Chapter 2 #2
“Like hell it isn’t.” Kent’s drawl always exaggerated when he was frustrated. “You’re killing yourself for this company that doesn’t care a lick about you.”
When she reached her door, something had been taped to it. Something that looked an awful lot like an eviction notice.
Which wouldn’t make any sense because Fletcher had spent way too many nights eating Top Ramen and Haribo candy Girl Dinner so she could make rent for her to be evicted.
The all-caps, 140-point header begged to differ. Words like 30-day notice and occupancy and reconstruction leaped off the page. A pit formed in Fletcher’s gut when she reached the fine print.
Her rent-protected apartment was being converted into a commercial building.
A bitter tang coated her mouth. It was always a miracle she’d been able to afford this place without a roommate, but the real estate market was a certified shit show, and her measly 3 percent cost-of-living raises were a joke.
No way was she going to find another apartment in her budget.
Certainly not one close enough to answer Dyer’s every beck and call.
“Fletcher?”
And if she couldn’t find somewhere new to live, then what? Move in with Ford? Maybe. Bridge troll? Tempting. Tuck her tail between her legs and head back to Nebraska? Never.
“Hello?”
What she really, truly, desperately needed was a promotion.
A new career track with actual growth potential.
A photographer gig at Jet-Setter, working under Jackie.
Why else had she spent the last three years lugging around her Canon and sneaking out while Dyer was in meetings to photograph the city, building her portfolio print by print?
“Fletcher!”
“What?”
Kent sighed so hard she could almost feel his exhale through the phone. “Come home, Fletch. You’ve got to quit letting people walk all over you.”
The words came out before she could stop them, before she could worry about disappointing him or some version of herself who used to think she wanted this. “If I did that, then we’d have to break up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t do this anymore!” Her throat chafed, sore and rasped with emotion.
“Can’t do what anymore?” Kent’s voice shifted. Stern, like a parent lecturing a disobedient child.
“You. This. All of it!” she said. Then, sharper: “I don’t want to come home, and I don’t want to marry you, Kent.”
She hung up before he could argue and somehow convince her to change her mind.
Fletcher crushed the eviction notice in her fist. She needed a drink. Stat.
After a couple rounds of Manhattans, Fletcher’s thoughts had forsaken all margins and bled together into One Thought to Rule Them All: Figure out a way to get to Lydell Island.
Meanwhile, Ford “I have a second liver” Jepson’s mission was to sweet-talk free drinks out of bartenders, and he was doing a great job. Perhaps too great of a job. Fletcher could already feel tomorrow’s hangover forming at the back of her head.
“I still can’t believe you actually dumped him,” Ford said. His arm was slung around Fletcher’s shoulders as they paced the Dumbo sidewalks toward their next destination, a bookstore-turned-bar called Subtext that Fletcher had seen all over Instagram.
After work, he’d changed from his Business Button-Up (white, untucked, satin) to his Party Button-Up (a short-sleeve patterned monstrosity he’d bothered to fasten only two buttons of).
With his deep brown skin, bottle-blond hair, and arms polka-dotted with fine-line tattoos, he could always be mistaken as a cover model.
Fletcher’s sensible heels and poly-blend blouse, on the other hand, would never qualify as couture.
“Me either,” she muttered.
For longer than she’d been Dyer’s Executive Assistant Fletcher, she’d been Kent Redburn’s Girlfriend Fletcher. Always defined by someone else. She thought she’d feel freer, lighter, but instead she felt like a child’s balloon caught in the rafters of a big-box store.
The bell above the door severed her thoughts as they entered Subtext.
Inside, a crackling fire staved off the October chill.
Instead of walls, there were only bookshelves, packed with hand-me-down stories inked inside broken spines.
Jazz filtered through the malty air, and for a moment, she assumed it was coming from someone’s carefully curated Spotify playlist, but when she peered through an archway toward the back, there was a stage with a quartet playing.
It was sophisticated. Nuanced. Welcoming.
Exactly the last place she expected to see Waylon Cartwright.
