“Morning, Chris!” Carol’s bright yellow blouse matches her cheery demeanor as she greets me from behind the reception desk. The Elemental Creative logo towers above her on the wall behind.
“Morning Carol, good weekend?” I ask. I grab my pass out of my jeans pocket to scan on the wall reader and open the glass door into the open plan office.
“Good, thanks. And yours?”
“Great, thanks.” I smile back at her and close the door behind me before making my way through several rows of desks, past the kitchen next to the boardroom, and over to our small alcove of desks. The rest of the team, minus our boss, Pietro, are already seated in their spots. Framed images of various creative marketing campaigns done for our clients adorn the walls.
The sight of the Brewed Coffee logo, printed on the paperwork sitting between Toby, another account manager, and Sara, who is supposedly our shared assistant but has been co-opted by Tony, makes my blood boil yet again. The Brewed account should have been mine, a crowning achievement after years of hard work for the company, but it was handed over to Tony after I missed a pivotal sales call. Alexander had gotten hurt when we were at askate park back in London and I’d taken him to the hospital, totally forgetting about the meeting. I had lost the account and been put on probation at work as a result.
My frustration with Tony’s grandiose attitude about working on what he calls “the number one brand in the country” is compounded anytime a new client is brought in that he deems beneath him. Tony suddenly becomes too busy to take on small accounts, leaving Pietro to assign those clients to me. But when bigger brands come in, he miraculously has space available in his portfolio.
He’s also become less discrete in his interactions with Sara around the office. More than once, I’ve caught his hand lingering over hers. And they regularly return from lunch breaks with disheveled appearances. Even Linda and Paolo, from finance on the other side of the office, have asked me if something is going on between them.
I take two deep inhales as I pull my laptop from my bag and remind myself,I will control my anger, I will not let my anger control me.
“Morning, Chris.” Julie looks up at me from her laptop with a broad smile. “Pietro’s running late this morning. He’s been called into HR and asked to push back the meeting to nine-thirty.”
Her smile turns to a smirk as she nods toward Tony and Sara.
An eerie tension hangs in the air.
“Morning guys,” I say to the two of them.
Sara looks up, cutting me a look of distain for misgendering her, with a complexion that almost matches her red dress.
She’s not worth it.
I sit down and take another deep inhale.
“Sorry. Morning, Sara.”
Her attention turns back to her laptop.
“Morning,” Tony mumbles. His shoulders are hunched over, making his black oversized T-shirt ride up, exposing his hairy lower back. His focus is locked onto his screen. The browser is open to a chart on a metrics website that reviews celebrities’audience demographics and reaches on socials. He adjusts his Harry Potter glasses with one hand and rapidly writes data from the screen down in his black notebook with the other.
Julie motions with her head toward the kitchen, and I get back up to follow her, pulling out my food container from my bag as I do.
“What’s wrong with them?” I ask, opening the fridge to slide in my lunch of chicken, rice, and avocado. I close the door, grab a glass from the side, and head over to the water fountain.
Julie reaches for a coffee cup and starts up the coffee machine.
“HR put a meeting request in over the weekend with Pietro,” she says, barely audible over the coffee machine grinding the beans. “I’m not sure, but I think word may have gotten to them about an inappropriate relationship going on between two of his team members.”
“You didn’t!” I gasp, my finger still pressed on the cold water button. The water starts to overflow my glass and I jerk it away.
“Of course not. Plausible deniability.” Julie wipes her hands on a towel and holds them up, then grabs her coffee from the machine. “But with the way they’ve been carrying on the last couple of weeks, it wouldn’t be hard for, say, Carol or Paolo to have noticed and mentioned something to HR.”
“Do you think they know?” A wave of excitement rises in my chest.
Exposure of their not-so-secret relationship would wipe the smug look right off Tony’s face. His holier-than-thou attitude would come down to earth with a thud. Heck, having a relationship with a junior colleague is a lot worse than missing one call, while on vacation no less, with a client. I might even get the Brewed account back.
“I told them that Pietro was in with HR when they got to the office, but they already looked pretty somber before I told them. Either they already know, or something else is going on between them.”
The wave of excitement turns into a ball of confusion.
What else could be going on?
“Keep me posted, won’t you?” Mischief is written all over my face.
