by Hannah Ford
He strode toward me in a beautifully cut navy suit and grey tie, his hair combed back from his forehead, his shoes shining, his face freshly shaven. It was shocking seeing him here, suddenly in front of me, and I felt as if the wind had been knocked from my body.
Our eyes met.
My heart clenched.
His jaw set in a hard line as he got closer to me.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
“What are you doing here?” I blurted.
“The hospital called me.”
“How did they…”
“I’m Rose’s emergency contact.” His tone was clipped, impatient. “What the hell were you thinking, bringing her here?”
“Excuse me?” I asked, thrown at his tone. He shouldn’t have been annoyed. He should have been thanking me. “I didn’t bring her here, Callum, she tried to give herself an injection of heroin and she passed out or lost consciousness or… something, I don’t know.”
“And you called 911?”
“Yes, I called 911!” I shook my head. “She had a seizure in the back of the ambulance!”
“You should have called me, Adriana.” He shook his head and then steepled his fingers together and put them up to his mouth, taking in a deep breath.
“I should have called you? Instead of the paramedics?”
“Yes. Actually, no, you shouldn’t have let her into my apartment in the first place. What the hell were you thinking?”
I stared at him incredulously. Was he being serious? “I didn’t let her in, Callum, she had a freaking key, she told me she lived there.”
“And you let her go into the bathroom alone when she was obviously high.”
“Again, I didn’t let her do anything. And if you were so worried about her, then why didn’t you stay at your apartment?”
“Did she have drugs on her?” he asked.
“She had a needle in her arm, Callum, so, yeah, I’d say she had drugs on her.”
“Fuck, Adriana,” he swore. “You should have thought about that before you called 911. Now the police are probably going be involved.”
I felt the hot, burning sting of fury biting at the back of my throat. “Don’t you dare try to blame me for this,” I said. “Don’t you try to blame me for any of it. It’s not my fault she– ” I trailed off, realizing it was a losing battle. He was too upset. He wasn’t going to listen to me. He was obviously worried about Rose, more worried about her than he was about me. He hadn’t asked me once if I was okay, hadn’t explained to me why he’d left this morning, hadn’t stopped to think that perhaps it may have been a little upsetting for me to have a strange woman pounding down his apartment door before injecting herself with an illegal drug in the bathroom and having a seizure.
But I knew pointing any of that out to him would be a complete waste of time.
He’d shown me who he was.
And now it was time for me to show him who I was.
“You know what, Callum?” I said. “Leave me alone. Don’t call me, don’t text me, don’t talk to me at work. Just. Forget. I. Exist.” I squared my shoulders. “And I’ll do the same to you.”
I turned away and he grabbed for my arm, but I wrenched free of his grasp. I took off running down the sidewalk, and as I did, the wind kicked up, cold against my face.
He called my name, but I didn’t turn around.
He didn’t follow me – if he had, he could have caught up to me easily. I was wearing sweatpants that were three sizes too big and a pair of high heels that made it ridiculously hard to make a dramatic exit.
In a movie, I would have been dressed perfectly, my hair ruffling in the breeze, my hips moving in a determined sway. Instead I was wearing Callum’s sweatpants and stumbling. I couldn’t even imagine how my hair and skin must look after what he’d done to me last night and the insane events of the morning.
But I didn’t care.
He had hurt me for the last time.
I never wanted to see him again, never wanted to talk to him again.
I was in the subway car, nestled between a middle-aged man and a homeless woman before I realized I was crying.
* * *
I tried to call Kiersten again to let her know I’d be late, but her phone was still set to voicemail. By the time I got to Archway’s offices, I was already two hours late.
I’d gotten there as quickly as I could, taking a three-minute shower and doing my make-up in a cab. I would have skipped the shower altogether or at least not bothered drying my hair, but there was no way I could have gotten away with it– after being cuffed to a bed last night and fucked so hard I still felt sore, my hair was in desperate need of some serious attention.
When I got to Kiersten’s office, I could see her through the glass, sitting at her desk, her hair pulled back in a loose bun at the base of her neck.
Peggy the receptionist gave me a look, one of those ‘I’m so sorry for whatever is about to happen to you’ looks.
“Kiersten?” I tried, knocking on her open door.
“Yes?” She didn’t look up from her computer.
“Sorry, I um, did you get my message?” My phone picked that time to go off in my purse. I pulled it out and silenced it, not able to miss the text message from Nessa that had popped up on the screen. ‘U alive, party girl? Saw you leaving with Callum. Can’t wait to hear about it!’
My throat went dry. Crap. Nessa had seen me leaving with Callum? Who else had seen me leaving with him? Had Kiersten? Was that why she hadn’t bothered to answer her phone when I called? Was she going to fire me right now, not just for being late, but for being with Callum after she’d expressly forbidden it?
“Something important?” Kiersten asked, glancing up at me. She slid her glasses off and set them down on her desk. Something about the gesture was extremely intimidating.
“No,” I said quickly, shoving my phone bag into my bag. “No, nothing important.”
“Why are you late?”
