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A murmured response rippled through the gathering, and then they dispersed. June gave me an accusatory scowl.
I raised my eyebrows. “What?”
“This is your fault.”
I felt my expression slam back down. “How?”
“You were looking at my bra, and you made me uncomfortable, and then youyelledat me.”
“You’re wearing a shirt that shows your underwear. How is that my fault?”
She gasped, looking at Carla. “Are you hearing this?”
Carla examined her nails. “You are both terrible. Teamwork, Matthews and Brady. Teamwork.”
Oh, I wanted to work June, alright. I wanted to work her to the bone until she dragged her tired little pixie body home and cried to her mommy and daddy every night about how horrible her mean boss was.
I also wanted to see her bra again, but I forced myself to put that aside.
“I can work as a team,” June said, lifting her chin a fraction. “I always do.”
“Right, if the team is neolithic and oh-for-ten on the leader board,” I growled.
“Stop,” Carla snapped. “Out of the lounge. Both of you.”
I grabbed my salad from the fridge, and without so much as another word, I banished myself back to my office. Teamwork? I could do teamwork. I’d make Matthews captain of Team Work Until You Cry. I wasn’t going to put myself under the guillotine by firing another scheduling operator. By the time I was done with her, she’d be begging to leave.
Three
June
Ihad definitely underestimated Dr. Brady’s potential for entering his villain era. My mistake had been thinking he perpetually lived in a state of evil, mustache-twirling depravity, but I had been so very wrong about that. It got so much worse.
It wasn’t just the soft, barking reprimands if my lunch ran a minute later than it should have, or the increased workload of moving his patients from the end of June to July for the retreat. No, actually, the worst part was the Digital Initiative. Dr. Brady had informed me the day after the “incident” that we would be digitizing every record in the surgical center from 1999 to 2015, and he thought I was the perfect one for the job.
But could I do this thing during normal work hours? No, he’d said. I would be paid overtime, of course, but it needed to be done outside office hours, from five to seven in the evening. Lately, he’d been pushing it to more like nine.
How, you ask, could he enforce such a thing?
He stayed late every fucking night. If his surgeries didn’t run long—which they usually did—then he went to the physical therapy gym and worked out for obscene amounts of time. Then he’d come back to his office, shower, and smelling like cedarwood soap, he’d sit in his office doing paperwork. If I tried to leave, he wouldstrongly suggestI stay as long as he did to ensure the Digital Initiative got done before we left for our retreat at the end of the month.
Even on the Friday everyone else had been approved to leave and travel to Jackson Hole, Dr. Brady had sent me a text reminding me that he had a last-minute surgery that day and that he would need me to come in and update the patient’s records.
I knew for a fact that he could easily do that himself, but I was at the whims of a madman.
As I punched my foot through the pantleg of my jean shorts, Liz watched me with uncharacteristic concern. “Girl… I do not feel right leaving you like this.” She leaned against the wall, studying me and twirling the pull strings of her corset bralette. She wore it over jeans that had been so purposefully shredded all the way up to her coochie, I wondered why she wore them at all. She had slicked her long, black hair into a high ponytail, and her bangs covered half her eyes. She looked like a model with her glossy, caramel lips, and I looked like a camp counselor who’d been mauled by a mountain lion.
Liz was headed for Miami, having paid her rent for three months, and fully intended to DJ Bunny her way through every club in the city. Over the course of two weeks, she had watched me slowly decay into a dry-skinned, dull-eyed, pathetic, moaning zombie.
I hiked the shorts up, buttoning them around my waist and over my belly button. I’d chosen a cut off, T-shirt-style crop top, and I looked down to survey my outfit. Oh, my God. I’d actually lost weight. Ineverlost weight. I had the body of a thirteenth century English peasant that stayed stocky and plump to survive the harsh winter famines. Apparently, all it took was a relentless work schedule and a domineering, cranky boss to shed some pounds.
Liz gasped. “Guuurl.”
“Oh, my God,” I moaned, patting my soft belly. “Look at this. Look what he’s doing to me.”
“I am gonna report him,” she said, chewing gum loudly and inspecting her long, coffin-shaped nails. “Report him to the BBB or something.”
“Does that apply to doctors?” I asked weakly. “I don’t think it does. I watched this documentary about a surgeon who literally butchered people on his operating table foryearsand no one did anything about it. I doubt they would care how he treats his secretary.”
