Keaton
I stared at Mr. Harvey and willed myself not to shake.
He was just like I remembered him on my first day – cold and closed-off, a brick wall that couldn’t be communicated with. Only this time, he was also angry as hell, and I could feel my nerve failing me under the intensity of his hard stare.
I knew I was in trouble. There was no getting around it. I ducked my head.
It was time to come clean about everything, and hope that he didn’t fire me. That he didn’t make me go away and never see him again. Anything but that.
“I, um,” I said. I couldn’t even figure out where to begin. “Did you ever look at my resume?”
“Ace took care of that,” Mr. Harvey said. He folded his massive arms across his massive chest. I swallowed.
“If you looked at it, you would have seen I don’t really have a good record of steady work,” I said. “I tend to switch around from job to job, with weeks or even months between. The reason for that is that I do another kind of work, too.”
Mr. Harvey lifted a flinty but bemused eyebrow.
“Oh, um, it’s nothing… illegal,” I said quickly, realizing how it was coming across.
But then again, filming people without their permission and doing corporate spy work was kind of illegal, wasn’t it?
Or at the very least, immoral. “I studied filmmaking at college. I’m…
I’ve always wanted to be a documentary filmmaker.
I’m not, like, well-known or anything. I’ve shot a few things, but I’ve never had the chance to shoot my dream project. ”
“Is this going somewhere?” Mr. Harvey asked. He sounded cold still, but… something else? I risked a glance up into his eyes but immediately had to look away.
It wasn’t just rage there. There was also…
Hope?
He was hoping I could say something to excuse myself.
God, I hoped he thought what I was about to say was excuse enough.
“I – when I saw the job post come up, I thought… well, I don’t know a lot about sports, but I thought…
this could be something,” I said. I looked at my own hands, clasped in my lap.
I suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.
“I thought maybe I could film some kind of exposé. If something crazy happened here – or if I saw something illegal…”
I trailed off, but Mr. Harvey said nothing. He didn’t even move. It was like he was carved out of stone – except for the vein pulsing silently in his forehead. I didn’t dare elaborate on the fact that he, himself, was the main target of my plan.
“I thought I might just be able to sell it to the press,” I whispered.
“Show me,” Mr. Harvey said.
I looked up. “What?”
“Show me,” he repeated. He gestured to the laptop I’d pulled out of my bag earlier.
Show him?
“You already saw the footage of Ridley,” I said.
“I wasn’t… I didn’t… I only filmed in the office a couple of times.
I got too scared. And after that, I started to like you too much.
I mean, the job. I started to think that if you caught me, you would fire me, and that would be really bad.
I didn’t think I was going to like the job, you know? I just – I thought…”
Mr. Harvey grunted. “Send me the files,” he said.
I was opening my laptop before the last word was out of his mouth.
“Right, right,” I nodded. I felt slightly manic.
Maybe on the verge of hysterical. Why wasn’t he saying anything?
Why wasn’t he screaming at me or telling me I was fired and to get out and never disgrace his doorstep again?
“I’ll send you everything. I promise. I really haven’t filmed anything for a while.
It felt too dishonest. Especially after you, you know, you made me inner circle.
I would never – I know what it’s like, so I would never – I wouldn’t… ”
I trailed off again, feeling my heart patter too fast in my chest, my breathing coming in rapid spurts. He had to understand. I wasn’t really ever going to betray him. I never did anything with the footage. It had been a bad idea and one I had barely followed through on at all.
But he just watched silently as I found all of the files – the few of them I had – and sent them to him over email. I heard the answering ping from his computer as it arrived in his inbox.
“That’s everything,” I said quietly. “I wouldn’t have ever used it. I mean that. It’s why I never said anything before. I wanted to keep my job. I wanted to stay here with you – at the company, I mean.”
I teetered on a knife’s edge. Should I have just said everything?
Told him I wanted him? Told him that the more I got to know him, the less I could betray him – and not just because I was a good person underneath it all and couldn’t hurt someone I knew, but because I liked him?
Because I craved his praise and his attention and I wanted him to save me again with his huge arms like that time I had tripped and he’d caught me?
If he fired me, I would. I knew it in my chest. I would spill all of it out and beg him, unashamed, letting go of all my pride on the chance that it might convince him to let me stay. I wouldn’t be able to hold it back.
I looked up. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at my desk. As if he couldn’t bear to let his gaze touch me any longer.
“Get out,” he said. My heart quailed in my chest. He gestured towards the doors. “Go… get me a coffee from the other side of town.”
