14. Emily
— · —
Emily
The gala is tonight, and I’ve been running it in my head for two weeks straight.
Carmen’s name turned up on the vendor list two days ago, tucked in with the modeling agency we hired to staff the promo shoot, and I almost didn’t catch it.
She’s barely a working model, the kind who picks up filler gigs when an agency needs warm bodies and nobody better says yes, so on paper it’s nothing, just a girl taking whatever work she can get.
Except I know how this agency books, and a job like this doesn’t fall in your lap.
You call somebody. You push. You make yourself impossible to say no to, for one specific room, on one specific night.
I don’t know for certain that she knows it’s my event.
Maybe she just took the gig. But Carmen has never in her life done anything by accident where I’m concerned, and the whole reunion watched me walk out on Richard Reed’s arm, and that crowd hasn’t shut up about it since.
It would take exactly one person mentioning my name for her to start making calls.
So I made a decision this morning, standing in front of the mirror in my work blacks.
If Carmen shows up tonight looking for a fight, fine.
Let her. I am done shrinking myself down for that woman.
I spent twenty years making myself small so she’d have less to aim at, and it never once worked, she just aimed lower.
Not tonight. Tonight I’ve got a job I’m good at, a man who looks at me like I hung the moon, and absolutely nothing left to lose to her.
If she starts something, I’m not backing down a single inch.
Fuck it. Let her come.
Right now, though, I have bigger problems. Coral problems.
I’m in the ballroom with my tablet and my headset and a florist who is about to learn a thing or two about me, standing over a centerpiece that is the wrong color.
“These are coral,” I say.
“They’re pink,” the florist says.
“They’re coral. I ordered blush. The whole room is blush and champagne, it’s in the linens, the lighting, the step-and-repeat the press shoots against. Coral on every table fights all of it, and hundreds of people and a photographer are going to be in here in three hours.
” I’m already scrolling my phone. “So they need to go back and the blush needs to come, and I need it to happen fast.”
“Ma’am, they look pink to...”
“Emily.” Richard’s voice, behind me, warm and amused. “Centerpiece crisis?”
I turn, and there he is in a tux, and I lose my train of thought for a solid second because the man should not be allowed to wear a tux around people with hearts.
“The roses are wrong,” I tell him, recovering.
“Wrong color. They’ll photograph wrong against everything else.
It’s handled, the right ones are already on a truck. ”
He looks at the roses. “They look pink to me.”
“You and the florist can start a support group.” I turn back to the arrangement.
“You scrapped five hundred dollars of flowers over a shade.”
“I scrapped them because your name is on this event and I’m not letting it look thrown-together in a single photo.” I don’t even glance up. “I’m good at my job, Mr. Reed.” I say his name flat and crisp, which wrecks him every time, and watch his jaw tick, and feel quietly powerful about it.
He steps in close, lowers his voice so the florist can’t hear. “You’re terrifying in event mode. Has anyone told you that?”
“Several people. I take it as a compliment.”
“It wasn’t entirely a compliment.”
“Taking it as one anyway.” He squeezes my hand once, quick, hidden between our bodies where nobody can see, and then he’s back to being the CEO, straightening his cuffs, scanning the room like he owns it, which he does.
Guests start arriving at seven. The room fills up, gold light and string music and a sea of people in clothes worth more than cars, and for about forty-five minutes everything goes off exactly how I planned it, which is its own kind of high.
The auction tables are perfect. The seating works.
The blush roses came on the truck like I bullied them into coming, and now every table glows the right soft color under the lights, and nobody but me will ever know there was a crisis at all.
That’s the whole art of it, honestly. You do the job right and it looks like nothing happened.
I’m standing near the back, checking the auction tables against my list, feeling like maybe, for once, I’ve actually pulled this off clean.
Richard finds me twice across the room over those forty-five minutes.
Both times he’s mid-conversation with someone important, nodding along, playing the gracious host, and both times his eyes track to me like he can’t help it, and both times he lets the corner of his mouth go up before he looks away.
Nobody else would catch it. I catch all of it.
It makes standing in the back with a clipboard feel like the best seat in the room.
