Page 24 of When Stars Collide
*****
As it turned out, downing an almost full bottle of wine and staying up late to chat with your best friend the night before work wasn’t such a great idea.Head pounding from tannin consumption and regret, I dragged myself through the halls of Drake Publishing, wearing my sunglasses until I came to my new, and beautifully dark, office in the corner of our suite. Removing my glasses, I plunked my purse down on my desk, which was already covered with more manuscripts than I would ever be able to go through in a month, and pulled out a bottle of water and my trusty ibuprofen.
“Good morning,” our intern, Penelope, stopped by my office with her high-pitched, sing-song voice, “and happy Monday. That’s such a funny thing to say, isn’t it? I mean, what’s so happy about Monday, am I right?” She giggled at her own joke, each chortle further intensifying the thundering in my head.
“I’m going to need you to dial it down to a three or four until at least noon today,” I answered her, taking two ibuprofen tablets and shoveling them into my mouth.
“How are you liking your new office?” she asked, her eyes searching every nook, cranny, and corner. “It’s pretty dark in here without the light on. Here, let me get this for you.” She reached for the light switch as my life flashed before my eyes.
“No, no, no,” I pleaded, holding out my hands as though I possessed some magical superpower that could cause her to freeze in her tracks. Apparently, Penelope’s comprehension of the word ‘no’ was different from that of the rest of the world’s. One agonizing split second later, the fluorescent light above me hummed to life, and I threw my hands over my eyes to keep my head from exploding.
“Oh, rough night?” she asked, stating the obvious.
“Rough night, rough life, who’s counting?” I took a step back, my heel catching the leg of my chair, which caused me to stumble backwards into my seat. Slowly, I removed my hands from my eyes, blinking furiously as the light attacked my retinas. My fingertips roamed from my eyebrows to my temples, where they stayed, massaging my pain away until the ibuprofen could kick in.
“It’s a good thing Phineas asked me to stop in to see if there was anything I could do to help you lighten your new workload.”
Of course Phineas would send Penelope in to check on me, because he knew no matter how busy I was, I wouldn’t want to burden anyone else with my workload when I knew they already had their own. But I also knew I had to get started on the edits forLove Me Tender, the paranormal romance I’d discovered, which meant I would have zero time to get to the slush pile we’d amassed in the short time since announcing our acceptance of unsolicited manuscripts.
“Actually, yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Penelope.”
I grabbed a stack of manuscripts from my desk, handing them to her. She took them from me, a little too excited to be receiving a pile of documents that probably wouldn’t be worth so much as a second glance. The publishing industry was notoriously hard for new writers to break into. Rejections were a more common sight than even the daisy dukes and cowboy hats I’d seen roaming around the fair.
“I just love that we’re doing this,” Penelope announced, throwing her Brazilian blowout over her shoulder while she thumbed through the stack balanced precariously on her arm. “Imagine the lives we could change, you know?”
“Or the dreams we could shatter.” Penelope briefly stopped thumbing through her pile to give me a stern raise of her microbladed eyebrow. “You have your fun, I’ll have mine,” I added, wishing like hell I had a cup of coffee in front of me, instead of a perky, young intern full of hope and ambition.
“I prefer to take the optimistic approach.”
“Give it another decade. Optimism dies and is replaced with complacency after thirty.” Penelope stared at me, confused. “You’ll see. Now get out of here, you idealistic whippersnapper.”
“Okay, I’ll start working on these right away and give you my thoughts before the end of the day.”
Her voice rose again to it’s far too cheerful, screeching level, which penetrated my skull like a ball-peen hammer. Reflexively, I brought my hand up to my forehead to massage it.
Penelope put her hand over her mouth. “Oops, sorry. Dialing it back down now.” She gestured with her hand, moving it down a notch at a time as she spoke.
I nodded, giving her a thumbs-up with one hand, while still cradling my throbbing head in the other. When I could no longer hear her Louboutins clicking across the ceramic tile floor, I sighed with relief. How others could be morning people, I would never be able to understand. Elle was like that. When we shared a dorm in college, she would wake up with a smile on her face most mornings. It was a quality that not only made me love her that much more, but was also often the reason why I’d thought about shoving her out of the window, depending on my frame of mind. Today would have been a window-shoving kind of day.
Just as I was beginning to settle in and crack openLove Me Tender, a knock on my doorframe roused me from my concentration.
“Good morning,” Phineas greeted me, taking a sip of coffee from his mug.
“Not you too. Honest to God, I don’t know how you people do mornings.”
“There’s bourbon in here.” He held up his mug in jest, eyeing my partially cleared desk. “I see Penelope paid you a visit.”
“She did, and may I just suggest a better vetting process for our interns next year.”
“What’s wrong with Penelope?”
“She’s so damn … hopeful.”
“You’re right. How dare we have hope in this office.” He chuckled.
“Not to mention, they get younger every year.”
Phineas furrowed his brow, something he always did whenever he was perplexed, deep in thought, or even amused by something, I’d noticed. “Our interns have all been seniors at Columbia … hence, the same age.”
