6. Liam
It’s still early when the back door slides open and the dog bounds out. Ten minutes later, Emerson herself appears—legs for days, lush little mouth in a stuck-up pout, calling for the dog while pretending she can’t see us.
The dogcontinues to run around happily, ignoring her. It’s solely because I don’t want the harpy out here any longer that I intervene. “Snowflake, come here, girl!” She’s a sweet dog, if not particularly bright, nuzzling my leg as I walk her toward the house.
Emerson frowns, her eyes wary. “Thank you,” she says, sounding more guarded than grateful.
“Any time, princess,” I say, mostly to watch those blue eyes of hers flash silver once more.
They don’t disappoint. If we were in Salem circa 1650, she’d definitely be undergoing a trial by water right now.
“Still running with that?” she asks through gritted teeth. “Never stop being you, yard boy. And, by the way, those tiles were wrong. Julie fucked up.”
This I’ve already heard about. I got a tearful call from the designer mere minutes ago, though I’m not sure what good she thought I could do.
“I heard you fired her over a simple mistake,” I reply. “Good to know my initial assessment of you wasn’t overly harsh.”
Her mouth becomes a flat line. “A simple mistake for you, perhaps. I need them torn out and redone, pronto.”
“It’s going to cost you.”
“Oh,” she says, eyes wide with feigned surprise, “so I need to pay you in exchange for labor? Thanks for explaining the most basic principle of supply and demand.”
She turns to follow the dog in, and as soon as the door slams behind her, JP is chuckling once again. I’m glad one of us finds her bullshit amusing.
“Yard boy,” he says. “I guess it’s better than little hammer. She might even go out with you if you keep it up.”
I raise a single brow. “Go out with me? I’d rather be alone forever than wake up to that.”
“It’s starting to look like you’re planning to be alone forever anyway,” Mac, the soon-to-be-married junior project manager, replies.
There it is again—the assumption that I’m not trying hard enough. That I don’t want the same shit everyone else does.
When I’m trying. I’ve been trying.
Sort of. My phone vibrates in my back pocket and yeah, there’s a fucked up part of me that wishes it was one of Emerson’s demanding, funny, interesting texts. I was treading water, waiting to see what would happen when she got to town.
Now we know. So why does it feel like I’m still treading water?
* * *
Stella callswith the new ceiling tile selection just as I’m getting home.
“It’s nine on the East Coast,” I point out. “Shouldn’t you be off work?”
“Nine o’clock isn’t late when you work for Emmy,” she replies. “She’s lucky I adore her.”
“I’m struggling to believe that any employee of Emerson’s actually adores her,” I sigh, hanging my keys on the hook by the door.
“Don’t let her fool you,” Stella says with a smile in her voice. “She wants to scare people, but if she loves you, she’ll fight to the death on your behalf.”
That is exactly the kind of person I imagined Emerson was until I actually met her. Because she was demanding and often unreasonable, but anytime I had a genuine issue, she folded like a deck of cards. Hiccups in the schedule, delivery issues…she never gave me a moment of shit.
“Are you sure she just doesn’t happen to enjoy a fight?”
She laughs. “Let me tell you how I wound up working for her: my boss hit on me, I told a friend who then told Em, and two days later he was being escorted out by security because they’d found inappropriate materials on his computer.”
“That sounds like a lucky coincidence.” Or unlucky, given she wound up with a boss who’s making her work nights.
“You don’t know her well if you believe that was a coincidence. She paid someone in IT to check the guy’s search history. She’ll pay for the cleaning lady’s kid to get braces and buy a plane ticket for the security guard downstairs to visit his dying mom, but she makes me take the credit for it so nobody knows.”
“Yet you’re telling me,” I reply.
“Yeah, and she’d hate that,” she says. “But I just get the feeling you need to know.”
I wish I didn’t. My dislike was simple and uncomplicated five minutes ago.
Now, once again, it’s not.