Then a voice somewhere near the side entrance carries over the music, bright and a little too loud, and my blood turns to ice water.
I know that voice. I’ve known it since before I could read.
I turn around, and there she is, sweeping in past a confused-looking staffer like a guest instead of the hired help she signed on as, because that modeling booking was only ever her ticket through the door.
Red hair swept up, a tight emerald dress cut for a different kind of party, the smug little tilt to her chin she’s had since kindergarten when she got the bigger slice of cake and made sure I watched her eat it.
“Emily,” Carmen says, smiling like a cat that found the cream. “What a surprise.”
Sure it is. She’s standing in the middle of my event in a dress she picked to be looked at, wearing the exact smile she’s been aiming at me our whole lives. Whatever string she pulled to get in here, she didn’t pull it to admire the flowers.
“Carmen.” I don’t bother pretending to be glad to see her. “Let me guess. You heard I left the reunion with Richard Reed and you’ve been dying ever since.”
“Oh, everyone heard.” She says it light, delighted, circling a little.
“You walked out on his arm in front of the whole class. Brittany nearly passed out. It’s all anybody’s talked about for weeks.
” She fans herself, mock-wistful. “Little Emily and the prom king, ten years later. I had to come see for myself if there was anything to it, or if you just got a pity dance and a ride to your car.”
“And here you are.”
“And here I am.” Her eyes flick over me then, properly, the headset, the tablet, the work blacks, and I watch the wistful act curdle as the picture refuses to add up. “Wait. Why are you dressed like the help? Are you... working this thing?”
“Sharp as ever.”
“Oh my god.” She presses a hand to her chest, gleeful. “You’re staff. You’re actual staff. Setting out his little centerpieces.” She looks around like the room just got funnier. “Doing what, exactly? Folding his napkins? Fetching his coffee?”
“His assistant,” I say, because she’ll get there anyway and I’m not giving her the satisfaction of working it out. “I run his office.”
The laugh that comes out of her is genuinely delighted, and it’s so loud a server actually turns to look.
“You work for him. You left Henry, threw your sad little life in the trash, and landed yourself a job answering some billionaire’s phone.
” She wipes the corner of her eye like I’ve made her cry laughing.
“God, that’s bleak, Em. That is so fucking bleak I almost feel bad for you. Almost.”
“You drove an hour out here in heels you can’t walk in to laugh at my job?” I tilt my head. “That’s a lot of effort for somebody who claims she never thinks about me.”
“Please. I think about you about as much as you think about a stain you can’t scrub out.
” She steps closer, and her voice drops into the low sugary register she’s used my whole life, the one that always comes right before the knife.
“But since I’m here. You should enjoy the rich boyfriend while he lasts, sweetheart, because he won’t.
Men like Richard Reed don’t keep girls like you.
They fuck them for a season and trade up.
You’re a rebound he found on the floor of his own office, and the day he’s bored you’re back on some couch with nothing, no husband, no house, no man, exactly where you started. Again.”
“Maybe.” I keep my voice flat. “But that’s my problem.
Not yours. So why are you really here, Carmen?
And don’t give me the bored-and-curious bit.
You wanted Richard Reed since we were seventeen.
You threw yourself at him for his entire senior year and he looked through you like a window, and now I’ve got him and you cannot fucking stand it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
Her smile drops for half a second. Half a second, but I catch it. I’ve spent my whole life watching that face. I know exactly what it looks like when I hit something true.
“I could’ve had him,” she says, and there’s an ugly little crack in it now. “If I’d wanted him.”
“You wanted him so bad you cried in the girls’ room when he left for college.
Brittany told everyone.” I watch that land too.
“You didn’t get him then, and you’re not getting him now, and the closest you’ll ever come is standing in his ballroom screaming at the woman who did.
So go off. Tell me again how I’m the sad one. ”
“At least I never had to whore myself out for a paycheck,” she snaps, all the sugar gone now, voice climbing. “Because that’s what this is, right? You’re fucking your boss. You’re not even divorced yet and you spread your legs for the first rich man who threw you a pity job...”
“And there she is.” I almost smile. “There’s the real you. Took about ninety seconds.”