Panic grips me. I know two things off the bat, and I’ll give ‘em to you as they occurred to me:
1)No one’s gonna notice I’m (discretely checking iPhone) five minutes late. Yippee! I got away with it again. I am a rockstar.
2)No one’s gonna notice I’m late ‘cause something much worse than Ashley being late to work is going down. Much, much worse.
Damn.
My best friend, Natalie, spots me and rushes right over.
“Ashley, there you are!” she hisses. “They’re going to do the announcement in like two minutes!”
“Announcement? What announcement?”
“Oh my god, girl, you really don’t read work emails outside of work, do you? They sent it at 5:30 this morning. There’s some big announcement happening this morning, and, like, everyone thinks they know what it is. But for reals, no one knows. It’s all just gossip.”
She’s pulling me toward the back of the room, which is where everyone just shoves the shit they don’t know what to do with—it’s basically our communal shit storage area. Old copies of our magazines, props for photo shoots, Christmas decorations—all that crap that no one knows what to do with and no one cares enough to organize.
But today, they had cleared all of that out, and put a dais up in the middle of it, with a microphone planted right up front.
You know, like what they’d do if they were planning on making a big announcement.
Like we don’t have jobs anymore.
Fuuuuuccccckkkkkkk…
Suddenly, not getting laid this weekend doesn't seem so important to me. I could be fired. In like three minutes, my fucking job could be gone.
I feel panic thrumming through my veins.
“Natalie,” I say, my voice rising in pitch. “Are we getting fired?” I may or may not have ended that question in a high-pitched squeak.
She whips around and grabs my arms, shaking me. “Don’t you freak the fuck out on me, Ash!” she commands, staring me in the eyes as she does it. She could be scary when she wants to be, and she wants to be right now. “Let’s hear what they say, and then freak out. For all we know, they’ve gathered us together to tell us that we’re getting extra large Christmas bonuses this year.”
“Extra large” would imply that we've received Christmas bonuses previously, but before I can point out how we’ve never gotten a penny as any kind of bonus, Mr. Isaouk steps up to the microphone.
This is a really bad sign, ‘cause he is a class A dickwad who’d fuck over his own mother for an extra $50. He also happens to own Blush.
No, seeing him definitely does not give me the warm and fuzzies.
“Hello?” he says, the mic screeching with feedback. Everyone groans with pain as the sound reverberates through their heads, but it does the trick; everyone in the room turns to stare at him.
Mr. Dickwad Boss Man begins droning on about how we’re a family and he cares about all of us, which could not be farther from the truth, and even he didn’t seem convinced by his speech when I glanced to the side.
The right side.
The side where, right at this very moment, the guy I stole the cab from not even 40 minutes ago is sta
nding.
And he’s staring right at me.
And … oh god, it dawns on me … he's the Wolf of New York.
I
am
so