“No way,” she said, skidding to a halt.
“No way, what?”
Waylon was too busy flirting with a brunette at the bar to notice Fletcher gawking in the doorway. She’d come out to forget about him. Not stare at him while drowning her sorrows in bottom-shelf bourbon.
“Can we go?” she asked.
“Why?” Ford asked, oblivious. He either hadn’t noticed the giant, egotistical elephant in the room or was choosing not to. “This place is amazing.”
Precisely. Waylon was supposed to work at a grungy hole-in-the-wall overrun with rodents and roaches. Not the kind of place with craft cocktails and mood lighting.
Then, of course, Waylon glanced toward the door. His eyes slid away and then snapped right back, registering. His expression situated somewhere between grin and grimace. Like he was both irritated and intrigued at her appearance.
It took all her effort not to snarl in his general direction. Still, the thought of him watching her chicken out of a confrontation had Fletcher saying, “One drink.”
Ford practically cheered. “I’ll find us a table. Grab me another martini, extra olives?”
“How you eat those things, I’ll never understand.” The very thought made her queasy.
Her nuisance of a best friend batted his long lashes. “Pour moi?”
Kent’s gruff tenor echoed through her mind, saying something about how when she wasn’t working, Fletcher still put other people first. She shook it away.
All her energy would be needed to avoid throwing up on Waylon when ordering their drinks.
Fletcher sucked down a steadying breath and waded through the sea of tables toward the bar.
As soon as she approached, Waylon spun to meet her, like she’d snagged a trip wire. He’d traded this afternoon’s leather jacket for a pressed button-down, the sleeves rolled up his forearms, but Waylon still wore the same slanted smile, the same smug confidence afforded to heirs apparent.
“Two Fletcher sightings in one day? To what god of misery do I owe the displeasure?”
All she did was scoot onto a barstool, but Fletcher’s heart rioted like she was running for her life. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were following me.”
“Because I’m here? At my bar.” His eyes were crystal blue beneath the low light. Too blue for his own good.
“Right.”
Waylon sugared a glass rim, measured cognac, and slid a sidecar to the patron sitting next to Fletcher. “Did you need something?”
Wasting her breath talking to Waylon Cartwright was on the short list of things Fletcher had no desire to do, but it was a necessary evil. It had been three years since Waylon acknowledged the company—or Dyer—existed. Inviting him to Lydell made absolutely no sense, and Fletcher needed to know why.
Straightening her shoulders, she asked, “Have a nice chat with your dad this afternoon?”
“So, that’s why you’re still in your little receptionist outfit at”—he tossed a bottle of Tito’s above his head and checked the silver-plated watch on his wrist while it spun—“nine forty-three p.m. You’re here on business.”
“First of all, I’m not a receptionist. And secondly, these are regular-people clothes.”
“Regular people who are receptionists.” A smirk crept onto his lips. Like he enjoyed this. Riling her up. His hands moved at light speed, swinging glass bottles with the same care he afforded to human emotions. (Which was to say: none.)
Fletcher simmered. “Not the point.”
With a nudge, he sent a vodka cranberry sailing down the bar. “And thirdly?”
“A drink. Can I please order a drink?”
Fletcher peeked over her shoulder. In her absence, Ford resorted to flirting with a blond with biceps the size of Montana. When she turned back, Waylon was pouring amber whiskey into a cocktail glass.
Her nose wrinkled. “What is that?”
“The drink you wanted.” Waylon plunked the coupe in front of her. “And seats are limited. Take your Manhattan and get back to doing my dad’s dirty work.”
How did he know her usual drink? “No, thanks. I want a martini. Extra olives.”
Waylon’s eyes narrowed, and suddenly Fletcher’s skin felt too tight. His claim about her poker face from earlier rang in her ears. Was she smiling weird? She flattened her lips, but that felt wrong, too. What was a mouth supposed to do? Just sit there?
All he said was “Fine. Take this to Jepson, then. He’ll drink anything.”
While Waylon shook and shimmied enough gin and vermouth to sanitize a surgery wound, Fletcher tapped her nails against the counter.
