The door to the handicap stall barely slams behind me before they start snickering cattily.
“I mean, is it, like, really that hard to be Mr. Svensson’s assistant?”
“Please. If it were me, I’d already be Mrs. Salinger Svensson.”
“I don’t care how mean he is—he’s so fucking hot.”
“And rich!”
“You’d think he’d spring for someone who could at least wear a skirt.”
“Like, I thought there was, like, a dress code here?”
Sucking in a breath, I yell over the partitions, “I can hear you talking, and—word to the wise from someone who’s been in the corporate world longer than you’ve been shoving tampons up your vaginas— save your shit-talking for girls’ night, not the office!”
They make disgusted noises, then their heels clack on the tile as they leave me to my tears.
I’m not crying over them—maybe if I was still twenty, but now? I am officially too old for that shit.
No, I have bigger problem.
Taking out my phone, I scroll through to delete the text messages that have already accumulated in the forty-five minutes since I’d seen him.
Not Salinger. His text messages usually consist of complaints about the printer, demands that he wants me to meet, and issues like, Why the fuck does it matters that it’s two in the morning, because it’s eight o’clock in London and he needs that memo writtennow.
The other guy has sent three dick pics, two death threats, and a photoshopped picture of my corgi next to a wood chipper. A sob escapes.
Pepper whines and head-butts my legs. It’s comforting, or it would be if her whines didn’t quickly devolve into howls of anxiety. Picking her up, I hold her to my chest.
“We’re breathing in, we’re breathing out,” I say, trying to calm down the panting dog. “Have your Puppuccino.”
She slurps the rest of the whipped cream while I stuff her into her anti-anxiety jacket.
It’s escalating, right? This is escalation.
It’s my own dumb fault. I have a college degree. I should have been smarter, should have seen it coming, should have handled it differently.
“I’ll move. I’ll just move to another state.”
It won’t work though. He has money—he’ll find me.
I’m not safe anywhere.
Well, except here.
In his office, Salinger paces back and forth behind the glass wall that separates him from the unwashed masses of the interns. Sensing movement, his eyes lock on me as I scurry to the safety of my desk, collapsing in a puff of dog hair, bags, and stress next to Jess.
Mumbling, “Coffee,” I suck down the last of my drink, wishing I’d bought two.
Behind his glass wall, Salinger is seething. At me? At his phone call?
“Okay, sure, that can be a new fashion thing, I guess.” Jess jabs me in the thigh. “Prepare to get a dressing down from the new interns. I swear you’d think this was theVogueoffice or something. They haven’t even been here twenty-four hours, and I say that literally because I was literally here from sunup to sunup yesterday when Johnson’s team was going after that Genome company buyout.”
Jess looks pointedly at my shoe.
“Wh—what? Oh!” I pick the toilet paper off my heel, and it flutters down into the trash can. “Sorry, I’m really out of it. Had to ride in the elevator with Salinger. I don’t know if I’m going to recover.”
“Yummy!” Jess grins and spins around in her chair.
