Chapter Five
Izzy
“Iz, your cat’s in my apartment,” Josh yelled from upstairs as I checked my mailbox.
“Seriously?” I sighed and wondered who’d been in my apartment since I left that morning. I looked over at my door and yep—it was ajar.
Thank God the general entrance to the building required a key.
My grandparents owned the building as their investment property. An older building, it sat in the middle of a midcentury middle-class neighborhood, offering four one-bedroom units. But instead of their leasing the apartments to college students and young professionals to make a pretty penny on premium rent, all four units in the building were leased at a discounted rate to Millie and Burt’s grandchildren.
I was grateful for the sweet deal on rent, as well as the landlords who adored me, but it came with a few less-than-ideal caveats. First, I’d lost count of the number of times I’d come home to find my grandpa tinkering in my apartment or my grandma “tidying things up a bit.”
Also, to make things “easier for everyone,” my grandparents had given each of us a copy of the master key so they didn’t have to mess around with individual locks.
Sometimes it felt like I lived in a big house with my cousins instead of my own private apartment.
My younger cousin, Emily, beautiful and funny and right across the hall, could often be found letting herself into my apartment, borrowing my clothes and leaving notes that said things like “I have your black shoes—will return later.”
Daphne, my other cousin, lived upstairs and was generally a quiet person aside from the occasional cosplay party she hosted for her fellow LARPers. Did she sometimes let herself into my place when she was out of food and didn’t feel like going to the store?
Yes, yes she did.
But did she replace the food she borrowed?
No, no she did not.
Josh was the best building-mate cousin out of the trio. He was an IT workaholic, so I rarely saw him at all aside from the occasional laundry room run-in, and he only got into my stuff when he ran out of beer and didn’t want to go to the store.
I ran up the stairs and retrieved the Darkling, apologizing to Josh for the black fur deposits my cat had left on his fancy white sofa.
“It’s cool,” he said in a huge cloud of smoke, because my favorite cousin was also a total vape hound.
By the time I finally got inside my apartment and kicked off my shoes, I was ready for a lot of inactivity.
Because my day, in and of itself, had been a LOT.
I changed into my pajamas (yes, at 6:10 p.m.), grabbed a Diet Coke, and went into the living room, where the McDonald’s bag I’d snagged on the way home was now soggy and grease-stained in the bottom of my purse.
I grabbed the remote and turned on the TV, needing escape as I pulled out my dinner. The Darkling walked back and forth on the back of the couch, stepping on my neck and being his usual dickish self, and I couldn’t help but sigh yet again.
What was I going to do?
I unwrapped my hamburger and kind of wanted to cry. I’d finally found what seemed like the perfect job, with a company that was considered to be the best place to work in the entire freaking world, and I’d totally blown myself up. I’d somehow managed to lie to and insult a vice president on my very first day.
As if that weren’t enough of an aww-shit sandwich, I was so profoundly disappointed in AVP Blake’s awful character arc that I could cry. He’d started off the day like some dashing hero in a rom-com, attractive and charming and filled with promise, but then, in an instant, he’d shown himself to be a pompous, arrogant, judgmental jerk.
A jerk who would most likely be firing me the following day.
Is it possible to salvage this? I wanted to believe there was a chance, but he’d looked disgusted with me before I’d behaved like a child. There was no way in hell he was going to be okay with me working for him after the lie and the “nope.”
No way.
A knot formed in my stomach at the thought of job hunting; I hated job hunting. It was the worst in good times, but in this tough market, where even the overqualified were struggling to get hired, it was a nightmare.
And how was I going to explain this to a potential employer? As someone whose career tasks often included interviewing candidates, I was incredibly aware of the question mark that would now be on my employment record.
Because by leaving Ellis off my résumé (which I would have to do since explaining away a one-day stint wasn’t an option), it was going to look as if I’d left my former job of two years without having anything else lined up.
Which was a total red flag in my book.
It suggested things like forced resignation, impulsiveness, or at best , a person who navigated her life without any sort of a plan.
And damn it—I was none of those things.
I was a planner, a rule follower, a freaking model employee who worked her ass off in whatever role she was given, for God’s sake.
Yet suddenly it didn’t matter.
Congratulations, you latte-stealing loser.
I shoved a fistful of fries into my mouth before grabbing my phone and checking for messages. Nothing. Because I was a homebody who didn’t have much of a social life, it wasn’t uncommon for me to be messageless on a Monday evening.
But tonight it stung more than usual.
Because after a day full of promise that had slowly reduced itself to merely a new job that I would probably be losing, the lack of messages felt like a pathetic exclamation point on my life.