Page 81 of The Boss I Can't Stand
But I was so wrapped up in my own thoughts, I’d missed the fact everyone had started filing into the screening room.
“Thank you,” I said to the usher, who nodded and got back to collecting empty wine glasses. From the screening room, I heard the opening orchestration ring out. Finn had hired a live orchestra because the rough cut didn’t have music yet, and the sound sent a chill down my spine. I was missing it—this movie we’d worked so hard on—because of stupid Trey.
I stuffed my phone away and rushed across the lobby, intending to slip into the back, but as I reached the door, it was to find Finn pacing outside the room. He stopped the moment he spotted me, throwing his arms wide. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded.
My eyes widened at the intensity of his words. “I?—”
“Where are the comment cards?” he said, cutting me off without giving me a second to answer. His lips were pulled into a tight, thin line.
“What?”
“The comment cards are missing from half the gift bags!” He held one of the sage blue bags up, shaking it in front of my face. “I walked down my entire row. No cards,” he snapped. “You said you’d finish tying the cards to the bags! Remember? ‘I’ll finish the comment cards and meet you in the limo.’ Or does that not ring a bell?”
Horror dawned. Complete and utter horror. It filled me to the brim like sludge, making me queasy and chilled all at once. I knewexactlywhere the cards were. My jaw dropped as I reached for the clutch tucked under my arm. “Oh my God.”
His entire face turned to stone—hard, bitter, unyielding stone—as he growled, “Where. Are. The cards?”
I opened the clutch between us, and the cards unfurled like an accordion between my palms. “I put them in here for safekeeping,” I said, trying to explain. “I meant to tie them on the drive over.”
“What fucking good are they in your purse?” he spat. “This was the whole point of the gift bags. To make sure people went home with a comment card and the links to the survey.”
My stomach dropped. “I know.” God, did I ever know. “I didn’t mean?—”
“Well, if you knew, what are they doing here?” he said, snatching the cards from me.
“When I got the notification from Jillian, I freaked out and forgot about everything else,” I rushed to say before he could cut me off again. “I just wanted to explain to you that it was all a lie before you could get some crazy idea in your head that any of it was true.” I reached for him, but he shrugged out of my grip.
“Dammit, Sierra! You said you could handle it. I actually thought I could rely on you to be the one person tonotmake more goddamn work for me.” He whirled around, gesturing to the first employee he could find.
“You!” he snapped. A young man in uniform rushed over with an empty serving tray. Finn yanked it out of his hands, replacing it with the comment cards. “You stand next to these doors and hand out a card to every person that walks out those doors after the film. Understand?”
The young man nodded, scurrying off.
“Finn, I’m really sorry,” I said, reaching for him again.
He shook his head, pulling his hand out of the way as he muttered bitterly. “That’s the last time I trust someone else to do what I knew I should have done myself.”
His words stung. It wasn’t true, and heknewthat. How many times had I come through for him? With deadlines, with reshoots, withfaking a whole-ass engagementand uprooting my whole life to play along with the part he wanted me to play? I’d more than proven he could trust me, and it was unfair of him to throw that all away because I’d made one mistake.
“Look, I know I screwed up, but this feels a little extreme. There was an easy fix. No harm done. Why don’t we go in and enjoy the rest of the film?”
“Easy fix?” he snapped. “Don’t you get it, Sierra? I’m always the one fixing everything. It’s bad enough that I have to clean up after my mother, I don’t need to be cleaning up after you too. How could you justforgetabout the comment cards? What could possibly be more important than that?”
His words were a slap to the face. “Excuse me for having an actual human moment,” I said, crossing my arms as I blinked back a wave of emotion, “and thinking you might beupsetto watch an interview that claimed I was cheating on you. When I heard what Trey said, the only thought in my head was to get to you and make sure you knew it wasn’t true. Forgive me for not being some freaking robot who ignored what this could mean for our relationship all so I could put some little card in a gift bag!”
He sneered.
I threw my hands up. “God, Finn, forgive me for being a person with flaws!”
“Christ, Sierra!” he snarled. “I’m sick to death of people and their flaws and that being an excuse for messing everything up! What’swrong with following through on the things you’ve promised? What’s so hard about following a script? About doing things right?”
“You can’t script everything in life!” I yelled, my frustration boiling over. He could be pissed at me if he wanted, but I was so tired of him trying to control everything—each microexpression on his face, each laugh, all so he could manipulate the public’s opinion. I was sick of having to weed through what was real and what was fake. “You can’t plot out all your emotions and reactions in advance.”
“I clearly need to or else I end up in situations like this.”
“Not everything goes according to plan,” I shot back. “Not everything is going to come out perfectly. That’s not reality. God, have you really spent that much time around film sets that you’ve forgotten what the real world is like?”
His jaw tensed, his cheek twitching. “I know exactly what the real world is like.”
