“Happens to everyone—the pissing off agents part. They’re impossible to please, so don’t beat yourself up over it.”
I nodded. I suspected that she was telling me this to make me feel better, but I’d take it. “Just getting used to everything.”
She leaned against the copy machine and gave me a warm smile. “I haven’t seen you in the staff room. You should come join me. I take my lunches at noon.”
“I take mine then, too, but I think I’m the social pariah.”
Her brows furrowed. “Weird. I didn’t see you in there this week.”
“I was there. And so was Brogan. When I made an ass out of myself.”
“In that staff room?” She pointed to the room across the hall from the file room.
This was news to me. Nowhere on the Jackson Office Tour From Hell was there mention of staff rooms. Emphasis on the plural. “No. The one across from my desk in the front of the office.”
Her face screwed into an awful grimace, but she quickly covered it with a chuckle. “That’s Brogan’s area. No one uses it but him, unless we’re out of creamer.”
I covered my face in my hands and groaned. Why hadn’t anyone told me this? “I was wondering why people were looking at me so weird!”
Of course Jackson wouldn’t, because in his mind I wasn’t sticking around long enough to fraternize with other coworkers. This whole hazing thing was going to come to an end the second I started learning more about the company.
“Come hang out with me today, and I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
The first genuine smile I’d had in days edged at the corners of my lips.
“Can I ask you something?” I flipped my thumb across the folder in my hand, one question gnawing at me ever since my horrible first meeting with Brogan.
She nodded. “Sure.”
“Does the staff have a nickname for Brogan?”
Her brows scrunched together, and her tongue ran across her lip ring. She stood in silence for a moment, most likely wracking her brain for an answer. “Like what?”
“The Antichrist?”
Her lips quivered as a smile broke out on her face. “The what?”
“Antichrist,” I said, a little more hesitant this time.
She bent over at the waist, clutching her knees, laughing. It took her a few seconds to compose herself. She straightened and wiped the stray tears running down her cheeks with her sweater sleeve. “No. Brogan’s an amazing boss. A little eccentric with all the rules, and scary as hell when bothered during one his deadlines, but everyone here loves him.”
Yeah, everyone but Jackson, apparently. And, of course, he was the one that had trained me. Not the other fifty employees that thought Brogan was a decent boss. I smothered the urge to crawl underneath all the paperwork and not come out until everyone left for the day. “Good to know.”
“Well, I have to get these to the copier before a meeting.” She waved her stack of papers in front of her. “Come hang out at lunch, okay?”
I nodded, and before I could say anything else, she was gone in a pink blur heading in the direction of the copier.
Two hours later, I grabbed my salad from the fridge and headed to the correct staff room, cringing when I walked past Brogan’s personal eating area. How stupid did he think I was, eating in there the whole week after I’d had the nerve to insult him? And why the heck was I still employed? Because unless he’d had a brain aneurysm, a guy who wrote a 300 page manual of painfully detailed rules (none of which, curiously, mentioned his personal lunch room) should have fired me ten times over by now.
I still couldn’t get the flex of his muscular arms as he gripped his coffee or his adorable dimples out of my mind. If he were just some random guy at a bar, I’d definitely let him buy me a beer or three before taking full advantage of him in my queen size bed back at my apartment. That said, he wasn’t a random guy at a bar. He was my boss, and according to rule twenty-seven, completely off-limits.
Um, reality check, girl. Who’s to say he’d be interested in you or your mouth that decidedly should never open around him?
Right. Duh. The rule was no big deal, because obviously my imagination was fifteen steps ahead of reality.
In the actual staff room, employees lounged in the chairs, smiling, talking, and looking happier than I’d seen them the first day. I was starting to think that people were only miserable whenever Jackson was in a ten-yard vicinity. I could get on that bandwagon, for sure.
Zelda was on the end with an empty chair beside her. She beamed when she saw me, and patted the chair. “You came!”
I gestured around me and gave a wry smile. “I made it to the right place this time.”