He won’t recognize you, I tell myself, and I sincerely hope I can manifest that into reality. Considering he wouldn’t expect to see me here, I’ll have the advantage of being out of place while also being someone easily overlookable.
Just have to keep my head down and keep doing my job.
I haven’t met the other man, the tattooed one bouncing the baby, but I know who he is. Theo Monroe, former GrippaPeen star and one-third owner of the retreat center. Also someone who, according to Sabrina at the coffee shop, would have possibly jerked off in a box of cereal once upon a time.
One of the other housekeepers pointed him out to me yesterday, as if I wouldn’t have researched the hell out of anywhere I intended to work to be able to recognize the owners on sight, which clearly, she doesn’t know.
But I’m not worried Theo will recognize me.
Theo didn’t sit on the board of directors of one of the largest arts endowment charities in the Northeast with me for five years.
Jonas Rutherford, however—who’s starred in half the movies his family’s entertainment conglomerate makes, and who married Theo’s sister, Emma, last year—did.
I turn my back on the men, flip the vacuum off, and get busy winding up the cord.
I’m not done, but I’m done enough. Not getting fired if someone notices the back part of the carpet didn’t have a vacuum run over it today, even if it low-key annoys me to leave a job incomplete.
“This has clusterfuck written all over it,” Theo’s saying to Jonas, who laughs.
“It was your idea.”
“I didn’t think they’d go for it. I just wanted them to leave me alone.”
“Too late now.”
“It’s not too late. Cancel.”
Jonas cackles while I hustle through pulling the vacuum closer and closer to the plug in the wall so I can completely bolt out of here.
Later, I’ll wonder what Theo got into that has Jonas cackling—I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him cackle—but right now, I don’t care what’s prompted it.
Right now, I need to get out of here.
When the damn vacuum cord is plugged in three feet from where the men are standing.
Maybe I should ditch the vacuum and pretend I have a personal emergency and come back and get it later.
I can fake food poisoning.
From the lunch I brought from home. Definitely would have to clarify I didn’t get food poisoning from eating here at the retreat center.
“Excuse me, miss,” Jonas says.
Fuuuuuuck.
He’s not talking to me.
Please, please,pleasetell me he’s not talking to me.
“Miss?” he repeats.
Dammit.
A quick glance around confirms for me that no one else is in here.
By default, he has to be talking to me.
I angle more in his direction, not looking up, and make my voice higher-pitched than it normally is while I adjust my glasses. Like he makes me nervous.