“I had a family emergency.” The lie slipped easily from my lips and I instantly felt my fair skin burn bright. I had never been a good liar.
“What kind of family emergency?” Kiersten asked. Her eyes stayed on mine, laser focused.
“It’s personal.”
“That’s kind of the point of a family emergency,” she said.
“Yes, well, I’d prefer not to say.”
“You don’t really have the luxury,” she said. “You were late. You’re on thin ice here already after the stunts you pulled yesterday.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “One, you didn’t bother to read Aubrey Zane’s book. Two, you antagonized one of our top authors, an author who had recommended you for this position, which leads me to believe that maybe you haven’t been completely honest with me about the nature of your relationship.”
My heart pounded in my chest, and the room started to spin. “Kiersten,” I said, forcing my voice to stay steady. “I apologized for my behavior yesterday, and I want to assure you that those things will not happen again.”
“Have you read the Aubrey Zane book?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No. Last night I was at the party.”
“How long were you there?” she asked, picking up her Starbucks cup and leaning back in her chair. She was wearing a cap-sleeved black dress that gathered right at the waist, accentuating her slim body.
An armful of bracelets – silver bangles, braided black leather, gold Alex and Ani – tangled together on her wrist, the light from above bouncing off the metal. It gave the impression that she’d just grabbed whatever had been in her jewelry box and thrown it on, but I knew better.
Everything about Kiersten was calculating. Even that first day, the way she’d been with me, pretending she was so laid back and cool. It had all been an act to lure me into a false sense of security.
But why? I wondered. Why would Kiersten have wanted me to think she was laid back and cool? Was it just so she could trip me up later? No, I decided. She must have had some deeper motive,
one I hadn’t figured out yet. Which made her extremely dangerous.
“I’m not really sure how long I was there.” I curled my toes up in my shoe, resisting the urge to jiggle my leg.
“A couple hours?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you see Callum Wilder there?”
“No,” I said firmly, not offering any more information. With lies, the best thing to do was to keep your answers simple. Otherwise there were more chances for you to get caught up later in a detail you hadn’t remembered.
“Really? Someone said he was there.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was with my friends.”
She sighed and pursed her lips. “We have a lunch meeting at one,” she said, “with Dean Bellingham.” She turned back to her computer. “If you don’t know who he is, then find out.” She took a sip of her Starbucks and put her glasses back on. “We also need to finalize the schedule for Callum’s tour. I sent you an email with the dates. We need to find hotels that are close to all the venues, nice places of course, and we need to make sure they’re alerted to the fact that we will be providing security for him.”
“Security?”
“Yes.” She was clicking around on her computer now, and I was making notes on my phone, trying to keep up with her rapid fire instructions. “No doubt there will be girls showing up at Callum’s hotel, looking for an autograph, or something more.”
“There will?” I imagined them all, standing outside some gorgeous hotel, waiting for Callum to come down and pick them from a crowd and bring them upstairs. Was that one of the places he’d been talking about when he said he didn’t fuck in his apartment?
But Kiersten was already done with me.
“Meet me in the lobby at twelve-thirty,” she said. “For our lunch. If you need help getting into your email, I’m sure someone from HR would be happy to show you.”
She’d obviously dismissed me, so I turned around and headed for the cubicle in the corner, the one that I’d sat in yesterday when I was putting together the prize packs. I took a deep breath and reached into my bag, pulled out the folder they’d given me in HR yesterday with my email login and password.
I was able to log in to my email fairly easily.
Sure enough, there was an email from Kiersten, and attached to it was Callum’s schedule, all laid out in a neat spreadsheet.
Okay, Adriana, I told myself, just forget you’re making reservations for the guy who fucked you last night, the guy you can’t stop thinking about, the guy that’s twisting you into a mess. You got this, girl.
It was time to get to work.
* * *
Two hours later, I was halfway done with finalizing Callum’s accommodations. The whole thing was an exercise in extreme masochism – each hotel I called was another chance to imagine Callum with another woman.
The one in Boston would be dark and pretty, with delicate features. She’d be the kind of girl who drank pumpkin spice lattes and wore tailored pea coats to protect her from the cold New England winters.
The girl in Savannah had long blonde hair and freckles, blue eyes and long legs, her face tan from the long Georgia days, her voice smooth like honey.
The one in Chicago was in medical school, but she was originally from a farm in Wisconsin, so not only did she know how to give people stitches, she could also milk a cow and raise a steer like no one’s business.
I imagined all of them, tangled up in him the way I’d been, wondered if he’d murmur the same things to them that he’d said to me, if he’d hold them the way he’d held me.
It was eleven o’clock when the first text came.
Lemon.
That was it.
Just one word.
I read it over and over, typed out my yes? response five or more times before finally deleting it, along with the original text that he’d sent.
The satisfaction only lasted a moment, and I hated myself for it, but I wanted that text back immediately.
I didn’t have to mourn it long.
Don’t be mad, the next one said.
The text did the exact opposite of what it was intended to – all it did was make me angrier than I already was. How dare Callum tell me not to be mad? He already thought he could tell me what to do -- now he wanted to tell me how to feel.
