by A. J. Wynter
Samantha shook her head and looked down. “You know, it amazes me sometimes that I’m the one who went bankrupt and not you.” She laughed incredulously. “I mean, do you get away with this stuff all the time? Because I certainly don’t. What, do you just charm your way out of these things?”
I stayed silent.
“I’ll take that as a yes, then,” Samantha said as I fumbled with my pen. There was no way to fight back on this one. She was clearly right and I was wrong. Her accusation was not too far from the truth, either.
“Well don’t just sit there,” Samantha said. “We’ve got five days’ worth of work to do in one. Get started on the charts!”
I smiled at her in defeat. “Yes, boss.” She rolled her eyes and continued working.
The tension in the room was palpable as I compiled the data from the Torver Group and Wordsworth in a series of graphs, a series of neat pie charts and tables that showed the details of our earnings for the year. I could feel it when Samantha looked over at me, and every time I glanced up towards her I felt like she would feel it and accuse me of something. The air in the room was thicker than usual. It was full of unspoken arguments and the leftover bitterness of the shouted ones, of the spoils and wounds of our wars and all the greed and pain that lingered with them.
We had worked out a system where I would compile our data into graphs and email them to Samantha, and she would write the accompanying report, being the better writer out of the two of us. It wasn’t the hardest work, but there was a hell of a lot of it, and by the time lunch break came around, the monotony of the work combined with the unflinching tension in the atmosphere made me feel as exhausted as I usually did at five o’clock.
“…It’s noon,” I said, nervously looking up towards Samantha, who had the posture of a duchess and the focus of a general as she typed away.
“Mmhm.”
“It’s noon, Samantha. We should eat.”
“There’s no time to get anything,” she said. “We’ll deal.”
I rolled my eyes at her stubbornness. “Nonsense. I’ll have Sabryna call in a pizza. No time wasted, okay?”
Samantha nodded. “Very well.”
“What toppings do you like?”
“Anything.”
“You sure?”
“Yup,” Samantha said. “As long as it’s not anything weird like anchovies or something, I should be good.”
I stumbled out of the conference room and made my way over to Sabryna’s desk.
“Hey,” I said. “Can you order me an extra-large Hawaiian pizza?”
Sabryna stared at me. “Sure. You alright?”
I scoffed. “Why would I not be alright?”
“You look like you’ve been under police interrogation for five hours.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yeah, you do.” Sabryna shook her head. “When you’re stressed you start running your hands through your hair, and it gets all poofy like that, see?”
I peeked in the mirror. “We all have bad hair days.”
Sabryna smiled. “That Samantha Doyle is driving you insane, and it barely even sounds like you’re talking in there.”
I saw myself blush in the mirror and quickly turned around. “Just get the pizza, okay?”
“Okay…”
I quickly walked back to the conference room, where Samantha was still working diligently. “Pizza order is in,” I said, wishing she would at least look up and acknowledge me for a second. “We still have another five hours of this crap to finish, so we may as well get some fuel in us, right?”
“I suppose,” Samantha said. “Email me the last pie chart you did.”
I sent it and squirmed in my chair uncomfortably. Five hours. That was a long time. Three movies. A football game and a half. A school day, not counting lunch. And those things all sounded a hell of a lot easier than whatever this was.
Samantha looked hot today, as much as I hated to admit it. She wore a tight black pencil skirt with matching black pantyhose, set off with a slightly unbuttoned white blouse and dark beige heels. Her dark hair was gathered behind her head with a topaz hair clip that matched her earrings. I was surprised that I noticed that her lipstick was slightly different today as well. It was a slightly darker shade…her usual dark pink was now bordering on seductress red.
God, maybe I was more attracted to her than I thought.
I spent the next twenty minutes training my eyes to look only at my screen, and not towards Samantha. The strange thing was, even when my eyes weren’t looking at her, somehow it still felt like I was, and worst of all, that she could sense it. I looked fiercely at the screen until the spreadsheets of numbers blurred before my eyes.
I jumped at a knock at the door.
“Pizza,” Sabryna said unexcitedly, dropping the box in the middle of the table.
“That was fast,” I noted.
“Not really,” Sabryna said. “Twenty minutes seems kind of like a slow delivery speed for being smack in the middle of the city.”
I shrugged and opened the box, picking up a slice of pizza and depositing it on a paper plate.
Samantha’s eyes narrowed. “That pizza isn’t all Hawaiian, is it?”
I froze and looked at her skeptically. “…Yeah?”
“God, Johnathan, you like Hawaiian pizza? Out of all the pizzas you could have ordered, out of all the vegetable and meat combinations the world has to offer, you decide the best course of action is to put ham and pineapple together on a pizza?”
I quickly chewed the food in my mouth so I could answer. “Um…yeah.”
Samantha put her head in her hands. “Jesus,” she laughed. “Okay, I have never hated you as much as I do right now.”
I shrugged. “You said anything except anchovies.”
“I said nothing weird! That’s beyond weird! That’s an abomination!”
I chuckled. “I cannot believe you’re anti-Hawaiian pizza.”
