Page 79 of Man Flu

“Great,” Brielle pipes up. “Everything is just about done. We might even be able to get out of here early today.” On the contrary, I haven’t gotten a thing done in preparation for this week. I don’t have any handouts or speaker notes prepared. I should have had this done last week, but everything has gone nuts, or nut. Nut. Why?

“Perfect. I was meaning to tell you that there is an attending vendor for a breast pump company looking for potential ad space. His name is Keith Champ. Hannah, I’m going to need you to turn up the charm with this one. Take some time and buy him a drink or two. Maybe even share your experiences about breast-pumps.”

I don’t know when I placed my hand on the side of my face or when I fell against the wall of the cube, but Taylor has managed to shock me yet again. He has no filter, and basically no brain. I’ve reported him to Human Resources so many times that I’m sure he has dirt on Human Resources since I’ve never seen him receive so much as a slap on the wrist for the crap he’s pulled. Brett has sent him home a few times for the things he’s said, yet here we are, talking breast pumps.

“Taylor, despite knowing what my job is this week, telling me to charm a vendor and talk about my experiences with breast pumps is highly inappropriate. You do know this, right?”

Taylor scratches the back of his head, then pushes his black-framed glasses up his nose. His glasses are prescription-free, their sole purpose to offer him an intelligent appearance.  “Uh, Hannah, do I need to remind you that you spent an entire year in one of our offices pumping milk out of your breasts? Do you know how inappropriate it was to have to listen to that day after day? We didn’t even get to watch. We could only listen. Now that, that is inappropriate. So, since we’ve been through that annoyance, I think you can do the company a solid this week. Am I wrong?”

“Yeah, man, you’re wrong.” Logan walks up from behind the cube wall I’m leaning on. “I just heard that whole thing.” Logan is visibly enraged. His face is a dark shade of red, and his top lip is slightly curled to one side. “Get the hell out of her cube before I do something far worse than what Human Resources would do.”

I can’t lie and say I don’t love having someone stick up for me here. It’s been years of battling this crap on my own, and I’ve gotten nowhere. Last year at the expo, Taylor asked me to set up a kissing booth, along with assuring me that he and Nick would be the first in line. That same trip, I got calls at midnight with requests to visit their hotel rooms for a late-night rendezvous as if I were some paid prostitute.  Each situation was reported. Each situation was ignored. No proof, no story. It’s nice.

“Logan, don’t bother trying to explain anything to him,” I say. Can this situation get any more complicated right now? What I urgently need is to figure out how to re-split my ass cheeks apart from each other before I die of pain, but instead, I’m talking to the world’s biggest pig.

“Aren’t you just a temp?” Taylor asks Logan. “I’m sure you have some papers to be collating somewhere else, don’t you?”

Logan takes in a deep breath, and his chest puffs out in response. He places his hands on top of the cube walls, now locking Taylor into this tight space with Brielle and me. “I don’t think you should be talking to me that way.”

“Temp, go away,” Taylor says through unnerving laughter.

“His name is Logan Grier,” Brielle tells him. I know why she added the Grier in, and now I’m watching Taylor’s expression contort into utter humiliation. He had no idea.

“Wait a minute. You’re Logan Grier, as in MVP of 2015, and the Logan Grier who was nearly castrated in front of over a million people?”

He had to throw that in there? Obviously, Logan was more than talented and a top player, yet his final moment on the field is what he’s remembered for. How does he walk around with confidence like he does? No wonder he got gun shy with me the other day.

“How many Logan Griers do you know?” Logan asks Taylor.

“Just you,” Taylor says with amazement. “I can’t believe I’m standing in the presence of a baseball god.”

“Taylor, I’m going to ask you to apologize to the ladies and move on with your day.”

Taylor lifts his arm and squeezes his shoulder while stretching his neck in each direction. Then, he looks at me and babbles something before hightailing it out of the cube. “I think I’ve waited to see a look like that on his face since he started here five years ago. Thank you,” I tell him. Now if you only you knew of a way to separate my ass cheeks, I might fall in love with you right here and now.

“You’re just all sorts of amazing, aren’t you Logan?” Brielle asks him with a wink. “Maybe you have more tricks up your sleeve to help our poor Hannah out today.” Brielle winks at me as if I didn’t ask her very nicely to keep her mouth shut about my situation.

“How can I help you, Hannah? Is everything okay?” I specifically asked Brielle not to react to my situation so I could avoid it being announced, and instead, she hints about it to Logan. She couldn’t just wait two minutes for him to leave the cube. Unbelievable. Nope, it’s believable. This girl cannot control her mouth.

“Ah, I think I’ll just go handle the problem myself,” I say, looking between the two of them.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing, it’s fine, really. It’s just girl stuff, no big deal.”

“This isn’t girl stuff,” Brielle chirps. “This is a serious issue, Hannah. We may need to go back to see that woman. She can fix this.”

I can either waddle out of here, or I can sink to the floor and scream out in pain—neither of which will make this any better.

“Seriously, what’s going on?” Logan asks. There’s more force behind his voice this time, which I find to be a turn on, but also very upsetting because I’m aware he’s about to find out what I did this morning, for him, and what the outcome was, which will not benefit him in the least at the moment.

I love how Brielle can bring it up so casually and then look at me like a deer in headlights afterward as if it were a total accident. It’s not that hard, is it? To think before you speak? I want to ask her.

More sweat is percolating under my skin, and I’m burning up. Nothing has gone smoothly—ha ha—with Logan, and I was so hoping tonight would go well, but this all seems to be a bad joke that’s on repeat. First, I puke all over him, and now he’s about to find out that my ass cheeks are waxed together because I needed to do a serious weed hack before he came anywhere near me again.

I think it’s been about two full minutes since anyone has said anything, and there is no way for me to slip out of this cube.

“Logan, I can’t …”