When the phone rang in my hand a second later, flashing his name on the screen, I ignored it, and instead mustered up all of my self-control and turned back to my work.
He was always there, though, burning the back of my mind the way he had ever since I’d met him. Every person on the phone who asked me how many keys I would need for his room, every time I would spell his name for a front desk clerk, explain who he was and what he needed, made me think of him, his blue eyes, his hands on me, how he made my body feel. I made myself push forward, though, forced myself to focus, to concentrate on what I was doing.
When noon rolled around, I was finished booking his itinerary. I double- checked everything I’d entered into the spreadsheet -- the names of the hotels, the room numbers, the phone numbers. I made a new column on the document, showing how far away the hotels were from the bookstores or arenas where Callum would be speaking.
I even put asterisks near the events I thought would be most appropriate for the twitter giveaways that Kiersten had been talking about, the ones where you could win a dinner with Callum.
Screw him, I thought. If I was going to be forced to work with him, then I would go all out. I’d pick the prettiest twitter followers, the girls who looked like they’d be most likely to sleep with him. I’d force them on him.
It would be like desensitizing myself or whatever they called it.
Like when people were afraid of something and they made themselves do it over and over again until it became background noise. I would imagine Callum with different women, over and over again, until my brain was so bored by it that it just didn’t react.
I emailed the spreadsheet to Kiersten and was about to head to her office to see what she wanted me to do next when a girl appeared at my cubicle. She was about my age, with curly red hair, and she was dressed all in black – slim black pants, black ruffled blouse, black cardigan, black flats.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re Adriana, right?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “I’m Adriana.”
“Hi! I’m Bailey. I’m one of the other publicity assistants.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling with relief that there was someone else on the same notch of the totem pole as I was. “Nice to meet you.” I held my hand out to her and she took it.
“Oh!” she said. “Sorry, these came for you.” For the first time, I noticed she was holding a long, shiny white box, which she handed to me. “I cover the desk for Peggy while she’s on her lunch break.”
“Thanks,” I said, running my hand over the glossy surface. My heart was pounding. Were they from Callum?
“Boyfriend?” Bailey asked, her green eyes sparkling.
“Probably from my mom,” I said, and set the box down on my desk.
“In a box like that?” she said. “I doubt it. Those are from Anthony’s.”
“Anthony’s?”
“They’re the most exclusive flower place in the city. Super expensive, but their flowers are absolutely gorgeous. When I get married, I’m having everything done from Anthony’s. Purple and silver are my colors, so I’m going to get lilacs and purple roses. Doesn’t that sound elegant?” She giggled, but didn’t wait for my response. “Don’t you dare steal my idea, or else I’ll have to kill you.”
“When are you getting married?” I asked politely.
“What? Oh, I’m not engaged,” she said. “But I plan to be.” She studied her nails for a long moment, then looked at me. “So! Aren’t you going to open them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely. Thanks for dropping them off.” There was no way I could open the flowers in front of her. If they were from Callum, it could get me in serious trouble. What the hell had he bee
n thinking, sending me flowers at work?
Bailey clutched the side of my cubicle and rested her chin in her hand, giving me an expectant look. “Go on!” she said. “I want to see!”
She was making it extremely hard to say no. If I didn’t open them, it was going to seem weird. I took in a deep breath, then reached over and pulled the top off the shiny white box.
Inside were a dozen red roses, each of them exquisite, each bud unfurling the perfect amount, each stem filled with sharp, delicate thorns. They were tied together with an elegant white satin ribbon. They were the kind of flowers every girl dreamed about, like something from a photo shoot or magazine spread.
Nestled in the ribbon was a tiny card.
“Open it!” Bailey urged.
I opened it.
Callum, as usual, was a man of few words.
Answer your phone.
“So?” Bailey said. “Who are they from?” She reached for the card, but I quickly pulled it out of her reach.
“They’re from my mom,” I said. “Just like I thought.”
Bailey frowned, giving me a weird look.
Before I could figure out how to respond, Kiersten appeared at my desk.
“There you are,” she said, as if she’d been looking for me for forever, and that it was strange for me to be at my cubicle, when that should have been the first place she’d checked. “Are you done with the spreadsheet?”
“Yes,” I said. “I just sent it to you.”
Her eyes flicked to the flowers, the card in my hand. “Who are the flowers from?”
“Um, my mom,” I said, and quickly shoved the card into my bag.
If Kiersten was suspicious, she didn’t show it.
“How sweet,” she said, and her voice softened just a little bit.
“Yeah,” I said. “She just wanted to congratulate me on my new job.”
“That’s nice,” Kiersten said. “But we have to leave now for our lunch with Dean Bellingham.” She turned to Bailey, acknowledging her presence for the first time. “Bailey, can you put those in water for Adriana? Thank you.”
“Um, sure,” Bailey said, and rolled her eyes at me behind Kiersten’s back. “Yes, your Highness,” she mouthed, and I covered my mouth to keep from giggling.