Chapter 5 #3
There was a harrowing hour of radio silence in which Simone became increasingly convinced that her boss was planning to fire her less than two weeks into her job.
Here was the first big project he’d trusted her to manage, and she hadn’t even gotten it off the ground.
In her defense, he could have just gone with Phillip’s original step-and-repeat banners, but still, she was at Frankie’s mercy, and his behavior had turned out to be somewhat unpredictable.
At five o’clock, Simone got a Slack message from Frankie asking her to come by his office whenever she had a chance. As soon as she read it, a pit formed in her stomach. The layoffs at her last job had been announced at the end of the day.
She pushed herself to standing and dragged her feet to Frankie’s glass-walled office.
When she got there, he was sitting at his desk and staring at his phone, nodding his head to an intense beat she couldn’t hear.
With a jittery hand, she rapped on the soundproof glass.
Frankie blinked in surprise, his forehead still creased with concentration, and waved for her to come in.
Techno music was blaring from his speakers.
He might as well have been working at a day club in Ibiza.
He cranked down the volume. “It’s my music for getting shit done,” he explained matter-of-factly, like a doctor explaining a surgical procedure to a patient.
Simone prayed the “shit” he’d been getting done this afternoon was something other than her termination paperwork.
She had a bad feeling about this meeting.
“Sit down,” her boss said, and she shuffled into the room, grabbing one of the chairs in front of his desk.
“Well,” he said, “this is a huge fucking disappointment.”
A cannonball hit Simone in the gut. She didn’t know how she could have done a better job convincing the contractors to drop everything to build a few selfie station sets, but she’d take the blame anyway. “It’s my fault. I—”
“What are you talking about?” Frankie asked, cutting her off.
She blinked. “You just said you were disappointed.”
“Not in you. In these asswipes who turned us down!”
“Oh!” Simone let out the breath she’d been holding and leaned back in the chair.
She did feel bad that Frankie had called the perfectly nice contractors “asswipes”—a word she hadn’t heard since her older brothers would play video games in the basement—but at least she wasn’t about to be fired.
“What do you think we should do about the selfie stations?” she asked Frankie.
Maybe they would go with the step-and-repeat banners after all.
“I don’t think. I know. And it’s all gonna be fine.”
“Oh—awesome!”
“I’m sending Ryan to Whistler with you.”
Another cannonball slammed into her gut, bigger and heavier than before.
“If you want something done right, do it yourself, you know? And honestly, I trust Ryan to get the job done more than I trust these randos. I assume that’s okay with you?” He cocked an eyebrow in a way that implied it had better be okay with her.
Oh yeah, it’s totally okay, she thought, except for the fact that he hates everything, including—no, especially—me.
Simone hadn’t seen Ryan since their face-off in the coffee shop yesterday morning, when she’d been riding the high of karaoke night and feeling unusually bold.
She’d been able to stand her ground for the time it took Barista Joe to make their maple spice lattes, but a whole work trip with Ryan?
That was a different matter entirely—one she might not survive.
She’d get pulled into his whirlpool of misery and drown.
Nevertheless, she had to admit that Frankie was right: Ryan would get the job done better than anyone else, judging by what she’d seen of his work at the Rainbow Museum.
Also, she’d vowed not to get on her boss’s bad side.
She swallowed hard and forced a close-lipped smile.
“Of course it’s okay,” she told Frankie in a voice that was several octaves higher than normal. “The more the merrier.”
“Great. I just texted him, and he’s in. He’s going to fly out early next week and take care of all the sets, get ’em ready for when the festival starts.
When you fly out next Friday, he’ll drive down to Vancouver to pick you up and bring you back to Whistler, and he’ll stay on through the festival to make sure they all get set up properly at the different venues. ”
“That sounds great,” she said in the same weird voice as before. “It’ll be great for the Rainbow Museum to have him there.” Maybe if she said the word great twelve hundred more times, Ryan’s personality would magically improve in time for the trip.
She felt like a giant slab of concrete as she dragged herself back to her desk.
When she got there, she looked at the little bisexual Pride flag she’d bought at the bookshop where Lucy had found her CHILDLESS CAT LADY button.
She’d stuck the flag in the mason jar along with the hydrangeas.
Was she really going to let some brooding carpenter ruin her first Pride celebration as an out and proud bisexual?
No, she was not. She deserved better than that.
As she looked around the office at the rainbow walls and the rainbow flags and all her new friends, Simone resolved to focus on what really mattered in Whistler, besides marketing the Rainbow Museum, obviously:
Pride.
Maybe she’d have another sapphic hookup—something more than a drunken dance-floor make-out. She imagined sex with a woman was significantly more enjoyable when you weren’t pretending to be straight the whole time.
She wasn’t going to waste her energy worrying about Ryan. She was going to spend it on making the Whistler Pride and Ski Festival the queerest week of her life.