Chapter 4
Anna
The thing about free cocktails is that nobody warns you about the third one.
The first one goes down easy. Sweet, cold, something with passion fruit and a little umbrella that Miley stuck behind her ear like a trophy.
The second one goes down easier because by then the music is loud and the lights are low and you’ve stopped counting.
The third one goes down because Miley puts it in your hand and says "You survived a week working for Satan in glasses, you deserve this," and honestly, she made a compelling argument.
But nobody tells you that the third cocktail on a stomach containing one spinach puff and raw optimism is where the evening takes a sharp left turn into chaos.
Rewind.
It had been a week since I started at Hunter Interactive. Five full working days, and I had seen Jace Hunter exactly zero times.
Not once. Not a glimpse through his office door, not a passing encounter in the hallway, not even an awkward elevator moment.
The man was a phantom. He handled everything through email, video calls from behind a camera he never turned on, and a scheduling app that communicated with the emotional warmth of a parking meter.
His office door stayed closed. I left documents on his desk before he arrived and they reappeared on mine with red-pen corrections and no commentary. For all I knew, he teleported in and out of the building specifically to avoid sharing oxygen with the woman who’d kissed him in a farmers market.
I was an assistant to a ghost who paid well and communicated exclusively in bullet points.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d left a diner where customers screamed at me to my face for a corporate job where my boss couldn’t even look at mine. Progress.
Miley told me about a new club opening. Reverie.
Free drinks on opening night. I don’t usually drink, and the last time I’d been in a crowded room with loud music and strangers pressing close, my body had locked up and I’d spent twenty minutes in a bathroom stall counting my breaths.
But Miley said I deserved it, and I was too tired to argue.
Too tired to be afraid, which was its own kind of freedom.
Three hours before everything went wrong, I was standing in Miley's bathroom staring at a black dress she'd draped over the shower rod for me.
It was borrowed, elegant—a clean neckline, a low open back, and fabric that hung with just enough weight to follow the body wearing it instead of fighting it.
I ran my fingers along the hem and felt something tighten in my chest, because I hadn't reached for anything that quietly beautiful since Charlotte, since gallery openings where I'd show up in heels with my portfolio under one arm and champagne in the other, back when dressing up felt like celebrating being alive.
Putting it on felt like trying on someone else’s skin.
A version of Anna who hadn’t had her career torched, who hadn’t fled a city with two suitcases and lost a part of her she still struggled to find every day.
A version of me that existed before my ex decided that destroying my life was easier than letting me walk away from his.
"You’re overthinking it," Miley called from the bedroom. "It’s a dress, not a life decision."
"It feels like a life decision."
"Everything feels like a life decision to you. Put the dress on. We’re going out. You’re gonna look hot, you’re gonna have fun, and if you argue with me, I’ll drag you there in your pajamas."
I put the dress on. It fit better than I expected. Miley appeared in the doorway, looked me up and down, and whistled.
"Charlotte’s loss," she smirked. "Miami’s gain."
The tightness in my chest eased. Just a little.
Reverie was packed when we arrived. Miley’s friend from the hotel had put us on the guest list, which meant we skipped the line and walked straight into a wall of bass and body heat and perfume that hit me like a wave.
The club was gorgeous. Dark walls with neon accents bleeding violet and rose across the velvet seating, a bar stretching the full length of the back wall with bottles lit from below in amber and gold and ice-blue, glowing like a skyline in miniature.
The light shifted with the crowd—catching the edge of a jawline, pooling in the hollow of a collarbone, turning strangers into silhouettes and compositions my brain assembled without permission.
A woman near the bar tipped her head back laughing and the neon broke across her throat, and my fingers twitched at my side, muscle memory reaching for a camera that wasn't there.
I hadn't picked one up in months. The urge surprised me.
I let myself relax. Not all the way. I don’t think I know how to do that anymore.
But enough. Enough to dance with Miley under the strobe lights, to laugh with a stranger who complimented my dress, to sip my drink and feel, for one night, like the person I used to be before someone decided to take her apart piece by piece.
Cocktail one. Cocktail two. Cocktail three.
And then the room started moving without me.
It happened slowly at first. A tilt. A warmth behind my eyes.