I stifled a whimper, nodded firmly, squeezed my eyes shut for a second, then pushed up and moved away from my desk.
I glanced back over my shoulder one last time before heading through the doors, but he was still looking away from me, his head turned resolutely in the opposite direction.
I blinked back the tears that threatened to gather behind my eyes and hurried away, letting the doors swing closed on their own instead of staying to make sure.
I rushed almost blindly down the hall, familiar enough with my surroundings that I didn’t need to think about where I was going by now. This was where I worked. I was here for so many hours every week that it was becoming my home away from home. As familiar to me as the house where I grew up.
And now I was probably going to have to leave.
I ran straight into Fernando without even stopping, I was so caught up in my own head.
“Oof!” he exclaimed, pushing me away and then regarding me at arm’s length. “Keaton? Did something happen?”
“Well – I don’t…” My lower lip trembled. I could feel I was on the verge of tears. If I tried to explain to him what was really going on, I would probably lose it.
“Is it about the Ridley Angus thing?” he asked keenly. I blinked. He wasn’t asking if I was alright. He was asking if something had happened.
Something – as in Mr. Harvey noticing him in the footage?
“Yes,” I said. “It’s about the Ridley Angus thing.”
Fernando blanched. “What’s going on?”
I looked at him carefully and then pulled him to the side.
We had ended up, as luck had it, right by one of the company’s break rooms – a small open space with seating and kitchen facilities, the kind of place that was used more often by visiting guests than the actual agents, who all had their own coffee machines anyway.
I lowered my voice. “I saw the footage,” I said. “You know I was there.”
He paled even further, if that was possible. “What did you do with it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Yet.” I didn’t mention the fact that the full video was, as we spoke, sitting in Mr. Harvey’s email inbox. I’d sent him the full file when he requested all my footage. If he decided to watch the whole thing, he had every chance of seeing and recognizing Fernando.
Or maybe not. It was only because I was searching for Brody that I had even noticed him. Knowing he had already asked me to check, maybe Mr. Harvey wouldn’t watch it himself.
But I could still tell him and make him look.
“Oh,” Fernando said and visibly relaxed. “Great. Well, that’s good. There’s not really any need to show anyone, is there?”
“Why were you there?” I asked. I straightened myself up just a bit.
My job was probably gone. I was about to be cast very, very far away from the man who had recently become my obsession.
Clara was just about the only thing I had left, and I was going to protect her any way I could.
If that meant interrogating her boyfriend, then I would do it, and he was going to answer me if it was the last thing I could achieve here.
“I was just drinking,” Fernando said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Clara was busy. That’s all.”
“Why were you so shocked when you saw me there?” I asked. “You saw me and you backed off immediately like you didn’t want me to see you.”
Fernando shrugged. “I was already pretty drunk and I didn’t want to have to try to look good in front of my future brother-in-law,” he said. “Look, I love Clara, but you’re only her brother. You know? We don’t have to be best friends.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “So, if that’s all it was, why are you so keen for me not to tell Mr. Harvey?”
“You know how it looks,” he fired back at me. “I can hear what you’re insinuating even now. Don’t you think it will look that way to him? Come on, man. Don’t get me fired for going to a club and having a drink. That’s all it was. You want me to be able to look after Clara, right?”
There were so many things that struck me as wrong right then.
The idea that I expected him to stay in a good job so he could provide everything Clara wanted was very far from reality.
That had never even crossed my mind. I was the one who had spent all these years looking after and providing for my little sister, not him – and besides, once she had this pilot underway and I had lost my job, it was probably going to be the other way around. Clara wasn’t some damsel in distress.
Voices came from the direction of the elevator, and Fernando quickly lifted his own back to normal volume as he backed away towards the hall. “I’ll see you later, anyway,” he said. “Got to get back to work!”
And he was gone.
I bit my lip for a long minute. After realizing I had nowhere else to go and the ‘trip’ I was supposed to be taking across town wasn’t supposed to be over yet, I sat down in one of the breakroom chairs, propping my head up with my hands.
Fernando had never really gelled with me. He was right to say we didn’t need to be best friends – which was good for him, because we weren’t.
But he was still Clara’s boyfriend. I knew how much she cared about him.
I sighed deeply. It didn’t matter whether he said things that rubbed me the wrong way or whether I liked him personally. He was Clara’s partner, and I loved Clara deeply.
I wasn’t going to tell anyone he’d been at the club.
Which meant now I just had to hope Mr. Harvey never noticed, otherwise I would be in even more trouble than I currently was.