Damaged Grump (Bad Chicago Bosses)

I can’t let sentimentality derail my entire day, or my plan.

Callie stares out her window while I glare out mine—until her soft voice pulls me from my brooding.

“I’m done,” she says crisply. “Let me be clear. I did your dirty work once and it made my fricking skin crawl. I gave you what you wanted. If you meant what you said, it’s time to put up or shut up, boss. Go help Easterly. Help the other girls. Help them and let me do what I was hired for. I won’t be your Girl Friday anymore.”

My eyes dagger her as my heart beats my ribs.

Fuck, this is bad.

Whatever answer I could give lodges in my throat.

There’s no doubt in her words—just bold, deserved defiance.

What’s it like, I wonder, to see the world with such clarity?

What’s it like to see right and wrong in such stark colors, when all I’ve ever known are muddy shades of grey?

* * *

I can’t get that conversation with Callie out of my head.

Go fucking figure.

I let her off at her office hours ago.

It’s been a long damn day, and I think I might be giving Frank and the entire legal department an aneurysm. Still, every stray moment when I’m not putting out fires or sorting through editorial calendars, my mind leaps back to the woman who’d love to stab me between the eyes.

The pain in her voice when she talked about her father.

The anger when she flipped me the bird without actually holding up her middle finger.

Damn my curiosity.

Damn it to hell.

I shake my head as I walk through the cubicles, listening to my team packing up and straggling out on their way to after-work cocktails and home.

Back in my office, a little Google-fu gives me a clearer picture of Alvin Landry’s fate.

He’s mostly been out of the news for the past decade, minus a few rowdy DUIs with a side order of drunk and disorderly conduct. Plus, a few lackluster “comeback” performances at casinos and odd opening acts here and there.

You’d think he’d settle back and find some sorely needed peace in his retirement now that he’s past being interesting to the greasier rags.

I may be Lucifer to some people, but I’m not a bottom feeder who latches on to the wounded like a lamprey and sucks everything out of them.

What’s happened to him now to leave Callie so hurt?

It’s not my business.

I shouldn’t fucking care.

Barrett is the only person I have the energy to care about, but there’s something there, dammit.

Something that says Callie’s still waters run deeper than I realized.

Is there a darkness in her like my own?

Is she lost in the same way I am?

A fate I’d never wish on anyone.

If someone hurt her dad the same way Haydn mutilated my brother, I already know her soul.

I know her hatred because it’s the same as mine.

She’s so pure. So righteous. So sweet.

Could there be a heart becoming as scorched black with cynical disgust for the world as mine underneath her sugarcoating? A heart I’m injecting with poison by using her like a wind-up toy for my justice?

I wonder.

I also wonder why it bothers me so much to see Callie losing what little idealism she has left.

9

Feeling Blue (Callie)

There’s not enough coffee in the known universe to get me through this day.

Correction: through this life.

It’s been a migraine maker lately, and I’ve nearly broken down in a screaming fit several times.

Worse, I’m stuttering like a stuck engine, and while I normally pride myself on being able to handle people even under stress without cracking...

I’m so freakin’ close.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to ask people to repeat themselves today.

Also, the number of times I’ve had to shut my eyes and count to ten and breathe to keep my cool through nonstop questions about layout spreads, photo credits, bylines, taglines, tan lines, and celebrity guest blogs.

It’s not even the supergrump sea hawk’s fault.

It’s not just his fault.

This morning, I woke up to Dad passed out in the living room, sprawled across an easy chair like a rag doll someone flung aside after they were done playing. Except, no doll would clutch an empty whiskey bottle in a death grip.

All around his overstuffed chair, more beer bottles and crumpled cans, glinting in the light like deadly gunmetal.

He’ll drink himself to death soon.

Alcohol poisoning is a real thing—and that’s if his liver doesn’t hand in its two weeks’ notice.

When I’d shaken him awake with my heart in my throat, he gave me the usual excuses.

“I’m fine, Callie-girl.”

“Just needed some fresh air, peanut.”

“Come walk around the block with me. Cures a damn hangover like this in fifteen minutes.”

Like I couldn’t feel him shaking when he leaned on me.

Like it wasn’t telling enough that he couldn’t even walk on his own without my support.

I told myself then that it was the stink of hard liquor wafting off him like cheap cologne that made my nose prickle and my eyes sting.