Xavi
My heart pounded in my chest. I felt sick. My palms were so sweaty I was sure I was going to drop my phone. I swallowed thickly, trying to get it together.
I shouldn’t have been this worked up over something so stupid, but there was a lot riding on it.
I tore my eyes away from Rowe and back to my computer, deciding once again to put it off until later.
Coward.
My inner voice was right, but that didn’t change a thing.
There was no way I could do it – not right now. I needed some liquid courage and a lot of practice. Maybe I could go to the bar down the street tonight after work and cut loose. Then, tomorrow…
I stifled a groan to myself, rubbing my hands over my face. Tomorrow was too late. It had to be tonight. And none of this was helping me get any work done, which was not exactly going to put me in anyone’s good books.
Talk of the devil and she appeared. I saw Janice bearing down on me from the manager’s office at the back of the room and bit my lip, quickly trying to pretend I was typing something on the screen before she could catch me torturing myself with indecision.
Not that it helped at all.
“Mr. Mendez,” she hissed, keeping her voice low as if to respect the other workers in their cubicles and yet managing to make herself perfectly heard. I was sure they were all listening in, too. Vultures. She leaned close to me, her bright pink polyester skirt suit rubbing against the side of my desk and the pictures I had pinned on my cubicle wall. “What is wrong with you?”
I had heard a few similar questions in my time here, but normally they were directed more towards something specific. “It’s been suggested that I might have a personality disorder of some kind, but I don’t have an official diagnosis,” I quipped, watching her face turn scarlet with anger.
“I’mreferringto theproject,” she said, enunciating each word carefully as if she thought I wasn’t going to understand her. Never mind the fact I was born in this country and English was my first language. Janice clearly thought I’d understand better if she said it in Spanish. “Your work has been unacceptable! You cannot rate clients by – byhotnessand put it on the company server!”
Any decent person would probably have flushed red at the embarrassment of realizing their mistake. But I had, quite literally, never been accused of being a decent person. “Oh, that ended up on the server, did it?” I asked. I chewed my lip slightly, more out of boredom than out of real anxiety. I hated talking to Janice. “I guess I was supposed to upload something else?”
“The proposal brief,” Janice snapped. “You’ve been working on it for over a week and there’s still no sign of it! Mendez, you are on your last legs here, I swear to you. Where is that brief?”
I regarded her with a sense of strange detachment. So, I was finally getting fired. I’d been waiting a long time for this, always hanging on purely by the skin of my teeth. The worst part of it all was that there was no way I could seduce Janice into giving me another chance. That particular talent of mine only worked on men, and while Janice did have pretty blocky shoulders, I was sure there was something feminine buried deep in there somewhere.
Very deep.
Not that it mattered so much. I hated working at this stupid company. So what if they wanted to fire me?
“Well,” I started, but before I could get out a single word of what was definitely going to be the shittiest excuse of all time, another voice interrupted me.
“Sorry about that, Janice,” Rowe said, pushing his desk chair towards us with a whoosh of wheels over carpet. “It’s my fault. I was distracting Xavi, asking him to help me out with the customer review analysis. You know he’s really great at getting people to talk to us.”
Janice almost hissed at him. “Mr. Rowe, I don’t see what that has to do with uploading the wrong file to the server,” she said. “Or where the proposal brief is!”
“Oh, well, that’s easy,” Rowe said smoothly. His handsome face was arranged in a convincing display of pure calm and innocence as if everything he was saying was really true. “While we were doing the analysis, we got talking about our clients, and, well, I encouraged him to make the list. I wanted to see how our ratings matched up.”
Janice turned her gaze back to me, and I looked back at her with what I hoped was the same innocent look Rowe was wearing. I’d been told in the past I usually came across more like a spoiled brat who was trying to get out of trouble, but it would have to do.
“I must have just uploaded the wrong document by mistake,” I said, seeing where he was obviously going. I even tried to put a little bit of an anxious whine in my voice so she would think I was sincere or something. Rowe was quick on his feet – he knew Janice got uncomfortable when she was reminded of the fact that the two of us were gay.
“And the real document?” Janice asked.
“See, that’s how I knew it was all an innocent mistake,” Rowe said with a beam. “He emailed it to me.”
Fuck. That was where he was going with it? But I hadn’t actually done the work. I’d been screwing around with something else and putting it off because proposal briefs were literally the most boring job in the entire world.
No matter what Rowe tried to say to get me out of this, I was fired. All he could do now was manage to drag himself down with me.
“Well, let’s see it, then,” Janice said, gesturing at one or either of us – with her wild hands and tacky, chunky bracelets flying all over the place, it was hard to tell.
“Janice,” I said with a sigh, ready to come clean and pack up my desk. This wasn’t fun anymore, anyway, and maybe I could tell a few people to go fuck themselves on the way out of the door.
