Page 34 of Loathing My Boss
They wanted performers.
And they got four out of the five of us to do their bidding.
Since I’m naturally a private person, writing suited me best. I didn’t get Lukas’s flamboyant interest in parading in front of people, and I can barely stomach my virtual interviews, so I don’t think Kyran’s career choice of streaming games would have worked, either. I’m not interested in making appearances at cons like Zakery, and I didn’t have the option to run away.
I like hiding behind make believe. Keeping up aprofessional front. Putting distance between myself and my fans who will never knowme. Because I don’t want to let them.
I need the control my parents didn’t care to let us have.
I need the ability to separate selling my products—and sellingmyself.
The words I put on paper are either too clinical or too personal, and there’s no in between. I’m either following an outline perfectly because I know it’ll sell, or I’m pouring something so raw into the pages the ink might as well be blood.
Writing to cope with my feelings and then holding on to those words is new. But maybe I can use it? Maybe it can give Crisis and me a place to start getting some things out in the open? Things about why she hates me—and why I love her anyway.
Do I dare?
Or…I let an arrow fly, hitting the top left of the target…do I continue to suffer, hoping that something, somehow, will change?
Chapter 12
?
The comedians around here are almost too much.
Crisis
Dearest Crisis,
The first time I laid eyes on you, my heart leapt, refusing to pump oxygen through my veins. And, still, my lungs starve for air as I find myself continually plagued by breaths I don’t realize I’m holding. You have me enchanted, hypnotized, hopeless. I hesitate to share that I am deeply, incomprehensibly, and inconsolably in love with you, but I cannot hold it in any longer.
Would that you’d spare me one kind and genuine word, I might never recover.
Therefore, allow me to beseech your favor.
Should you appease my plea, I would write you novels of adoration, committing oceans of words to the description of my feelings for you. I beg you to end this suffering. Let us learn one another during the time we have here together.
Please leave your reply in the hanging feed bucket on the stall to the left of your room when you exit. I shall check it this evening.
With hope,
Your Secret Admirer
I quite completely cannot help myself as I finish reading the letter that mysteriously appeared slid under the crack of our room door this morning.
Snorting, I buckle as I cackle.
Looking as exhausted as he was yesterday, Viktor startles, swallowing hard. “What is it?”
Rolling my eyes toward him, I smirk. “Aloveletter.” I rip the page in half.
He flinches.
My brow arches. “What?”
Wetting his lips, he makes his side of the bed, pulling the sheets and blankets up to tuck beneath the fluffy dog bed. “Why would you rip up a love letter?”
“Because.” I tear the typed words in half the other direction, gather the pieces, and do it again. “It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. Love letters fromsecret admirers, first and foremost, are cowardly. If someone really likes me, they should tell me themselves in person. Secondly, we’ve been here three days with the majority of those days spent in this little room. When would anyone have the time to ‘fall in love with me’?” My head shakes, and I let the pieces flutter into the trash under my desk. “I bet it’s a prank from that idiot yesterday who was messing with that woman.”
