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Oh fuck. Oh no. We’d gone in there. Holt and I had gone into Chase’s office to fart, and because we’d both eaten an ungodly amount of dairy, they’d been particularly bad. Then we’d run out and quickly closed the door to trap the smell, giggling like little kids.
“Taylor?” Lance asked uncertainly from behind me. “You okay, bud?”
“Y-yeah. Donuts,” I said faintly as I watched Chase open the window in his office as wide as possible, then grab the air freshener.
When he glanced toward the bullpen, I dove into my chair and ducked my head, starting to sweat. Oh god. What if he somehow knew it’d been me?
“You sure you’re okay, bud?” Lance asked. I spun my desk chair to stare at him with slightly panicked eyes. “You look a little… tired.”
“Um.” I scrubbed my face, trying to wipe any trace of guilt from my features. “Yeah, I’m… Just slept badly.”
Lance tutted in sympathy. “Worrying about your sister?”
What? I didn’t have a sister. What the fuck had I told him?
“Yeah,” I said weakly, then grabbed my, You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps! mug and stood. “I’m going to get some coffee. You want one?”
“I’m good, bud. Don’t forget to take your lunch to the fridge.”
I mumbled something indistinctly and grabbed my backpack, even though I hadn’t brought a lunch. Just before I made it into the break room, Tim from HR strode out with a carton in his hand and a deep frown on his face.
“Okay, everyone,” he announced imperiously, raising his chin as the office went quiet and heads turned to look at him. He lifted the carton high into the air. “I understand that sometimes, the regular milk runs out and you’re all too busy to go and buy more in the middle of the day. But that does not give you the right to use my almond milk. I need my almond milk. It’s clearly mine. I write my name on every carton I bring to the office.”
Suddenly, I was remembering showing Holt the break room and watching as he rifled through the fridge, took out Tim from HR’s carton of almond milk, and guzzled the entire thing. Then he’d held back a burp and tightly said, “That was a mistake.”
Oh god. He’d thrown up. Where had he thrown up??? Had he made it to the bathroom in time? I couldn’t fucking remember!
“Now, an apology would be nice,” Tim from HR was saying snippily as I stood right beside him, clutching my mug and backpack and sweating profusely. “But I’ll settle for the perpetrator quietly leaving the money for the almond milk on my desk when I’m at lunch. And I implore you all to have some common courtesy in the workplace. This is unacceptable.”
As he turned and walked stiffly away, the restroom door swung open and Simon from IT stepped out with a grimace on his face.
“Did someone throw up in the men’s room during Sharon from Accounts’ party? It smells like vomit in there.”
I was going to pass out. The blood rushing to my face was making me light-headed. Keeping my head down, I powerwalked into the break room and hid in the corner so no one could see me through the windows.
Why the fuck had I let Holt come up here with me? He was clearly a menace. I didn’t think we’d been in the office for all that long, so surely we hadn’t done anything else. In fact, I was pretty sure I remembered Seb calmly hoisting Holt over his shoulder and carrying him out of the bathroom after he’d finished throwing up. We’d left after that. And Holt had been in no position to wreak any more havoc. He’d been too busy singing eighties power ballads off-key and using Seb’s wide back as a drum set.
Trying to calm down, I filled my mug with water and chugged it, then did the same again. My belly sloshing, I poured myself a cup of black coffee and tried to walk back to my desk like a normal human being. I couldn’t just hide all day. I had to work.
It was torture. I’d thought this place was hell already, but I’d never experienced it while hungover as shit and terrified that someone else was going to pop up and say they’d found photocopies of someone’s balls pinned up in their cubicle or something. I was almost positive we hadn’t gone near the photocopier, but Holt might have snuck off to do it. He did seem to have a fixation on his balls. Then again, I doubted he’d want their asymmetry immortalised on copy paper.
Over the course of the day, I kept remembering more stuff from last night, mostly from when we were still hanging out in Holt’s office. Still drinking. So much drinking.
“Have I fucked any of the wrestlers? No,” Holt had said while stirring rum into what remained of the salted caramel ice cream so he could drink it. “Have I imagined them all passing my naked and willing body around the ring to do whatever they want to me while a crowd of lusty spectators looked on? I’m not made of stone, Taylor. Of course I have.”
“I tried to learn how to twerk,” I’d admitted while we’d thrown my sad party hat back and forth to each other. “It was when I lived with Marcus. He was out on a bike ride, and I’d pretended to feel sick so I wouldn’t have to go. The mailman saw me through the window. I could never look him in the eye again.”
“I did learn how to twerk,” Holt had replied. “Practised in my office for fucking hours. Seb caught me once.”
“When I worked for a gaming company in my twenties, I was trying to download this stupid Moth Simulator game on my work computer and somehow managed to delete six months of character design for the new game they were working on,” I’d told him with a body-wracking cringe. “I have no idea how. I didn’t even have the program open. I never told them. They thought it was a catastrophic system error.”
“I pretended to be vegan for five years just to piss off my parents,” Holt had said while propelling himself around the room on his desk chair. “Used to eat burgers and stuff on my way home from school. Snuck a whole rotisserie chicken up to my bedroom once. I threw the carcass out my window once I was done with it.”
“I’ve always wanted to know what a footjob feels like,” I’d blurted at one point.
“I almost got arrested for indecent exposure when I was on vacation in Tokyo,” Holt had said with a cringe. “I was wearing really, really tight pants and I tripped on the Shibuya Crossing, and when I went to break my fall the back of my pants split open. I’d run out of clean underwear so I wasn’t wearing any. A large group of Japanese businessmen saw my butthole.”
Why the hell had I made plans to see him again tonight? We shouldn’t ever see each other again. It felt almost illegal. I knew all his deepest, most embarrassing secrets, and he knew all of mine. There should be laws in place that prevented us from ever going within fifty feet of each other after that.
