There’s no need to pretend you live in this hellhole just to win the argument—”
Anger gave me the strength to wrench the door handle out of his grip.“‘This hellhole’ is my home.”
“Surely we’re paying you enough that—”
“Some of us have student loans, not a trust fund.” I slammed the door and charged out into the cool night, fumbling with my keys as I hurried to my apartment door, hoping he wouldn’t follow, so I could calm down. Hoping he would follow, so I could tear his entitlement apart some more. I saw his car still idling there as I closed the door, and just as I was considering the various strengths and weakness of different rude hand gestures, it pulled away and disappeared into the early morning fog and gloom.
I stomped up to my apartment, still pissed, and pulled a carton of orange juice from the fridge.
And then I froze with the carton still in my hand, realizing that I might have just gotten myself fired,
FOUR
The next day, jittery from lack of sleep (I kept waiting for the phone call telling me I was being let go) I made my way carefully across the marble floor of the Devlin Media Corp lobby carrying the Unholy Grail—by which, of course? I mean Jacinda’s coffee. And I do mean carefully. My heels might be sensible but my supervisor certainly wasn’t, and if I spilled one drop of the nonfat organic free-trade low-sugar gluten-free raspberry-blackberry-French-vanilla latte with extra strawberry whipped cream and a dusting of white chocolate sprinkles that Jacinda had sent me out on a quest for, she would have my head.
I wish I was being figurative when I said that.
“Hey, girl!” Kate called out to me from her receptionist desk where she was comfortably ensconced amidst her natural habitat of phones, candy, and water-cooler gossip. “Did the witch send you out for more sugar-free unicorn blood?”
“With an extra shot of newt’s eyes and a scoop of ground virgin’s heart on top,” I deadpanned. “Locally sourced, of course.”