Emily pouts, distracted by her computer screen. “Shitty.”
“I think it had something to do with...” I gesture in the general direction of myself.
She frowns. “Your...blouse? Your pencil skirt!” she shouts like we’re playing charades.
I huff out a breath. “You know...” I raise my brows meaningfully.
She laughs. “I truly do not know.”
“Well, because I’m a woman.”
“Oh.” She makes this flat-mouthed face, very much resembling a frog. “Ew. Don’t we have enough of those kinds of guys around here?”
I nod. “And, Mark apparently is good friends with my intern from last year, Sean.”
“Oh.” Emily arches an eyebrow and I know I don’t have to say any more. Sean’s behavior was wildly inappropriate when we were in private. So much so that I started making excuses for other people to be in the room with me if I knew he and I would be alone together.
When his thinly veiled, lewd comments weren’t getting the reaction he wanted, he started talking about me to other people in the office. As far as I know, his words never got to Richard or any of the other executives. But I still feel like I’m picking up the pieces of my integrity. He made it easier for people who already didn’t like me to have another excuse not to like me even more.
“What does that have to do with Wesley?” Emily asks.
“Mark made a joke about me. Called me a name.”
Emily nods for me to continue.
“He called me a cunt. Wesley laughed.”
“What?!”Emily screeches.
She slams her cup down onto her desk calendar, spilling black coffee all over Tuesday and most of Wednesday.
“He called you the C-word?” she hisses.
I nod.
“Did you say anything?”
I pause before I shake my head. “No.”
“Did you report him to HR?” she asks, shrill.
“No.”
She leans back in her chair. “Corrine.” She says my name flatly. “You run this department single-handedly. You expect excellence from everyone who works for you. You take shit from no one.”
She ticks each point off on her finger.
“But when some fuck boy thinks he can say whatever he wants about you, you do nothing. You never reported Sean and he never listened to you when you asked him to stop. Are you going to let Mark do this, too? And don’t even get me started on Richard—”
“Stop,” I tell her. I hold up my hand to emphasize the point. “I don’t want to talk about Richard.”
She glares at me. “You won’t even acknowledge how inappropriate—”
“I’m not talking about this, Emily.” I straighten my spine. Discussing Richard’s increasingly inappropriate behavior these last few years will only cause me to pop more Tums and force me to give up coffee again.
The frustration in her face melts away. “Just tell me why you won’t do anything when a guy like Mark thinks he can speak about you that way. That’s not the friend I know... Is it because of what happened at that other agency? At Blitz Media?”
“Firing him will only prove to everyone else what theythinkthey already know. That I’m too difficult to work with. Maybe instead I should just show them—show him—how difficult I really can be.”
