Page 10 of Dance This Song With Me?

Dear Aunt Macie,

Thank you so much for the private dance lessons. I appreciate it. You can send the voucher to Lucas Morton, 46 Chuckleberry Rd, Cremorne.

Yours, Dance_newbie

*****

What the fuck?

I stared at the email in disbelief.

"Emilio must have lost his fucking mind!" I swore, to no-one in particular. There were only a few people in the office at this hour and none of them were near me, which was perhaps fortunate since I was close to losing my mind.

Any good the six week holiday to Europe had done for me was fast flying out the window as I discovered the mess my stand-in had made with my Aunt Macie role.

There were a couple of things that, sure, were my fault and I was going to have to update the procedures for next time. Because there would be a next time - I sure wasn't giving up on going away now I had a loving partner in my life. Filing of emails and tying expenses back to the specific cases, which was an admin requirement of my job, hadn't been done. And the appropriate recording and receipting of expenses hadn't been done either. The later was probably the reason for my current problem.

Emilio had taken the budget for 'extras' - gifts we gave the correspondents to help them with whatever their issue was - and literally run away with it, running miles over budget. And now, here in my inbox was another commitment he'd made, which we couldn't fulfill, because my boss was refusing to authorise any further expenditure for at least another month, in an effort to recover from Emilio's spending spree.

Frustrated, I pulled out my phone and called Eddy.

"Hey, handsome!" Eddy's cheerful voice normally made me smile but tonight my frustration seeped through into my voice.

"Hey, Eddy."

"He-e-y, what's up?"

I sighed.

"Fucking Emilio, that's what's up. He ran over budget on the Aunt Macie thing like it was not even a speedbump in the highway. He's been giving out vouchers and flower arrangements like his mission was to raise GDP all by himself! Hell, he even shouted a couple to a super expensive weekend in a hotel down on the harbor!"

Eddy laughed - which I didn't appreciate, "Yeah, he's a pretty generous guy."

"With my money, or at least my budget," I retorted.

"Okay, but he's not doing it any more, so what's the problem? You can just stop giving out freebies until you catch up, right?"

"Yeah, well. Pete - my boss - said no more until the end of next month, but I've received an email from someone Emilio promised private dance lessons! But they haven't been sent the voucher for them yet. Private lessons! How fucking expensive would that be? And now I'm going to have to write back and tell him we can't do it after all. Ugh, I hate this!"

"Hold on," Eddy said. I knew him so well, I could tell he was thinking his way through the problem, just from the way he spoke. "What sort of dance is it?"

"I dunno. Dance is... isn't it all the same?"

Eddy snort-laughed. "Noooo, babe. There's a whole world outside of bump and grind, you know. Didn't you ever watch that TV show with the dancers learning all sorts of fancy shit?"

"Er, no."

"Oh well. Look, there are all kinds of dances. Does it tell you anywhere in the email which one it is?"

I went back to the email. And here was another example of Emilio not following the rules. One and done, I'd told him, but no, there was a chain of at least four emails - which was why we were now in this mess.

"It's... bachata?" I said, after scanning all the emails.

"Oh, right! Cool."

"You've heard of it?"

"Yeah! Of course. It's latin dancing. Emilio does it. He might even teach it. Not sure about that though. I'm gonna call him right now. I'll call you back."