She paused again and narrowed her eyes at me.
“Nina, I—” I tried to speak, but she cut me off. It was a good thing, too, because I had no idea how I could possibly hope to explain a fuckup of this magnitude.
“I don’t want to hear it. I called you no less than twelve times last night. I had to cut my trip to New York short, pull every trick and favor out of my ass to fix this, not to mention my checkbook.
“Emma, you have been an exemplary employee. Twenty-four hours ago, I would have said you were the best. You have the look, the education, the connections, the experience, the wit. In five years,you could have been running this firm. But, Emma”—she slapped the tablet down again—“this is not the kind of fuckup you come back from. This isn’t about Blake Malone. In ten years, some other Hollywood hunk with a tight ass and a six-pack will come along and hopefully Mr. Malone will have been smart enough to have pivoted into production. People like Blake Malone don’t keep the lights on. The studio is our client. If we can’t handle a simple transaction like an NDA, what good are we? This is a multimillion-dollar fuckup, Emma.”
“I am so sorry, Nina,” I stammered. “I’ve just been going through a lot lately. It shouldn’t have affected my work, but it did, and I promise it won’t happen again.”
Nina wasn’t looking at me, she was scanning the tablet.
“It’s almost a shame we had to kill this article,” she mused. “This writer actually has some talent. This passage, in particular, is quite fetching: ‘If I were Blake Malone, I would fire my publicist.’” Nina lowered the tablet to glare at me. “What excellent advice… Emma, you’re fired.”
My entire body was numb. I wasn’t sure how, but I somehow managed to make it back to my office and collapse into my chair.
“Well?” Max was waiting for me when I returned, her face twisted in anticipation. Alicia was hovering in the doorway, trying to look busy. I managed to mumble out a retelling of my colossal fuckup that led to Nina’s one-sided conversation in her office and ended with me being fired.
“We are going to have a very long, boozy, and expensive lunch while Alicia packs up your office.” Max shot my now-former assistant a look, and she scurried off—presumably to get boxes. “But first things first, we’re going to copy all of your contacts before she has IT block your access,” she continued in a whisper when Alicia was out of earshot, while she clicked away on my keyboard.
“Max, I can’t drink. It’s only ten a.m.”
“Ma’am. It’s five o’ clock somewhere, and you are unemployed, so you can do whatever the fuck you want. Let’s go. Louis insists.”
“That raggedy bitch,” Max muttered under her breath, and I snorted a laugh. Admittedly, I was working on my second martini, so Max’s antics were funnier than usual. “How many of her fuckups have we fixed over the years? And she fires you for one damn mistake?” She signaled the bartender for another order of prosciutto-wrapped mozzarella and more drinks.
“It was a pretty big mistake,” I conceded. The shock of getting fired was slowly wearing off and I began to consider the aftermath. How was I going to explain this to my clients, my mother, Teddy? As if on cue, my phone buzzed in my purse. Teddy. I stared at it in stupefaction for a long moment before Max snatched it out of my hand and ignored the call.
“No. You need time.” She turned to the bartender and yelled, “And another martini!”
After another two hours of drinking, bashing my former boss, and eating my weight in fried calamari and crab cakes, I began tofeel slightly less hopeless. Teddy would probably be relieved that I’d lost my job. It would be one less thing for us to fight about. All of my focus would be on his senate run, house hunting, and planning the biggest wedding in the state. That is, if Teddy ever gets around to proposing and stops talking about marriage like it’s some foregone conclusion.
The problem was that I liked working. I loved it. I wasn’t crazy about working for Nina, or working through some of the frivolous issues of our high-profile clients like we were solving world peace, but I loved my independence and the ability to put my degree to use. The same skill for problem-solving and thinking three to five steps ahead that helped me win chess tournaments is what made me one of Atlanta’s top PR reps—until this morning.
Maybe I didn’t have to stop working. I had a JD from an Ivy League. I could take the Georgia State Bar Exam and practice law. I secretly consulted on enough of Teddy’s cases to know my skills would be valuable to someone. I could start my own PR firm. How many times had Max and I daydreamed about striking out on our own? I was a woman with options. For a brief, gin-filled moment, I considered the farm as an option. Perhaps I could be a part of something else, something completely different from the life that I felt had been weighing me down lately. Maybe I needed a change.
I mentioned my farm idea to Maxima, who by that point was too drunk to be polite and pulled no punches in telling me what a “horrible fucking idea” it was, before making jokes about me on a tractor or milking a cow. I laughed along, partly because I agreed that I would look ridiculous milking a cow, but mostly because I didn’t want Max to know how empty I felt inside.
Max insisted I use the company car service to take me home and she’d arrange to have my car dropped off later. I initially protested, telling her I’d call an Uber, but once I was sinking into the plush leather seats and sipping the complimentary ice-cold sparkling water, I would have paid the driver extra to drive me into the building and up the stairs to my condo.
After fumbling with my keys, I made it into my condo, let out a sigh of relief, and took two steps before coming into contact with something hard in the middle of my floor and tumbling face-first onto the hardwood floor of my foyer.
“What the fuck?” I yelled when I hit the ground. The contents of my bag were scattered everywhere, and I found myself sprawled in the midst of several mini towers of white cardboard bankers boxes. It took me a second—okay, a few seconds—to realize that these were the boxes from my office. This led to me trying to solve the mystery of how they got inside the condo. The answer came from a familiar voice shouting my name and a pair of large, warm hands pulling me up to a shaky standing position.
“Teddy?” I swayed on my feet and gripped his shoulder for dear life. “What the hell are you doin’ in here?” I could tell I was slurring my words and I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d been this drunk.
“Baby, I live here,” he said seriously, and I rolled my eyes. I was just a little tipsy, not suffering from a traumatic brain injury.
“I know that, silly.” I smiled and bopped his nose with my finger. I snorted with laughter, but Teddy didn’t find our situation as hilarious as I did. “Why. Aren’t. You. At. Work?” I asked slowly.
“Because I heard what happened at Laramie and I was worriedabout you.” He was gently gripping my shoulders and rubbing his thumbs back and forth in a soothing gesture. His brow was furrowed, and he was searching my face for a response. He felt like my old Teddy, the one I’d been missing.
That Teddy would hold me in his arms after any crisis, real or imagined, and convince me that everything was going to be okay.
That Teddy would drop everything at his big, important Atlanta law firm job and rush home because his girlfriend lost her job.
I looked into the deep brown eyes that captured a nineteen-year-old girl’s heart while waiting in line for a roller coaster a decade ago. My eyes filled with tears, and I felt my bottom lip quiver. Teddy squeezed me into his chest and pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“You’re gonna be okay, Emmababy,” he whispered, and my belly fluttered at his nickname for me. It was a name he used sparingly these days. “You are the smartest, cleverest, and most amazing woman—fuck that, person—I know. Nina Laramie is going to regret firing you.” He placed another kiss on the top of my head. The combination of the warmth of his big body enveloping me and the intoxicating smell of his cologne made me feel like I was floating. The martinis probably factored a lot into the equation. I could have stayed in that embrace forever.