Irritation lanced down her spine. Had she learned nothing from Jet-Setter’s November proof?
When interacting with an animal on their territory, it was best to appear nonthreatening.
Well, if Waylon were an animal, he’d be an apex predator, and Fletcher suddenly felt a little too much like a fawn. Wide-eyed and wobbly legged and definitely about to get eaten, exactly like she felt the first night she met him.
The most important part of her job was knowing everything about everyone.
When the company hosted events, she was always right by Dyer’s side, feeding him intel, because the head honcho of a century-old publishing magnate used his spare brain cells making decisions for global investing rather than remembering who couldn’t eat shrimp without going anaphylactic. That was what Fletcher was for.
She knew that Cartwright’s CFO Deepti Kaur couldn’t swim but took two weeks of PTO to the Maldives every summer to lounge on the white sand. Naked, if you believed the rumors.
She knew that Denis Bertram, the SVP of Marketing and Publicity, took medical leave last month for emergency gallbladder surgery.
And, now, she knew that Waylon Cartwright was twenty-eight, an Aries, and a former Merit Scholar who graduated summa cum laude from Oxford.
He was a serial dater, a troublemaker, and a constant PR risk.
But three years ago, Fletcher knew him only as a handsome stranger hiding in the coat check closet during the biggest Cartwright Media charity gala of the year.
She could still smell the leather and suede, the spilled champagne.
Remembering that night made Fletcher want to throat-punch him.
On the inside.
On the outside, she twirled a strand of copper hair around her finger, trying her damnedest to look like she wasn’t thinking about how three years ago she almost kissed him.
Waylon flipped the shaker bottle behind his back and caught it in time to pour into the triangle glass. He slid the martini toward her and then rested his elbows on the bar top, knuckles under his chin. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re really here, honey?”
“Why were you invited to Lydell instead of me?”
“How do you expect me to know that?” Waylon tensed, but his words came as cool as ever. “You’ve spent more time with my dad in the last three years than I have in my whole life.”
“Exactly. Why would he even bother inviting you? At least I want to go to Lydell.”
“No, you don’t.”
Fletcher’s mouth hung open. “You’re right. I don’t want to. I need to.”
“Again: no.” Waylon shifted down the bar and started making a negroni for a woman with a striking resemblance to Fran Drescher, but Fletcher didn’t budge.
A splash of Campari, a king cube, and an orange-peel ribbon later, he picked up right where he left off.
“And because I know you’re thinking it, no, I can’t convince him to add you to the guest list.”
A glare.
“It’s a company trip. You don’t work there.
” Fletcher tried to take a sip of Ford’s martini, but the olives’ freaky little belly buttons made bile crawl up her throat, so she set the glass right back down.
“What’s your angle? Weasel your way back into Dyer’s good graces?
Take the CMO position? Embarrass me in front of the entire company and nearly get me fired—oh, wait. You already did that.”
The way Waylon watched her made her mouth go dry. He wiped his hands on the towel tossed over his shoulder. “They’ll skin you alive on Lydell.”
“I have what it takes.”
“Not if you have to ask to be invited.”
Waylon was objectively attractive. Hard lines and sharp edges. Always just shy of clean-shaven, only enough scruff to make you wonder, Is he doing this on purpose? It wasn’t a crime to be handsome.
It was, however, a crime to kill her boss’s son, so Fletcher refrained from homicide even though the cocktail forks were right there.
“Excuse me?” Fletcher asked. It was the liquor in her system leaving her feeling off-kilter. Definitely not the hardened way Waylon looked at her.
“If you really want to go, you should do something about it. But you won’t. You do what you’re told, Spence. It makes you a good receptionist.”
“I told you. I’m not a—”
“Cash or card?” He slid the receipt for both drinks toward her.
“Twenty-eight dollars?” Fletcher balked. “Each?”
Something dark flared in his eyes. “Drink up, buttercup.”
Fletcher fixed her stare on him, tipped the martini to her lips, and gulped. She’d prove him wrong, even if it killed her.