The music was getting louder and softer at the same time, which didn’t make sense but made perfect sense to my drunk brain.
I blinked. The dance floor swayed. My stomach, which had been quietly tolerating the evening’s decisions, issued its first formal complaint.
I needed a bathroom. Now.
"Miley." I grabbed her arm. "Bathroom," I said quickly.
"You okay?" she asked, leaning in.
"Gonna be sick," I admitted.
"Go, go, go. I’ll find you," she urged.
I pushed through the crowd, which was harder than it should’ve been because my legs had apparently decided to operate on a two-second delay.
The main bathroom had a line stretching halfway down the wall.
I couldn’t wait. My stomach was staging a full coup and the negotiation window was closing fast.
I turned down a corridor. Quieter. Dimmer.
Doors unmarked. The music faded to a dull pulse behind me.
I was looking for a bathroom, any bathroom, and my vision was doing that thing where everything was sharp in the center and blurry at the edges and I was walking with the careful determination of someone trying very hard not to surrender to gravity.
"Are you following me?"
The voice came from my left. Cold. Clipped. British-edged.
Or a hallucination of Jace Hunter. Because there was no way my actual boss was standing in a dim hallway at a club on a Saturday night looking at me like my existence was an inconvenience he hadn't scheduled.
I squinted at him. "You’re not real."
His expression didn’t change. "I assure you, I am."
"Nope." I shook my head, which was a mistake because the corridor wobbled. "You’re not. You’re a hallucination. My brain is punishing me for the third cocktail. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them you’ll be gone."
I closed my eyes. Counted to three. Opened them.
He was still there. Same suit. Same glasses. Same face that looked like it had never smiled and was personally offended by the concept.
"Huh," I said. "Persistent hallucination."
"I’m not a hallucination. And you are clearly inebriated."
"I’m not drunk. I’m… lightly impaired." I pointed at him. "And you can’t be here. You’re my boss. Bosses don’t exist in nightclubs. It’s against the rules."
"What rules?"
"The rules of the universe. You exist in your office behind your clean desk with your little cube thing and your red pen. You don’t exist here.
" I gestured vaguely at the corridor. "Here is where fun happens. And you, Mr. Hunter, are the opposite of fun. You’re the dictionary definition of anti-fun.
If fun had an enemy, it would be your face. "
He stared at me. I stared back. The corridor tilted gently to the left and I compensated by leaning gently to the right, which probably looked ridiculous but felt like expert-level balance management.
Then, because the drunk version of me had zero impulse control and a death wish I’d be paying for tomorrow, I held both my hands up in front of him. Palms out. Fingers spread.
"Look," I said. "Clean. See? No coffee. No weapons. No biohazards. Just hands. Regular human hands attached to a regular human person."
His eyes went to my hands, then back to my face. "What on earth are you doing?"
"Showing you that I’m harmless." I wiggled my fingers. "No contamination. No germs. Nothing that requires emergency sanitization. You can relax."
"I don’t need to…"
"And these," I continued, cupping my own chest with both hands, "are not weapons. Okay? They’re just boobs. They’re soft. Like clouds. Soft, harmless clouds that cannot hurt anyone. You touched them at the market and you survived. So clearly they pose no threat to your wellbeing."
His eyes went wide. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. It closed, then opened again, as if his brain had drafted a response and his body sent it back. For one glorious second, Jace Hunter—a man who had a prepared answer for everything—had absolutely nothing.
"You…" He took a step back. Then another. "You are spectacularly drunk."
"And you are spectacularly rude. Even as a hallucination." I dropped my hands and pointed at him. "You know what your problem is? Your ego. It’s the size of your building. No, bigger. It’s like a whole city. A city of ego. But only you are living there because nobody else can stand to live there."
"Are you quite finished?"
"I’m just getting started. You’ve ignored me for an entire week, Mr. Hunter. You communicate through an app. An APP. Who does that? Who hires a human being and then refuses to acknowledge she exists? You know your scheduling app doesn’t even say please, right? Not once. I checked."
"It’s a scheduling application. It doesn’t require social graces."
"Neither do you, apparently."
