5. Chapter 5 #3
“Okay, I’ll tell you, but hear me out first!” Macy pleads gently, setting off a red flag in my head, but regardless, I accept, pushing our finished plates aside and leaning on my chin, ready to hear her solution to my problem.
“You remember on Sunday, when I told you Surly Bastard asked if I knew a Nanny?” She starts; I nod slowly in response, and I already had a feeling I knew where she was going with this, but I hoped I was wrong.
“Well, he’s still looking, and apparently, he’s desperate. I spoke to his assistant, Nigel, before coming here…which is why I was late, and he said it’s a live-in nanny position that pays really well.” She finishes, wiggling her eyebrows at me whilst I throw the paper straw on the table at her.
“Mace, are you crazy?” I scoff, wondering if the cook had put something odd in her food because that was the only way this all made sense.
“Why not? It gets you out of Granny Mags, gives you somewhere to stay, which has to be nice because he’s the top-paid employee at the company, which means the pay must be even better than good,” she shrugs. I just look at her as if I’d just caught her huffing paint fumes.
“Are you suggesting I work for Surly Bastard?” I ask rhetorically. “Your boss, the same man you have complained about non-stop for years. Him. You want me to work for him?” I unintentionally repeated myself, a habit I do when I’m freaking out, much like I was right now.
“Yes.” Macy nodded, without a care in the world. Like it was no big deal, she was suggesting I work for her boss, the same insanely hot man who’s apparently so grumpy and terrifying he makes grown men wet themselves.
“Lulu, hold on. Okay? Think about it.” She prompts, leaning forward to grab my hand that was resting on the table.
“You would be working for him, yes. But only in a sense. Your job would only be picking his kid up from school, making sure he does his homework and cooking dinner. You’d have the entire first half of the day to yourself, a bed to sleep in and zero chance of hearing your Gran testing out her new hip,” she smirks at the last part, but it was the right amount of cringe to snap me out of the frozen void I entered the moment she voiced this crazy plan.
“I’m not saying you should take it, but it’s pretty close to what you’re looking for, and you’re great with kids, amazing even. With all that help you do down at the home, I’m sure Tracy would be more than happy to be your reference,” she suggests, and I can already feel her slowly reeling me in.
“In fact, the more I think about it, who better for this job than you? I mean, I’m a workaholic stress head, and if my maternity leave didn’t go the way I planned it or if something happened to me…
there’s only one person I’d trust with my newborn child.
” She recites with a smile that looks sincere to others, but to me, it was coated with evil.
She’d hit the bullseye on my sore spot.
She had me right where she wanted.
I shouldn’t be surprised, as she always got what she wanted.
I was in the middle of going over what she said, ready to knuckle under, when her phone started ringing. She scrambles through her purse to find it and picks it up after the third ring. I sit back and watch the animation of facial expression play out on her face.
First, there was the ‘ugh, what do you want’ look on her face. Then there was the professional phone voice when she realised who it was. She nodded along a couple of times, glancing at me every so often to roll her eyes and show how bored she was, then she hung up.
“Everything okay?” I ask, tilting my head.
“Yeah, that Surl-” she starts, but suddenly clamps her mouth shut. Which already told me it probably had something to do with her boss, but she wasn’t going to badmouth him right now, not when she was trying to convince me to work for the very same man.
“Everything’s fine. One of the interns mixed up some of the research, and they need me to come and fix it,” she explains, shuffling her way out of the booth. We finish off our drinks, and since we paid before we ate, we made our way out of the restaurant, prepared to head in opposite directions.
Me heading towards Ms Richard’s hair shop closer to home, and her heading back towards the firm. We share a quick hug, trying not to squish the baby too much, when Macy grabs me by the shoulders.
“Okay, so I didn’t tell you the whole truth inside, but that was Nigel on the phone.
He was calling for me to fix a problem, but only because he was stuck in nanny interviews all afternoon, so I’m gonna head back and put your hat in the ring, convince him you’re a shoo-in, and give him your contact details, kay?
Perfect, love you! Bye.” She blurts so fast, it was too difficult to breathe, but by the time she takes a breath again, she’d let go of my shoulders and waddled off in the opposite direction as fast as she could before I could even get a word in.
It was safe to say I was getting an interview for that job, whether I wanted it or not, because, as you may already know, what Macy wants, she gets.