"Stay away from him," Tara said.
"Sure, whatever. I don't even like him. He's a self-absorbed nutcase, and you two deserve each other," I shot back.
Tara glared at me. "I think you're supposed to be rearranging a storage closet. Oh, and I need coffee and tea in my meeting. Chop-chop!" Her nose twitched.
"I'll be down with coffee in a little bit," I said, giving her my most insincere smile.
The breakroom still smelled like smoke, and there was caution tape wrapped around it like a yellow spider's web. So I went to the breakroom on the next floor down and grabbed cups, a pot of coffee, and a kettle of hot water and put it all on a tray.
Willow was huddled in a chair in a corner when I went into the conference room.
"I can't take this anymore," she whispered to me as I set out the refreshments. "I hope there's cyanide in that pot of coffee. This is the most disorganized marketing contract ever."
"No cyanide," I said, "but—" I slipped her a breakfast croissant.
Willow took a big bite and said around the food, "Tara made us watch that quarterly presentation."
"It was good, wasn't it?" I said. "I spiced it up."
"It was too spicy for Tara. She bitched and complained through the whole thing," Willow told me in a low voice.
"Lordy. Are they paying on time at least?" I asked.
Willow nodded.
"That's the important thing," I told her.
When I walked back to Mace's office, I stopped in front of the storage closet that served the C-suite office.
"Yikes," I said after I opened it. I fully admitted I was a disorganized person, but even I thought this closet was a wreck. I hadn't fully appreciated how bad it was yesterday. "We are about to Marie Kondo this shit up," I said.
I took everything out of the closet and piled it in Mace's office, covering the floor, his desk, and the sofa.
I was lugging a projector screen out of the closet when the strap broke, sending it crashing into the glass wall of Mace's office. Little squares of glass rained down all over me and the floor.
"Are you trying to destroy this office?" Garrett asked. "You're going to single-handedly raise our insurance premiums."
"Sorry," I said to Mace's brother.
"What are you even doing?" he asked.
"Reorganizing the closet."
"That's not part of your job description," he retorted.
"Mace told me to. He wanted me to reorganize the closet and make an inventory of all the snacks and create a survey for the office of people's favorite food items," I rattled off.
Garrett looked taken aback. He shook his head. "No."
"No?"
"No. That is beneath you."
"He's my boss…"
Garrett snorted. "Mace likes to think he runs this company, but finances are the backbone of any empire. Your talents are wasted on tidying. You're good at all that communications business, correct?"
I nodded.
