Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
“Technically, I never hired you. I never did sign anything.” Ephemeral sighs. She looks tired now. So. Freaking. Tired. Which makes me feel doubly like shit.
“Verbal agreements are legally binding in some states.”
“Were you recording me without my consent?” She angles slightly over, and I see it now.
I see the way she’s holding that knife. Not like she’s going to stab me if I aggravate her any further, even though I can practically see her doing a full-body twitch as she’s so pissgate2.0ed off. No, she’s got the knife gripped in her hand with her middle finger just slightly angled over the handle in my direction.
She’s super subtly flipping me off.
I keep my face as perfectly neutral as possible, given that I’m icing my jewels at the moment, and my dignity is as in question as it’s ever going to get.
She stopped angry chopping a few seconds ago, but now she washes her hands in the tiny little RV sink and dries them on a tea towel covered with—you’ve got it—cat faces. She snatches her phone off the counter and stabs angrily at the screen.
“Let’s see if the court of public opinion thinks I should fire you or not.”
“That’s not fair.” I jerk forward, my balls protesting the sudden movement by shaking their little ball fists at me in horror. “The internet never has anything good to say.”
“Hmm.” Her nose wrinkles and scrunches, and her lips purse. I refuse to find it cute, attractive, or strangely seductive. Popping a boner right now with my junk in the state it’s in is not a good idea. “One woman wants to know where I found such a clown. Another would like an explanation on why a child was just about assaulted. A third says no one the size of an ancient brick factory who looks like a hulking brute with his features entirely out of proportion and muscles too big for his britches should be anywhere near someone as sweet and innocent as myself or Peach Lips. She’s worried you might fall on Peach Lips by accident.”
“Ridiculous. Next.”
“Ironic. The next person says you’re the ridiculous one. What security guard worth anything tries to taser a child?”
“That is not what happened. No tasering was ever going to occur. The little shit was the one who drew the thing out.”
She curls her fingers into air quotations. “This is direct. Okay, no. That’s too mean. It’s a little bit of a man-hating comment. I’m not going to read it.” Her face falls the longer she scans her phone, which is for a very long time. When she looks back up at me, her eyes are glistening and watery.
Fuck. She’s going to cry. Because of the shit she just read on her phone, which is probably pouring in by thousands of comments per minute.
“This isn’t good. People don’t like you, which is honestly not my problem, but they’re questioning whether I’m in the right frame of mind to be doing this as of late. First, Peach Lips gets taken by some rando, and now this.”
I need to disarm the situation, and fast, but fuck me if I have any idea how to make this better. Or how to comfort a crying woman. “I know. It’s one fuck-up after another when there are never any fuck-ups. I pride myself on that. I can assure you, there won’t be a third.”
She brushes her fingers over the countertop absently, almost like she’s petting it. For an absurd second, I wonder what they’d feel like grazing my skin. That thought is as fantastical as her brightly-colored mythical-inspired cat dresses. She probably has a few caticorns and purrmaids in her repertoire.
I don’t want her hands on my body.
I don’t want her lovely, mesmerizing eyes fixed on me.
I don’t want her smiles, her laughter, her good days and her bad.
I don’t want anything from her because I can’t.
I can’t even get my ass upright at the moment or figure out how to say something in the realm of being comforting. I’m such a #lostcause.
It’s time for the big guns. “I’ll get this figured out. My PR team will be on it. I can have someone from my office touch base with you on how they think you should handle the internet in all shapes and forms moving forward.”
Her eyes flash. “That’s not how I like to do things.” She picks up her phone.
“Stop. Stop reading it.”
She quickly scans it again, paling further. It makes my stomach bottom out. Knowing she’s reading all that shit and mopping up after me without cleaning anything up at all hurts worse than my nuts.
“He looks like he could detach someone’s head from their body, a full spine-ripping ordeal…”
“Don’t.”
“Apparently, his security firm is one of the largest in the US. They’re like…leading this and leading that. He doesn’t look like he’s leading much of anything besides the janitorial brute crew.”