I needed to find Tess.
The elevator pinged.
“Are you all coming to the food art class?” Vera asked excitedly. “We’re learning how to make corgi bento boxes.”
“I have some work I have to do.”
“Is Tess back? Does she want to go?”
“I actually need to meet up with her.”And find her and beg her to come back.
“Ah!” Vera gave me a wink. “I can take the girls so you can have your ‘meeting!’”
But where was Tess?I decided to try her house after digging up her address from the company directory.
I planned my speech for begging her to come back. But as the car pulled up in front of a dilapidated apartment building, I suddenly had a horrifying thought. I technically should not have looked up her address. If she wanted to, she could file a lawsuit for workplace harassment. It was not a good look for a billionaire boss to show up at his fired assistant’s apartment in the middle of the night.
Someone behind us honked.
“Can you just pull into the alley?” I asked the driver.
Maybe I should leave, but I needed to talk to Tess.
29
Tess
“You know you’re going to have to go see him.”
“You could just ask him at work tomorrow.” I groaned.
“I’m not talking to Beck,” Maeve said, horrified. “He might fire me. Then where will we be? We’ll be homeless.”
“We really shouldn’t be living here anyway,” I admitted, poking my pencil at the spongy wall.
“You need your phone.”
“To be fair, it’s Beck’s phone.”
“But it’s your SIM card, and you’re still paying the bill,” Maeve reminded me.
“Shit. My bills! My student loan payments! You can’t even work for the temp office without a phone.” I sat down heavily on the rickety couch that was in front of the bunk beds. It cracked, and the corner sagged.
“Maybe we should try harder to find another living situation. We could sign up for a house-sitting website and be paid to live in a swanky penthouse.”
“I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“Of course it’s a thing.”
“I think it turns into a sex thing.”
“No, that’s those deals on Craigslist where a guy is like, ‘come move in and be a maid for room and board,’ and you get there, and he’s like, ‘here’s your room, don’t mind the sex dungeon décor.’”
I went back to baking my pie. I hadn’t been able to properly enjoy my dessert after the tapas fiasco.
Also, screw Beck. I furiously worked the pie dough, which wasn’t good because the pie dough liked to be cold, and I was making it as hot as my ex-boss.
“No, he is not hot.”
