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The three of them simply exploded in laughter.
“All the way up there,” I said, raising my voice just enough so that they could hear me over the laughter. “And he screamed like a tea kettle, jumping around the room waving his hands in the air with half a hard-on and a red stiletto coming out of his ass.”
That part of the story usually killed, but the faces of my audience were deathly serious. Had I offended them?
Their eyes weren’t even looking at me. They were focused above my head and behind me. I turned and there was my boss, Wesley Hartford — the darkly handsome boss of the company, with his slightly graying hair and angular face — wearing his typical bulldog expression, not the least bit amused. His icy blue eyes expressed a clear disapproval only echoed by his small lips, which I’d never seen stretch out to become a smile.
“Mr. Hartford,” I said. “I didn’t see you there.” There was fear in my voice. I knew he didn’t like me to begin with and it always felt like I was on thin ice with him, as if he was the school principal and I was the problem child of the school.
“Miss Saunders,” he said, “Come see me in my office.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a demand.
CHAPTER2
***WESLEY***
This was not why I got into real estate. In my 30 years in the business, a lot had changed, but the worst change was having to act as disciplinarian, putting employees in timeout for misbehaving.
Sloane obviously shouldn’t have been telling stories about trysts and stiletto heels in assholes at work, but when did my job turn into this? Or even criticizing her non-existent sales record. Back in the day, a person sold a house, or they didn’t — if they didn’t, they didn’t bring home any commission. No one needed to be fired — if they couldn’t succeed, they just quit and went back to school to become a lawyer or something.
“Take a seat, Ms. Saunders,” I said. Sloane pulled out her chair and took her time sitting down, as if this was just a casual meeting and she had no idea what it was about. And the truth was that she didn’t, but it’d be impossible to ignore the elephant in the room and not mention her story before discussing the real purpose.
Sloane joined us a couple months ago and, from where I was standing, it felt like she’d gotten through life solely based on her pretty face and bright demeanor. It was so bright, in fact, that I practically needed sunglasses anytime I was in the same room with her. This quality was only accentuated by the curly blonde hair which extended out of her head like rays from the sun. She could easily be featured in a toothpaste advertisement with her big, ever-present smile.
None of this was to suggest that she wasn’t smart. Just the opposite, in fact. I suspected she was quite brilliant, though it was hard to see why she wanted to apply that brilliance to a field she obviously had no interest in. If she had applied half the energy she exhibited as a raconteur to her actual job as a real estate agent, she would have been one of our best employees. As it stood, her sales record was non-existent.
I sighed then sat down across from her. My mug of coffee had been untouched on my desk since that morning and reached room temperature hours ago, but I didn’t care. I took a long swig — as much as I could tolerate without retching — because I needed the caffeine to power me through this meeting and then, with any luck, the few remaining hours of the day.
“I’m very sorry,” she said, as if reading from a script, saying the words without any intentionality or meaning behind them. This is what I meant by saying she was intelligent — she knew what to say and how to act, she just chose not to do it. “I know that what I said wasn’t office appropriate and I’ll be sure to adhere to company guidelines for future conversations I engage in while I’m here.”
She shot me that big bright, beautiful smile, the kind that could have put her on the cover of a magazine. It would also look great on a billboard promoting our real estate services, though at this rate, I wasn’t confident that she’d be staying long enough to make the photo shoot for such an ad worthwhile.
In my younger years, her smile might have made me weak in the knees — and I imagine it was effective on most of the men she may have encountered in her life — but the best part about getting old was that such techniques no longer worked on me. I could see right through them, and they only made me frown harder.
And then she hiccupped.
“Sorry,” she said.
She hiccupped again. And again.
“Are you okay, Ms. Saunders?”
“I hiccup when I’m nervous.” Another irritating hiccup acted as the punctuation for her sentence.
She held her breath, gesturing towards me to go on as though nothing was happening, though I found her ridiculous expression very distracting.
“Ms. Saunders,” I said. “Let me tell you a story about a friend of mine.”
Sloane let the breath out of lungs. “Ooh, story time?” She leaned forward, resting her chin on her palms, giving me her full attention. She was absolutely patronizing me, but this was the world we lived in. She didn’t want to be in here listening to my spiel and I sure as hell didn’t want to be giving it to her, so we might as well get it over with.
“You can knock it off,” I told her. “Cute doesn’t work on me.”
“Sorry, sir,” she said, offering me pouty, puppy dog eyes in response, which were no more effective on me than her eager attentiveness.
Those pouty, puppy dog eyes sure were pretty, though.
“Like you, he was also just telling a story around the office, something that we were all amused by.”
