Page 54 of Brave
Flustered, she bowed back over the form.
“Sit up,” he ordered. “You look like you expect to get hit.”
She locked her mouth so she wouldn’t point out that he had, in fact, hit her. Sitting up straight, she tried again and immediately miswrote her name again. She caught herself after only two letters, but so did he.
Snatching the clipboard away, he crumpled the form into a tight ball and threw it in the trash. Replacing it with a fresh form, he handed the clipboard back. “Again.”
“Why?” she snapped, growing frustration getting the best of her. “We both know I can’t do this.”
“Do we?” Spencer challenged.
She glared at the clipboard so she wouldn’t get caught glaring at him. Not at all sure what to say, she locked her lips again.
“Try again,” Spencer ordered.
This time, she got all the way down to references before she made another mistake.
“You really think Ethen O’Dowell is going to give you a good work recommendation? Use your head.”
Into the garbage the paper went and a new form was thrust in front of her.
“If I see you list Pony instead, I’m going to smack you again,” he grumbled before she got that far.
By then, her hand no longer stinging, but her eyes were more than making up for it. She was shaking, terrifyingly close to just throwing all this back at him. With real throws. Frustrated and hopeless, the last thing she needed was his terse reminders that she was too stupid even to fill out an application.
She knew Ethen wasn’t going to give her a good reference.
…But she had put him on the application. Both this one and the one she’d turned into the library. She’d done it without thinking, just like she’d put Pony on it. And Kitty, although the contact information was blank because she didn’t have it now that she’d moved to Australia. She didn’t have Piggy’s either, but they were menagerie girls. They’d made good their escape and probably wanted nothing more to do with her, but they were still her sisters.
And besides, those answers were good enough for Deanwood. They’d called her for an interview. She wasn’t going to get the job, she knew that. But she had got the interview, and it took everything she had not to remind him. Especially since she doubted she could do so while keeping a respectful tone.
She stared at the reference section and the three empty slots, at a complete loss for who to put down.
“You thought of Ethen, but not your Dom?” Spencer asked dryly.
A slow heat burned her face. The knots in her stomach twisted, expanding inside her until she could feel the block of them all the way up in the back of her throat. She put Carlson’s name down. She’d have to get his contact information later. She hadn’t yet memorized his phone number. That was in her cell.
She tried to skip to the next section.
“You need to provide three references. Who else do you have?”
“Pony,” she said defiantly, but they both knew that wasn’t true and his frown said as much. Still, it was easier to lie than to admit she didn’t have anybody else.
“Where was your last job?”
“They fired me.”
“Why?”
Because she was Puppy and she hadn’t been able to function.
“Fine,” he said, when she stayed silent. “Where was your last decent job?”
“They fired me too,” she said bitterly.
“All right, now I really want to know: Why?” he demanded.
Because Ethen got arrested and she’d become the girl in the cage that every media outlet showed pictures of and every reporter in the area hounded for an interview for weeks, first when police finally raided Ethen’s home and again during the course of his trial. Her old boss hadn’t wanted any part of that. He hadn’t wanted any part of the girl in the dog kennel, for that matter.