“I’ll pick the pineapples off, it’s fine,” Samantha joked. I watched as she deposited the little yellow triangles into a napkin. “Now let’s get back to work, okay?”
I smiled and cracked my laptop back open, starting on my second slice as I worked. The pizza and our brief conversation had ruined the comfortable silence we had maintained for a while, and now it was broken once again. Opportunities to speak hung tantalizingly in the air around us. I hated how conscious I was of Samantha’s presence as I worked. I could barely focus, and she wasn’t even doing anything remotely interesting. I noticed the way she crossed and re-crossed her legs, the starts and stops of her typing, the way she would stroke the side of her neck when she paused to think. I noticed myself pulling at my hair again. Just one afternoon and the report would be in, and I could sit down in front of my wide-screen and relax.
When two o’clock hit, I excused myself to get my afternoon coffee and went out to the break room, where Kirk tended to get his coffee at around the same time. Sure enough, he was standing in the corner of the room browsing the selection of Keurig cups.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” Kirk replied. “You check the latest report? It’s up to twelve inches now.”
“Jesus,” I said, ripping open a sugar packet. “I totally forgot about the blizzard.”
Kirk grinned. “Who wouldn’t, being stuck in a room with Samantha Doyle all day?”
“Shut up,” I said, punching his arm playfully. “Anyway, I was going to ask, can you look over the report really quick before we send it in? I’d like a fresh pair of eyes to read over it first. I’m already feeling pretty braindead.”
“No problem,” Kirk said. “Have a good rest of the day with your girlfriend.” He winked and I rolled my eyes, and shocked myself a little bit when I noticed I was smiling.
The afternoon drudged on. I felt an even greater sense of panic when I realized I would have to figure out how to deal with everyone’s work for the next week if we ended up having to close the office due to the snow. There was still an incr
edible amount of work to do before we had to leave the office, and we were honestly pushing it a bit. The tension de-escalated a little bit as I acclimated to it, and I stopped being so paranoid about Samantha noticing me when I looked over.
“Okay,” Samantha said, looking up at the wall clock. “Now we’ve got about four hours of work to do in two. I don’t know how exactly we’re going to manage this.”
I shrugged. “Maybe if you had gotten all those good vitamins and nutrients from those pineapples you picked off you’d have more energy,” I joked.
Samantha met my eyes and laughed. “Maybe you’re right.”
The next two hours were a blur of furiously typing numbers into spreadsheets and Samantha mumbling under her breath as she read over her sentences. We were both in a state of hyper-focused energy, the kind of academic fight or flight you get during a final examination. When I emailed the last file to Samantha, I exhaled and threw my fist in the air.
“Yes!” I said, high-fiving Samantha. “Finally.” I took a deep breath and tried to shake myself out of work mode and relax now that the period of panic had passed over. “You write that last bit, I’m going to call Kirk in to look over everything.”
“You got it,” Samantha said, and I was relieved to see that she looked happy.
I brought Kirk in, and tried not to notice the grin on his face as he walked in…once again, he was far too giddy about the awkward situation I had been placed in than he was about checking over our report.
“Lemme see,” Kirk said. “Give me your laptop.”
I handed it over and drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair impatiently. I amused myself by thinking about all the television I would have the opportunity to catch up on when I got home. And the food. So many options…Game of Thrones and curry? Black Mirror and an ice cream sundae? What the hell, I deserved it. Oh, and also, I could—
“Um, guys…” Kirk said nervously.
“Yeah?” Samantha and I said simultaneously.
“Er…” Kirk grimaced awkwardly. “Johnathan, you might want to check what spreadsheet of data you were making those graphs from.”
I grabbed the laptop. “The what?” I could already feel myself panicking as I opened the document on the screen.
“No!” I yelled, slamming my hand on the table. “Are you kidding me? We’ve been working on this all day! Shit!”
Samantha looked at Kirk. “I’m sorry, what happened?”
Kirk sighed. “Johnathan was using the data from two years ago instead of last year.”
Samantha groaned. “You’re kidding, right?”
I held my head in my hands and tried not to freak out. “I’m afraid so.”
For some reason, my mind was hardly considering how to fix the problem. At the moment, all I could think about was how much Samantha would probably hate me for making her do all that work for nothing.
However, she seemed surprisingly calm. “It’s snowing,” Samantha said, taking a second to stare dreamily out the window.
“Crap,” said Kirk. “What now?”
I tried my best to regain focus, and then remembered how important my leadership was to my company in moments like this. “Kirk, go home. Tell everyone to get home and drive safe. Tell them to bring any important papers in case we have to work from home tomorrow. I’ll email everyone with an update soon.”
Kirk looked at me with concern. “Are you guys sure you’re okay?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s fine.”
Kirk smiled at me kindly and then shut the door.
“Fuck,” I said, burying my head in my elbows. “We’re completely fucked.”
Samantha sighed and kicked off her heels. “So, what do we do?”
I chuckled. “After all this, you’re asking me what to do? After I messed up that bad? How are you not completely furious with me right now, Samantha?”
