Page 5 of Meet Hate Love
Amanda whistling was bad. Like the cackle of a witch when she tossed the last eye of newt into her potion and a huge, green, skull-shaped cloud of smoke erupted from the boiling pot. But her whistling that particular song meant only bad assignments were to come. If I had to guess, my next write-up would see me visiting a leech museum or some taxidermy farm out in the middle of Butt Fuck, Nowhere, managed by a serial killer who would end up stuffing my rotting carcass into a steel drum. That wasifI came back from my assignment to Europe… because bullet point number ten in the article I’d just read had beenLeave your job without warning. And I’d thought that sounded like a pretty good idea.
I pushed out of my chair and followed her to her office. When my gaze landed on Vance’s huge frame crammed into one of two chairs across from her desk, I stopped inside the doorway. There was only one reason she’d have called me into her office while he was in there—to reprimand me for something Mr. Heard You Were Easy had complained about.
He had probably run into her office earlier in the morning, tattling like a five-year-old:Blake came into work five minutes late, then threw paper clips and hole-punch trash at me. Some last-ditch effort to screw me over before I jet-setted across the Atlantic and left him to rot in his neat-and-tidy cubicle.
The office door clicked shut—so it was door-closed kind of business…
I thumbed at Vance as Amanda rounded her desk. “Why is he in here?”
“I’ll just cut to the chase.” She smoothed a hand over her suit jacket, her attention snapping to me as she sank to her seat. “I’ve reassigned the European travel to Vance.”
I felt my left eye twitch. There was no way she’d just said what I’d heard. No way, because her ripping that assignment away from me would take my bad luck to good luck ratio to thirty-eight to zero. It was all I’d had to cling to, and statistically, the universe owed me one good thing.
“I’m sorry,” I laughed, then touched a hand to my pounding chest. “But it sounded like you just said Vance was going to Europe instead of me.”
“I did.” She shuffled through a pile of papers on her desk, pulled one from the stack, and passed it across to Vance.
Evidently, that morning, my bad luck devil had gone apeshit crazy and snorted an eight-ball of Mexican black-tar heroin.
I felt my jaw tic as I looked from Amanda to the arrogant prick now smiling down at the paper in his hand. “Can I ask why it was reassigned?” Then I redirected my attention to Amanda, who looked more than thrilled about the current situation. “Last minute?”
“During a meeting on Friday, Vance brought up the importance of live feeds, especially regarding website traffic.”
Of course, the conniving, prompt, go-getter turned thief with biceps the size of my head had. I stared straight ahead while my blood pressure steadily ticked up.
“And since Vance’s online persona is not only more on brand with international travel—I never would have suggested you for it had I been here—” she mumbled that part like it wasn’t crystal clear the only reason I’d gotten the assignment was that she’d been out of the office with a stomach bug. “But he has a pretty rabid following. And business is business, after all. The higher-ups agreed he’d be a better fit. Just like you’ll be a better fit for—” She made an exaggerated jab to her keyboard.
The motor to her printer whirred before it spat out a piece of paper which she promptly passed across her too-neat desk to me—“The Lunchbox Museum,” she said. “Isn’t that exciting?”
My eye spasmed again. I envisioned raking everything off her desk while letting out a banshee war cry, then taking her ridiculous rhinestone-encrusted stapler and chucking it through the office window. But that would get me fired, so instead, I cleared my throat and tried to collect myself enough that my voice wouldn’t shake. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Vance to go to the Lunchbox Museum? Since I’m already packed for Europe?” And since I was three minutes away from completely losing it.
“Oh, come on. The Lunchbox Museum is right up your alley, Blake.” There went her Joker grin again. “It’s…eccentric. You’re great at eccentric.”
I despised that word. I’d been called that by my mother for as long as I could remember, and it was nothing but a backhanded, socially acceptable way to call someone a weirdo. What I thought would be much more up my “eccentric” alley would be my taking that stapler from her desk and giving her a hack job of an eyelift right before I used it to pierce Vance’s man nipples.
“And, Blake,” Amanda said, that villainous smile spreading over her red lips, “would you mind emailing whatever research you’ve done to Vance?”
“Oh, thanks. That would be great,” he added.
My head whipped to the side just as Vance flashed a perfectly white, thieving smile.
I bit the inside of my cheek as heat crept from my chest to my ears. Then I nodded, swallowing back the urge to call him a massive, blister-covered dick in a garbled, “Uh-huh.” I’d get to it tomorrow. Maybe Friday when he was halfway over the Atlantic.
Amanda clapped her hands together. “Teamwork is what it’s all about.” Then she went about rattling off all my wonderful experiences that article-stealing dickhead would get before she dismissed me.
I pushed out of my seat. “Hope you enjoy Europe,” I said, hiding every bit of contempt bubbling like a hot cauldron inside me as I left the room.
He’d stolen the holy grail of assignments right out from under me like some cheap, pee-stained rug.
I stopped at the end of the hallway, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. A really deep breath. No—acleansing breath—while I silently recited, “I breathe in the calm and exhale the toxic.” I kept pulling that breath deeper and deeper, hoping the tension winding my muscles would dissipate, but it didn’t. My irritation had built to nuclear levels, and by the time I finally let the breath go, I felt a little lightheaded.
Holding the wall to steady myself, I rounded the corner, and the second I did, my gaze went straight to the news article pulled up on a coworker’s monitor.Carbon monoxide poisoning kills two at Belgium Airbnb.
One of my brows lifted. Was that a sign from some omniscient presence that the trip was a disaster waiting to happen? Maybe Vance getting that assignment was the world trying to rectify my life. What if, in a week’s time, Vance was a headline about carbon monoxide poisoning or a hostel stay gone wrong? Not that I hoped he would be. He may be an arrogant asshole, but I didn’t want him dead. Dead to me, but not dead-dead. Although, if he ended up with a case of bedbugs or scabies or horrendous diarrhea, I would absolutely laugh.
Laugh and laugh and laugh…
ChapterThree
