Chapter 6: Corrine
A smile threatens at my lips. Since I’m safe in the confines of my empty sports car, I let it out; that’s the freedom that comes with being the first person to the office in the morning. My heels are the only sound echoing in the parking garage and the elevator hasn’t yet filled with the smell of morning coffees and greasy breakfast sandwiches. By the time I arrive on the Hill City floor, the smile is almost real. Until Emily steps out of the elevator beside mine.
“What are you doing here so early?” I wince at the accusatory tone to my words but it’s too late to reel them in. Emily launches a sarcastic smile my way.
“Good morning to you, too.”
Her blond hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail and her blazer hangs over her arm. Bags dangle from each elbow and she holds a paper sack wafting breakfast sandwich smell at me in one hand, and a large coffee in the other.
“Do you need help?” I ask. If I must give up the unrestrained joy that is an empty office, I’d rather do it for Emily than anyone else.
“Please,” she says, relieved. Emily straightens her arm and unhooks one of her bags and her blazer.
“Why are you here so early?” I ask as she leans forward to jiggle her boobs in front of the door sensor. Her office pass dangles from her blouse. A beep and a click sound and Emily backs into the door to push her way through. “You don’t usually get in until Richard does.”
“Two words,” Emily spits. “Mark Gutterberg.”
“Who?”
“Richard’s intern.” Emily sounds disgusted. “I wish we had yours instead,” she says over her shoulder as I follow her to her desk outside Richard’s office.
I’m still confused. “How did an intern make you come in early?”
Emily throws her bag down behind her desk and slumps in her chair, pulling the lid off her coffee cup. “He didn’t.”
She holds the cup under her nose and sniffs like she’s huffing glue.
“He just ran me around all day yesterday, asking for clarification or help whenever Richard wasn’t around. He couldn’t even fill out his direct deposit form without my assistance. I came in early so I could finish up a few things from yesterday and get a head start on today.”
She winces as she takes another whiff of coffee.
“Emily, what are you doing to that coffee?”
“It’s too hot to drink,” she says as if this explains it. “So I’m smelling the caffeine.”
“I don’t think it works that way.” I place her bag beside the other one and hang her blazer on the back of her chair behind her, smoothing out the shoulders.
“The steam is burning my nose hairs off,” she whines.
She searches my now-empty hands and smacks her palm to her forehead. “I should have gotten yours, too.”
Emily is one of the few people who can get my order right.
“Oh.” I pause. “I was going to make Wesley Chambers do it,” I say quietly.
Saying it out loud makes it sound a little bit repugnant and a knot of shame unfurls in my belly. I’m already having second thoughts about the plan I hatched last night.
Emily frowns at me. “Why would you make Wesley do it?” she asks. “And why did you make me train him on admin tasks yesterday? I thought you wanted him to help you with accounts and expand the digital marketing department.”
Technically, that’s true. I wasn’t even going to mentor again this year after my experience with my intern last year. But Richard spoke so highly of him. After he showed me some of Wesley’s mock campaigns from his original internship application, I was sold. Mr. Chambers’s work was exactly the direction I want to take our department and he would fit in with many of the new hires. At least I’d thought he would, before he opened his mouth.
I thought we’d have a relationship similar to the one I’d had with Richard when I was his intern years ago. Before Richard morphed into the man he is now.
I look behind me even though there’s no one here. “I was in the elevator with him and Richard’s intern yesterday.”
Emily nods slowly. “Okay.”
“He didn’t recognize me. We never interviewed personally. Richard wanted to let him off the hook for it since he’d technically already interviewed two years before and his family had a tough time this year. Mr. Chambers expressed hisextreme distressat being partnered with me rather than Richard.”
