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“You have exactly ten seconds to explain yourself.”
Or what?
The itty-bitty voice of self-preservation in the rarely visited, cobwebbed corner of my head managed to stop me from asking that out loud, though.
“I was looking for a charger,” I said instead. “My phone died.”
Silence.
Seriously, his eyes were an absurdly intimidating shade of dark green. I was half convinced they were contacts. Or he’d surgically altered their color somehow.
“And?” he pushed, his dark brows reaching for one another.
“And I couldn’t find one sticking out of any outlets, and all your drawers were closed, so I tried the box,” I said, pointing at the torn remnants of the black box on his desk. I was careful to make sure my finger was pointing at the actual box and not the words that had popped out of it. “But then everything exploded just as you walked in.”
“You went through my drawers?”
“No. They were locked.” Was he not listening?
“You tried to go through my drawers.” He said the words slowly like he needed to make sure I understood what I’d just confessed to. “And you’re admitting to it. Out loud.”
“Yes. I needed a charger for my phone. Like I said, it died.”
He eyed me for a few seconds, trying to gauge my exact level of crazy. He landed on “batshit” pretty quickly from the looks of it. “You’re aware that’s a fireable offense. Not to mention illegal.”
His voice had taken on a new, slightly more baffled edge. As if my blatant stupidity was a curveball he hadn’t seen coming.
The man thought I was a straight-up imbecile with, like, two fully functioning brain cells max. I could see it in his face, in the slight shift of his features as skeptical confusion started to dampen his rage.
It lasted all of three seconds. Just until I opened my mouth again. “I know, right? It’s almost as bad as locking an employee in your office without their consent. I’m no lawyer but I’m pretty sure that’s alsoillegal. It might even bemoreillegal than rummaging through someone’s stuff. False imprisonment and all that.”
I tried to wipe the sticky glitter off my skin again, but it really wasn’t going anywhere. Kind of a bummer. I hated the feeling of sand or chalk or anything grainy and dry between my fingers. It felt like how nails on a chalkboard sounded, and it made me want to scrunch my shoulders to my ears and dip my hands in water.
“You weren’t forcibly detained, Miss Sanchez,” Adrien claimed in that molten voice of his.
What was up with the wholeMiss Sanchezthing? What century were we in?
“You could have fooled me,” I retorted, crossing my shiny arms. “The door was locked and no one was answering me from the other end. Which, by the way, is a pretty reckless thing to do. What if there’d been a fire?”
“I had security outside. You’d have been let out the second the alarm went off.”
“How would I have known that?”
He took another two steps forward, apparently no longer concerned about stepping on the red unicorn vomit. “You think that excuses you going through my things and wreaking havoc on my office? Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take to get all this cleaned up?”
Not my fucking problem.“How the hell was I supposed to know the box on your desk contained a glitter bomb of all things? What did you do, piss off a Care Bear?”
I didn’t actually know if Care Bears blasted glitter out of their chests, but it was the best I could come up with. My brain still felt a little fuzzy after the whole explosion thing.
Adrien took another three steps forward, and—
Wait, why was I keeping track of how many steps he was taking? That wasn’t something I normally did, was it?
“That’s none of your business,” he said. “You shouldn’t have been touching it in the first place. You were given perfectly clear instructions to sit on the couch and wait.”
“Yeah, and I was told you’d be hereshortly,” I retorted. My voice came out a little snappier than I’d intended, and I realized my fists were clenched against my ribs. “That was two hours ago,Mr. Cloutier.”
I didn’t know why I said his name like that, with so much sarcastic venom. Or why I was suddenly so irritated. It wasn’t going to help my case.