His eyes narrowed. "Ms. Wilson…"
"I heard there’s been four assistants." I held up four fingers, which took two attempts because my motor skills had gone on holiday. "Four people before me who had to deal with your emails and your red pen and your refusal to exist in the same room as another person. Four. That’s not a staffing problem, Mr. Hunter. That’s a you problem. "
He opened his mouth to respond, and that’s when my stomach made its final announcement.
It rose. Fast. Unstoppable. And it didn't negotiate—didn't care about timing or dignity or the fact that my boss was standing three feet away.
I tried to step past him. He blocked my path.
"Move…"
"Ms. Wilson, you’ve been—"
It happened.
Erupting from my mouth, directly onto his chest.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
I stared at his suit. He stared at his suit. The damage was catastrophic. Three cocktails, one spinach puff, and whatever was left of my professional reputation, all over him.
My brain, which had been operating in a cheerful fog for the last hour, snapped into horrifying clarity. Because nothing sobers you up faster than vomiting on your boss in a nightclub corridor.
He was real.
He was real and I had just thrown up on him. Every gesture. All real.
"Oh god," I whispered.
His face cycled through horror, rage, and something that looked like a man reconsidering every single choice that led him to this exact moment in this exact corridor on this exact night.
My voice came out small. "I am so…"
"Get out," he growled.
"Mr. Hunter, please, I—"
"You’re fired. Effective now." His eyes were ice.
Every trace of composure stripped away, replaced by something cold and final.
"You are the most catastrophically disruptive human being I have ever encountered in my life, and I would sooner run this entire company alone than spend another moment sharing air with you. "
My eyes burned. I blinked hard. Bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.
A door burst open behind us.
"What happened?" A woman appeared in the corridor, late twenties, all sharp energy and designer trainers, eyes bouncing between Jace and me. She was stunning, dark-haired, with features that reminded me of the man in front of me. The same gray eyes, but warmer, alive with a curiosity that Jace’s never held. "Jace? What happened to your…"
She saw the suit. Her eyebrows climbed.
Jace stripped his jacket off and dropped it on the floor. He stepped around me without another word and disappeared down the corridor, his footsteps sharp and quick against the floor.
The woman looked at me. "Did you just throw up on my brother?"
Brother. The resemblance clicked into place.
I didn’t answer because Miley was already there, taking one look at my face and switching into extraction mode without a single question.
"We’re going," Miley said, her arm around my waist. "Right now. Let’s go."
She didn’t ask what happened. Not in the corridor or in the Uber where I leaned my head against the window and watched the neon lights of South Beach blur past like smeared paint.
Not until we were home and I was sitting on the bathroom floor in her borrowed black dress with mascara on my cheeks and my back against the cold tile and the full weight of the evening pressing down on me like a hand on my chest.
Then I cried.
Miley slid down to the tile beside me as I told her everything.
"It’s over," I said, my voice wrecked. "One week. That’s all I lasted."
"You don’t know that for sure."
"He fired me to my face, Miley. In a nightclub corridor. While wearing my vomit. That’s not a gray area. That’s a very clear, very vomit-covered termination."
"Okay, when you put it like that it does sound bad."
I laughed. A wet, broken sound that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a laugh or a sob. "It is bad."
"It’s bad tonight. Tonight isn’t forever." She bumped her knee against mine. "And for what it’s worth? If someone threw up on me and then cupped their own boobs and told me they were soft like clouds, I’d probably fire them too. So at least he’s being reasonable."
"That’s not helping."
"It’s helping a little bit. You smiled."
"I didn’t smile."
"You did. A tiny one. Don’t lie to me, I’m sitting on a cold floor for you." She reached over and pulled my head onto her shoulder. "You’ve survived worse than a man in a fancy suit, Anna. Way worse. And you’re still here."
She was right. I had survived worse. But surviving and living were different things. And I was getting tired of only doing one of them.
Miley stroked my hair. "We’ll figure it out. We always figure it out."
I didn’t believe her. But Miley was warm, and the tile was cold, and believing took energy I didn’t have. So I closed my eyes and let her hold me, trying not to think about what was waiting when the sun came up.
Whether I still had a job. Whether Jace Hunter meant what he said. Tomorrow was another day and I’d know if I had to start over from nothing.