"Calm down. Give it a minute."
"We don't have any extra fucking minutes!" Now I'm really stressed. If this data doesn't load—and soon—I'm fucked. I check back at the status bar.
"Oh good—Walter it's done; it's at 100 percent! I'm ejecting the USB stick; we did it."
I pop out the USB drive, and it slips out of my fingers and onto the floor. Shit. I look around, trying to find it. Just great. Where the hell is it? I get down on my knees and search for it, and I finally find it, nestled behind the leg of a chair. As soon as I have it in my hands, I hear the sound of footsteps approaching.
"What are you doing in here?"
It's Cheryl. Shit.
"I—uh—I just—"
&n
bsp; Then I hear Walter in my ear. "Tell her you were looking for an earring that you lost; she'll believe that," he says.
"I was just looking for an earring that I must've dropped," I say.
Cheryl raises one skeptical eyebrow. "You dropped an earring? Here, in Ethan’s office?”
"That's right," I say. "Well, I'm not sure if it was in here, per say. It could be somewhere else, but I just wanted to make sure."
"And why would it be in here?" Cheryl asks. "Or maybe the better question is, why would you have ever needed to be in here? To say the earring might be here is to imply you've spent time here. Only our developers come in here."
"Oh I—uh—I was taking a tour of the place the other day," I say.
"In here?"
“Well, Ethan and I…” I trail off.
Cheryl looks at me. “Ethan and you, what?”
I roll my eyes as if asking her if she really needs me to spell out the fact that we were fucking.
“Right,” Cheryl says after a minute. “You fucked him.”
“Or he fucked me, you know?” I say, giving her some sass. “It was kind of mutual.”
“Do you always sleep with your clients?” Cheryl asks me.
“It’s been my philosophy to get to know someone since high school,” I tell her sweetly as she raises her eyebrows at me. Fuck her. Interrogating me and shit.
"Did you just so happen to develop that philosophy at … say … Man Chasers LLC?" she asks.
When she says this I'm floored. How did she know that? And I'm sure that shock is written all over my face.
"What are you talking about?"
"Oh come on Brittney," she says. "Do you think I don't know? I know all about your business."
"This has nothing to do with my business," I say. There's no use lying and trying to tell her that Man Chaser's LLC doesn't exist. She obviously knows all about it. I have to just go with it.
"I hope not," she says.
"Being an actress for Illicit Entertainment has nothing to do with my previous work," I say, confirming my stance.
"For your sake, I hope you're right," Cheryl says. Her gaze has intensified. "Because if you try to pull something here, you'll regret it. That much I can promise."