“It’s important to get along with your coworkers.”
He sounds exactly like Ben, who threw that same exact advice in my face when I couldn’t stop blubbering to him about my own work problems. My face reddens, recalling all that awkwardness of Friday night. “I guess you’re right. Too bad they all hate me.”
“Nah, they don’t hate you.”
I move past him—his cat glaring at me the whole way—and with a pat on Elijah’s shoulder, I whisper, “Put on your game face, buddy. Today, we’re gonna remind ourselves what we’re doing all of this for,” before throwing my messenger bag over a shoulder and heading for the door.
I have a boss to impress.
8
Benjamin won’t wring a neck today.
“This would be a lot easier if you’d give it to me straight,” I state into my phone in the back of the car. “Has he—or has he not—posted the apology we sent him?”
“Yes. And also no.”
“He cannot have done both. If he altered the apology in any way, then it was not the one we crafted for him.”
“He made a revision or two. Y-Yes, sir.”
I shut my eyes and pinch my nose with a couple fingers. “Tell me the revisions.”
“Before the bit about his actions being f-foolish …” Rebekah’s voice falters. She swallows hard, then resumes. “He suggested that if any of his loyal f-f-fans thought he was out of line with what he said, then h-he …” She sighs, then clears her throat. “H-he … um.”
“Then he …?”
“He … would like to formally request that they … I quote … ‘go suck his parakeet’s dicky-licky’. Err, a’hem … sorry: ‘Dick-a-lick’. I read that wrong.”
I massage my forehead. Fucking pop stars. “And that whole bit about his actions being foolish … did he ‘revise’ that, too?”
“He cut it completely from the apology, sir.”
My eyes flash. “That was the apology.” I keep my cool. I always do, no matter what. “Get with Jessica and the others. Tell him the ‘Jersey boy’ needs serious damage control. It’s very important we act fast. I can’t be there for three more hours, as I have to meet another client for lunch, but I’ll write a response in the next ten, then shoot it through Mimi and Vick.”
“Do you want to speak to Haw—s-sorry—the Jersey boy?”
“No. I’ll rip off his dick and make him suck his own if I do,” I answer coolly, helping myself to a drink from the minibar. “Get Patrick to speak to our Jersey boy Hawk. Pat’s from Jersey, he’ll get through to the punk. We need him to delete the post. Maybe we come at this from another angle. Dick-a-lick. He used a silly word, we can pass it off as his unfortunate sense of humor that gets the best of him. We can’t use the off-his-meds thing again because, like meds, the effect of that excuse has long worn off. Plus, we don’t want to make light of those with real mental illnesses. He mentioned his parakeet as well. Might want to follow any trending activity on animal rights activists, avian activists, and the like.”
“Got it. Noted all that.”
“Tweet out about his last leg of the tour, how many sold-out shows he has, et cetera. Oh, how about we rerun the story of that orphan kid he brought up on the stage with him during his show in San Diego. That’ll warm hearts. Flood out the negative, every outlet, and replace it with good.”
“Will do. Anything else, sir?”
“Yeah. Make sure my office is stocked with hard liquor by the time I’m in.” I hang up my phone with one curt tap, then toss it onto the long, empty seat by my side as I kick back the shot of brandy, which doesn’t so much as stir under the smooth, skillful driving of my faithful chauffeur.
I’m not completely focused right now and haven’t been the whole damned weekend. It’s unfortunate timing, considering that every celebrity my company represents seems to have had some sort of crisis or another this weekend of all weekends. One client, an athlete from Michigan, slipped and said a gay slur during a radio interview. Another client punched a tooth out of a persistent super-fan with a camera. Then there’s another client, a beautiful Broadway actress in New York, who was caught on camera cussing out a restaurant manager for putting onions in her soup. The video went viral Saturday night—seven million views and quickly counting—and now she’s the Onion Wench.
And despite all of this chaos, hysteria, and social media hell swarming around me, my mind is stuck on just one thing:
Trevor.
Every single minute of my Saturday was spent trying not to think about that sexy boy from Friday night. But every time I sat down to eat, my mind wandered to the way his plush lips tasted. Every time I sit in the back of this car—like I’m doing now—my hands inevitably rest in my crotch, and by just shutting my eyes, my hands turn into his, and he’s massaging me the way I wanted him to that night.