Page 3 of Fake Date with the Mountain Man

Glitter.

It’s fucking glitter, and it looks just like a unicorn peed my pants.

Chapter 2

RYAN

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to prank Marlow.

It was an accident, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t laugh like hell about it. Marlow…did not. No surprise there. She’s already proven that she lacks human emotions. Except maybe annoyance, which she seems to have a surplus of when it comes to me.

Instead, she’s standing on the opposite side of my desk with her face all puckered up and a stream of glitter running down the front of her clothes.

Marlow draws a slow, sharp breath. On the exhale, she purses her lips together and glares at me. Anyone else would scream, laugh…something. But not Marlow. Even though she’s obviously fuming, she refuses to let it melt that icy shell of hers.

I used to think we just needed to give her some time to warm up to all of us. I was half right: it took her a good while to warm up to the other rangers. Now that she’s worked here for a couple of months, most of my coworkers seem to get along with her fine enough. But for me, Marlow’s icy exterior went from a thin shell to a full-blown wall.

“I’m sorry,” I start to say through a laugh, but Marlow is already turning on her heel to walk out of my office. She’s glowing bright red, just like she always does when she’s upset with me. “Marlow…”

She stops in the doorway but doesn’t turn around. “Just reprint the paperwork, please. I’ll pick it up later.”

And then she disappears.

If she would have given me a second, I would have explained that the glitter avalanche was just as big of a surprise to me as it was to her. Linda worked late last night, so I offered up my office as an after-school playroom for her kids. It’s right across the hall from hers, so I figured she could keep an eye on them while she finished her work. But I’m guessing she didn’t notice when one of them emptied an entire bag of glitter right into the file folder on my desk – the one full of the orientation paperwork that I printed out for Marlow before I left the office yesterday.

I didn’t notice either, until Marlow opened the folder and ended up wearing the glitter.

Even though I maintain my innocence, a pang of guilt hits me when I turn the corner to Marlow’s office a few minutes later. Her head is tilted down to her lap where she’s picking away at flecks of glitter. She looks genuinely sad for a second, but her face hardens when she notices me standing there.

“Here…a peace offering,” I say as I set a new folder of freshly printed, glitter-free paperwork down on her desk.

“Right,” she says skeptically. “What’s in this one?”

“It’s a surprise. Hope you’re not allergic to bees.”

The normal, functioning adult in me knows that this would be the right time to apologize (again) and explain what actually happened. But the stubborn asshole in me knows that it won’t make any difference. Marlow is going to be pissed off at me regardless. So, I turn and leave before we have another showdown. Between the break room stand-off earlier this morning and the glitter explosion, I think we’ve met our quota for the day.

_____

After lunch, Hunter calls me into his office.

Hunter’s office looks like the kind of place a serial killer goes to do his paperwork. The walls are bare, aside from the shadows of long-gone posters. There are toppling stacks of paper everywhere. The two guest seats are gray metal folding chairs from the eighties that I think he found in the forest and dragged back here. And for some reason, he can’t seem to get both of the fluorescent light tubes to work at the same time, so it’s always too dark in there.

After his big promotion to District Ranger, it took months of coaxing to convince Hunter to move into the big corner office. He only relented after hiring Marlow to take over my old job. Either he moved or the newest recruit got the boss’s old office. Truthfully, I don’t think he saw any problem with the latter, but the rest of us sure as hell did. It’s easily the best office in the building.

Or at least itwasbefore Hunter moved in.

“You ever gonna spruce this place up, man?” I ask.

Hunter grumbles something at me without looking up from his computer screen.

“The supervisor’s office just sent over the paperwork for the new interns,” Hunter says more clearly as I lean against the doorframe of his office.

“Oh yeah? Think we’ll get a decent batch this year?”

Hunter shrugs. “Do we ever? You know how this usually goes.”

Unfortunately, I do.

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