I didn’t know why they looked so pissed off. Were they that upset by the idea that I’d supposedly slept with my boss? Were they judging me? Were they going to tell Isaac?
Shit. I could just imagine how that would go. Isaac had made it clear that while we were “together” no other man was allowed to touch me. For someone who didn’t give a crap about me, he was weirdly possessive.
At least I wasn’t on the edge of an orgasm anymore. On the way to the newspaper offices, I’d stopped in a bathroom and taken off the vibrating underwear, tossing them in the trash. I wasn’t letting Isaac put me through that hell again, and even though he was taking a test, I wasn’t sure if the app on his phone could control the panties from far away and wouldn’t put it past him to not fuck with me during my meeting.
My meeting that wasnotgoing well.
“Tovah, can I talk to you?” Toby asked, ignoring the way Judah and Levi straightened. “Alone?”
“Not gonna happen,” Judah said. “Whatever you can say in front of her, you say in front of the two of us, too.”
I could feel my face turning crimson. This was becoming a pattern, one Ihated.
Getting out of my chair, I followed Toby out of the bullpen where we’d been meeting and into his office. Judah and Levi, who’d been busy propping up the wall with their backs, stood up and followed.
“They don’t actually think they’re joining us, do they?” Toby said, sounding worried.
I understood. Separately, each of the Wasserson twins probably outweighed him times two. Together, they could flatten him into a newspaper, or something resembling one.
“Tovah, what is going on? Why do you have bodyguards? Or are they babysitters?” he continued, holding his office door open for me.
I followed him in, and as Judah started to step inside, I slammed the door shut in his face, locking it.
He shook his head slowly at me.
“Isaac’s not going to like this,” he said through the door.
I pulled down the shade in reply, turning to Toby.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.
He exploded. “Tovah, what thefuck. You were supposed to send me an interview with Isaac Jones, but I checked the Dropbox multiple times last night and this morning and there was nothing. You didn’t respond to a single one of my texts and emails.”
Of course I hadn’t responded. Isaac still had my damn phone.
Toby continued. “Then, I hear you’re dating the guy? Don’t you hate him? There’s no integrity to the feature if the writer is the subject’s girlfriend,” he whined in his nasally voice.
I was still stuck on what Toby had said. Girlfriend? Isaac and I had gone tooneclass together, and yeah, Toby was a journalist, so it was his job to know things, but still. It had gotten around campusthatquickly? And Isaac had made it pretty clear in class it wasn’t a girlfriend-boyfriend situation so much as a clingy hookup situation.
“Am I going to have to assign someone else the interview?” Toby prodded.
“No,” I said. “I’ll get you the feature.” I would, and Toby didn’t know it yet, but the story he was going to get was going to be so much more than he’d ever expected.
“Good, because I don’t want to regret giving you the sports editor position.”
“I didn’t evenwantto be sports editor, Toby,” I pointed out. “I wanted to be managing editor. You just made me sports editor because you hate Veronica.”
He shrugged. “She’s a bitch. You know that.”
“You made her bitchier,” I said. “You so easily could make my life easier and instead?—”
“—and instead I did what mademylife easier,” he said agreeably. “And you’re just going to have to suck it up and deal with it because?—”
The door to Toby’s office banged open liked someone had kicked it.
Because someonehad.Isaac stood there, hands fisted as he planted his right foot back on the floor and stared at me.
“Excuse me, did you just kick open my door?” Toby looked shocked.