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It felt like a ghost was using me as a punching bag. Everything inside hurt and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.The Squawker was acquired?How was that even possible? Except she’d explained exactly how it was possible, I just…
I took a deep, shaky breath and shook my head. Did I want to follow after her? I could resign too and maybe land somewhere more prestigious next time around. I knew my dad would approve, but what didIwant?
I flopped down in the chair beside her desk, running through my thoughts.
What the hell did I want?
The answer came straight away. I admired the hell out of Jasmine, but I didn’t want to do what she was doing. She was giving up and running. I had my fair share of setbacks, even at my young age. I didn’t want to run from this one. I put two years of my life into this magazine, and I believed in the weekly feature I was going to pitch to Jasmine. So,no, I wasn’t going to quit.
I was going to thrive, dammit. Besides, my new boss was probably going to be a reasonable person. All I needed to do was convince the new boss my weekly feature was worth pursuing, and things wouldn’t really change that much, right?
I felt like I was in a daze when I left Jasmine’s office. Elizabeth saw the look on my face, then followed my eyes to Jasmine, who was waiting for the elevator with her bin of things. She came to me slowly, features slowly forming a wince.
“Yeah,” she said, reaching up to give my shoulder a comforting touch. “I heard.”
I nodded. Elizabeth was our best comedic voice. Sometimes she helped inject a little humor into our more stale pieces. Unsurprisingly, she was usually just as hilarious in everyday life as she was on the page. She was barely over five and a half feet tall and wore bright blue glasses to match her hair.
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “It’s okay, though.”
“Look on the bright side,” Elizabeth said. “I saw the new boss. Even if he’s completely clueless, he’s fuckingdelicious.I just about offered him up all my eggs for breeding the moment he stepped out of that elevator. He was glaring andgod, it looked like he was about to hate fuck the first thing that walked in front of him. I was very close to offering myself as tribute, Katniss Everdeen style.”
“Wait,” I said, connecting the dots as my stomach sank even further. Any more stomach sinking today and the damn thing was going to fall out of my ass. “Was this new boss you saw wearing a blue suit?”
“Blue, black, yellow. I have no freaking idea. My ovaries were practically pushing my eyes out of the way to get a look at him. It was really just a blur of sexy fog.”
“Where is he now?” I asked, looking around. I noticed then how the whole office was in a rare hush. People had gathered into groups of two and three as they leaned their heads together, whispering at their stations.
“He went into the conference room. My guess is we’re going to get summoned for a meeting. Would I be too much of a hoe if I let him see up my skirt during the meeting? You know, long range warfare? Although I’m wearing some ratty ass panties today.Damn.Can I borrow yours?”
I blinked, looking toward the conference room.This wasn’t happening.I murmured something to Elizabeth about how she couldn’t have my panties and then wandered to my station in a fog. I passed several groups of co-workers who were all clustered together like football players getting ready for the final drive of the game.
I’d signed on atThe Squawkerafter an absolute disaster of a college career. I wrote an expose Junior year at Columbia that should’ve been my ticket to an internship withThe Union Coast,which had pretty much been my life’s trajectory since middle school. But thanks to a very frustrating, sort of long story, that piece ended up getting me expelled from school. I finished out my degree in journalism at a community college and this job atThe Squawkerwas all I could land. It had taken me almost two years, but I’d eventually convinced myself this was all for the best.
After all, how did I know writing forThe Union Coastwould be so great, anyway? Once the goal felt out of reach, it seemed more clear that it had never beenmygoal in the first place. That was just my dad shoving me toward the life he wished he’d captured for himself.
Little by little, I’d been building a new life and a new dream at this job. Jasmine Marshall seemed like a permanent fixture in my life, and I’d wanted to prove my value to her more than anything. I wanted my own weekly feature. I wanted to prove you could write something meaningful, even if it was just for an entertainment magazine.
And now? I looked around the office and felt like I barely recognized it. All the easy smiling faces and casual din of conversation was gone. People were tense. They looked like they were getting ready for war, and they might as well be. A new boss would mean restructuring. The magazine was going to change, and anybody who disagreed with those changes was probably going to be first on the cutting block.
I wondered if the magazine I cared about would still exist when the dust settled.
“Hey,” Farhad said, knocking on my desk. “You coming? The meeting starts in five.”
“Meeting?” I asked.
Farhad looked at me like I was crazy. He was Persian, handsome as hell, and had what might’ve been the best head of hair I’d ever seen. He mostly helped with the fashion and trends portion of the magazine, which was easy to believe because he always looked amazing. He creased his dark, thick brows. “The email, Darcy.Come on,” he said, leaning in and lowering his voice. “I like you, so do your best to survive this thing, okay? That means not missing the first meeting our new boss calls for.”
I nodded shakily, smiling before he rushed off with the rest of my co-workers toward the conference room.
I could do this. I just needed to get my head on straight. Most importantly, I needed to resist the urge to berate this asshole during the meeting for destroying everything I loved.
This was going to be a challenge.
3
DARCY
There was an unnatural hush in the conference room. In total, I had seventeen co-workers atThe Squawker. Eighteen if you included the I.T. guy, who was just one big pile of beard, long hair, and glasses with a strong enough prescription that his eyes were magnified to terrifying proportions–just wide, watery orbs of terror. Everybody–even the I.T. guy, was completely silent. Normally, meetings here were raucous and we could barely get anything done because people kept sidetracking Jasmine or too many background conversations were happening.
