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5
Rebecca
I snuck into the office, which, thankfully, was still pretty much empty, and slipped into my seat. Foggy-headed from the Margarita-induced hangover, I turned on my computer and scrolled back and forth through the ninety-seven emails in my inbox, most of which I didn’t even need to be copied in on, and failed to open any of them. I clearly needed more coffee before I was capable of doing anything constructive.
‘Don’t tell me you’ve only just got in!’
I looked up as Freya wafted into the seat opposite me dressed in a floaty maxi skirt and a creased pastel-pink T-shirt. For reasons I hadn’t quite got to the bottom of, she regularly wore clothes that were completely inappropriate for the weather, such as a mohair jumper in July and this get-up when it was threatening to snow outside.
‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, trying to arrange my face so that it looked relaxed and normal.
‘You’ve still got your coat on,’ said Freya, eyeing me suspiciously.
Damn.
‘Oh,’ I said, shrugging it off and stuffing it under my desk.
‘Anyway, I’d love to stay and chat,’ Freya continued, ‘but I’ve got a meeting with that knob from New York now, haven’t I?’
‘Have you?’ I replied, staring at my keyboard and pretending to focus very hard on typing something.
‘You can always count on Americans to call meetings that nobody needs,’ Freya moaned. ‘It’s all work, work, work over there, isn’t it?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
I was tempted to tell her what had happened, to get her opinion on it, more than anything. Along with what felt like everyone else, she’d been nagging me for months to get out there and meet someone. She reckoned I’d missed out on all the fun of being in my twenties because I’d been with Dan for my entire adult life and that I shouldn’t be fucking up my early thirties because of him, too. She was right, of course, but what I didn’t need was another relationship. What I needed was a series of casual flings. One-night stands. Inappropriate affairs. Fun without the fear of getting hurt, basically.
‘What makes you think he’s a knob?’ I asked, curious. I mean, I could sort of see why, but I wanted to hear her say it.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? You only have to look at him,’ said Freya, tearing open a dry-looking cereal bar and stuffing it into her mouth. ‘The way he swans around the office in designer clothes, all tanned from his ski trips to Aspen or wherever. And he thinks he’s god’s gift to women. The admin girls are playing right into his hands, simpering all over him the second he steps over the threshold.’
I felt secretly smug. Unlike half the office, I had not been simpering over him. I probably wouldn’t even have given him a second look had we not been thrown together on the roof of a hotel last December.
‘You’ve met him, anyway, haven’t you?’ said Freya, taking a sip of her foul-smelling herbal tea. ‘That night Amanda went AWOL and you had to cover her meeting. What did you think of him?’
I pressed my lips together, thinking about how to describe my first impressions of Tyler Martin. ‘He was very charming.’
‘Yes, I can see he thinks he is very charming,’ said Freya.
I laughed. ‘He seems nice, honestly.’
‘Sure he does. By the way, can I have a look at your ideas for the Been to Bean Coffee campaign?’ asked Freya, shuffling papers around her desk. ‘In case he asks me for some off the top of my head. I haven’t actually had time to think of any.’
‘Sure, I’ll ping them over now,’ I said, even though I’d planned to present them myself at our next departmental meeting. Sometimes it felt as though I was not only doing my own job but half of everyone else’s, too. And it wasn’t even as though I was particularly passionate about it; I had no real desire to come up with ways to promote yet another coffee company that we really didn’t need. I emailed Freya the details anyway and then, checking that nobody could see my screen, opened up my CV, attempting to look at it objectively. They’d finally announced, after months of rumours, that they would be creating a new senior position in the department. Everyone (well, mainly Freya and my friend Val, who worked downstairs in Direct Marketing) assured me I was going to get it and I supposed it was the obvious next move for me. The only person who could possibly put a spanner in the works was the events manager, Amanda Clarke.
Right on cue, she flounced into the office in her Christian Louboutin heels, her Birkin bag clutched in her perfectly manicured hand. At that precise moment, Tyler flung open the door of meeting room four and almost walked straight into her. Amanda, never slow on the uptake when it came to a networking opportunity, made a big drama out of it, laughing loudly enough for the whole floor to hear, her perfect, bouncy hair swishing around her shoulders like something out of a Herbal Essences advert. Credit where credit was due, she did have a talent for getting herself noticed, a skill that, disappointingly, had always evaded me.
‘Trust her to be straight in there,’ said Freya, tutting. ‘I bet she’d shag him if she thought she’d get a promotion out of it.’
I swallowed hard. Clearly nobody could ever find out about me and Tyler. I tapped away at my keyboard, watching furtively as Amanda ushered him into a meeting room. She was in full-on flirting mode and I tried to work out if I cared. I thought I probably did a bit, but only because it was her.
Freya crossed her arms huffily. ‘I suppose he’s going to be late for our meeting, now, after dragging me in at this hour.’
‘It is nearly ten,’ I said, and then regretted saying anything when I saw Freya’s face. ‘I’m being a jobsworth again, aren’t I?’
‘Very much so. We can’t all be morning people, Becs.’
The funny thing was, being a morning person had its drawbacks. Sometimes I’d have quite liked to have lounged about in bed until midday, especially when I had a weekend with not much to do and was spending most of it on my own. But there would always be this nagging voice inside my head telling me what a waste of time that would be. And wasting time was something I refused to do. I filled my day with productive things so that at the end of it, I could reassure myself that I’d made the most of it; that if it happened to be my last day on earth, I’d have done something useful with it. I didn’t think I’d ever admitted that to anybody and, honestly, it was beginning to feel quite exhausting.