She shook her head and laughed. “I’m far too exhausted to be furious.”
“True…” I said, and a long silence followed as the snow outside turned heavier.
“We can do this,” Samantha said confidently. “We just need a thorough plan.”
“Okay,” I said, fully ready to roll up into a ball and let her do all the work.
“Well I guess,” Samantha said. “We take all this home and stay up late working and emailing back and forth. To be honest, there isn’t much difference in the data between the two years, so a lot of my written portion of the reports can be recycled. And I can use my extra time to make new graphs. If we budget our time correctly, we could be done before midnight.”
“Impressive,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Now let’s hope it works.”
Twenty minutes later, we were all packed up and ready to go on our way. It would be a grueling evening ahead, but once we had the report in, all the work will have been worth it.
“Have a safe drive, Samantha,” I said as cheerily as I could as I locked up. “And again, I’m sorry about my mistake. I really do owe you.”
She smiled and sighed. “It’s okay. What’s done is done.”
We smiled at each other for a small moment, and it was probably the warmest smile that had ever been shared between us. It was a magically brief bit of friendship because, in that moment, we had shared a whole day’s worth of well…total and utter disaster.
And that was when the lights flickered out.
Samantha turned to me with a look of horror on her face and suddenly began pacing around the office in nervous, frantic circles, holding her head in one of her hands.
“Look, Johnathan, let’s think this through, maybe—”
“Those files are on the computer, Samantha!” I raged. “All the writing you already did on the report is on the computer. All the data! Everything!” I crumpled up a brochure that was lying on the table and threw it at the table. After everything that had already happened today, this? This?!
Samantha just stared at me, waiting for me to calm down.
“You know,” I said, walking up to her slowly. “If there’s any time for you to yell at me, this is it. If I had done all this earlier, all this…” I threw myself down in a chair. “…I wouldn’t have gotten you stuck in this mess.” I stared at her with a hint of confusion. “By the way, why aren’t you mad?”
Samantha laughed in the kind of uproarious way that only shows itself when life has gotten truly apocalyptic. “It won’t accomplish anything anymore, I suppose,” she said in defeat. “I figure my best shot for the company is to keep the peace.”
“Well,” I said, bending a staple I had found on the table frustratingly with my fingers. “I certainly can’t argue with that.”
Samantha stared out the window at the falling snow. “So what now?”
“We stay.”
“We what?”
I felt my frown morph into the grin of a madman as I revealed my plan. “You can do what you want, Sam, but the only offline copies of the data we need are in this office, and that’s the only way we have a chance to get the report in, and that’s if the power’s back on by morning. I’m staying.”
“It’s going to snow ten inches!” Samantha exclaimed.
“Twelve,” I corrected with a smile. “And if you truly do want what’s best for Wordsworth, and your employees that you supposedly care so much about, then I suggest you get ready for a long night.”
Samantha stood her ground for a moment and watched me carefully, and eyed me up and down as if trying to decode my thoughts. She slipped her beige heels back on her feet and walked up to face me, her head held high.
“Very well,” she said with that regal smile of hers. “Let’s do this.”
***
Within twenty minutes, Samantha and I had both downed some energy drinks Cassidy had in the fridge that probably contained an illegal amount of caffeine, and were rolling open endless file cabinets trying to locate the data sheets that just hours earlier we had accessed with just a few clicks of a mouse.
“You know,” I said, sucking on a fresh
paper cut. “I don’t know why it never occurred to me to ask Sabryna how her filing system works. Would have come in handy,” I said, shutting another drawer with a rolling thud.
Samantha smiled at me sympathetically. The office looked otherworldly. I had left the blinds up so we could watch the progress of the snow through the windows. Samantha and I had dug through the office to find anything that lit up, so a motley assortment of right-side-up flashlights and candles of all shapes and sizes gave the room a warm glow. It had a very romantic feel to it, like an old Italian restaurant.
Oh, crap.
After we had collected all of the files that were pertinent to the report from their various hiding places around the office, we opened them up and organized them on the large conference room table, which was looking more chaotic than it ever had in the lifespan of our digital age company. Samantha and I were both filled with the artificial frenetic energy only pure will and caffeine can get you, and our hands shivered with it as we stacked and passed papers around the table, and the soft glow of the flashlights made it seem as if our task had an even more extreme importance.
“This reminds me of college,” I said, copying down some data. “I can’t remember the last time I planned to pull an all-nighter to finish a project on time.”
Samantha laughed. “Not me. I had all my papers done two days ahead of time.”
“I bet you had a 4.0 GPA too.”
“Maybe,” she smiled.
“So, you never pulled any good pranks? Went to any good parties?” I joked. “I suppose you were always back in your dorm asleep by ten p.m.”
“I did blackmail the head of the math department once.”
I stopped writing. “You what?”
Samantha smirked. “Let’s just say he was behaving very inappropriately towards one of my friends, I threatened to tell the dean, and then I just happened to mention how it would be really, really awesome if she got the department’s most prestigious internship.”
I scoffed. “Figures.”