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She was still lost in her thoughts when a loud noise sent her flying forward from her seat. She jerked her head up to find herself looking at the angry face of Gary Nasteau. He was holding some papers in his hand. He walked over and dropped them on her desk with a loud thud.
“I need these correlated and put into booklets within the hour. The rest are in the conference room. I have clients coming. That is, if you can tear yourself out of whatever trance you’ve been in for the past half-hour.”
“I’ll get them done,” she replied, ignoring the rest of his comment.
“See that you do. It would be unfortunate if you fail. I really don’t have time for incompetence.”
Jaycee watched him walk away, making a sour face. She looked down at the pages he had put on her desk. There were only three sets of what looked to be about twenty books. Why he hadn’t asked that they be correlated and bound by the print department was beyond her, but he seemed to get off on making even the simplest of tasks more difficult.
She picked up the stack, walked to the conference room, and groaned. There, stacked up all across the desk, was about a hundred more stacks in the same amount, some crisscrossed on top of one another due to having run out of space. She took a deep breath and began, working in small batches until she was able to get all the books built and stapled by the industrial stapler meant for heavy duty stacks like this.
She was finishing the last stack when he strolled in with his clients, looking at her accusingly. She quickly laid the booklets all around the table in front of chairs and asked if he needed anything else before she went.
“Not right now,” he snapped, waving his hand dismissively.
This was going to be a very long internship. Nasteau was a miserable old man and hellbent on making sure everyone around him was as miserable as he was. There was a part of her that wanted to quit, to just walk away, but she wasn’t the kind to just give in to defeat. Instead, she doubled down on trying to please him.
Of course, it didn’t seem to be making a dent in his ice cold, spiteful exterior, and she found herself once again wondering what he would do if she suddenly shifted and showed him just exactly who he was dealing with. He’d shit his pants if she came at him as a wolf.
It went without saying that she couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that. Still, she thought about it from time to time; what it would feel like to put him in his place. Instead, she just reminded herself that this was only six weeks. There was little chance of him hiring her as a permanent assistant. It was like Val had said, her job here was not to impress him, but to make sure other people knew her name.
There was no pleasing Gary Nasteau and to try would most likely drive a person mad. He was bitter and selfish. In fact, she’d go so far as to say he hated women if the treatment of herself and others was any indication of his true feelings toward them. She wondered what had happened in his life that had made him this way.
Was it a failure of parenting or had someone hurt him long after he had become an adult? It was something she always found interesting about humans. Until now, she’d only had limited exposure to their kind when doing business with them through her pack’s farms. Being on the receiving end of the vitriol, on an everyday basis, was quite a unique experience.
It was not the way of her pack. They didn’t eat their own. Everyone worked together as a team, a family. That was the hardest part of leaving them. They may be simple farmers with no other ambition than raising a good crop to take to market, but they understood the value of holding one another up, of supporting their community.
She doubted that was something most people could ever find in a place like NIH. And who even stood a chance of it if men like Nasteau were in charge of molding the new members of staff. She was an intern. In any other setting, her boss would be her mentor. That is what she thought she had come here for, but Nasteau had no interested in being a teacher. He didn’t even have an interest in training an assistant.
Her sole purpose here for him was to fetch whatever he needed for him. It was disgusting and she was already sick of it, but it was a means to an end. If she could just keep him happy enough to climb the ladder, then she was golden. She’d find a better placement once her time was up.
