Kat
I grindmy teeth and slam the bottom of a wine bottle into the ice bucket. The giant piece of ice that was there falls apart under the glass onslaught, but the bottle doesn’t break.
Not that I wish it would. Not really, because then there would be chardonnay and maybe also blood everywhere, and I’d be causing a scene, but God I want to break something right now and this wine bottle is the best candidate.
But no, I don’t even get that satisfaction. The bottle remains stubbornly whole, so all I can do is load more wine bottles into the bucket to sell them for $5 a glass to people looking at art and bidding on pies.
“Everything okay?” asks Anna Grace, who’s materialized behind the bar with me. You wouldn’t think that someone so loud all the time could also be so sneaky, but Anna Grace contains multitudes.
“Great,” I say, and do a thing with my face that’s supposed to be a smile. It might be a grimace instead. “Everything is going very great.”
“Uh huh,” she says, and stops, tilting her head to one side, her blonde curls rearranging themselves.
I sigh, take a deep breath, and try to collect myself. Thankfully the bar is at the back of the theater, so at least I don’t feel like I’m being stared at.
The pie auction, on the other hand, is right next to the stage and there are lights and tables and signs and oh holy hell, what did I sign myself up for?
“It’s been a week,” I tell Anna Grace, who already knows it’s been a week. “I just. You know.”
She puts her clipboard down on the bar and engulfs me in a big, warm Valkyrie hug.
“You don’t have to stay,” she tells the top of my head. “Go home. Fuck the pies, they’ll auction themselves.”
“I don’t want to go home,” I mutter into her shoulder. “If I go home I’ll just lie on the couch and think and that’s even worse.”
She responds by hugging me tighter.
“Work was the one thing that was going well,” I say. I’m telling Anna Grace stuff she already knows, but I feel like I have to say it again or I might crack apart into a million pieces from nerves. “And now even that has been cruelly taken from me.”
She pets my hair.
“He emailed me today,” I tell her, not for the first time. “He wanted to make sure I could put my personal feelings aside and remain professional since I’ll be sharing his office.”
“Fucking asshole,” she agrees.
“He wrote that to me! His office. It’s my office, you self-important ass-goblin.”
“They can’t put him into another office?” she asks, because I love Anna Grace but she’s the kind of person who can’t resist offering a solution.
“I didn’t try,” I admit. “I’ve only been there for six months and I don’t want to be difficult, you know? Especially not when things were good at work.”
Anna Grace just makes a soothing noise, thankfully not offering more solutions even though I can tell she wants to.
“And I yelled at Silas Flynn about the fire door and everyone heard me and now they all think I’m a lunatic,” I say. “So. You know.”
“Kat, I promise everyone in this building has yelled at Silas for something or other,” she says, and I just snort.
“He’s such a dick.”
“Mhm.”
I finally pull back, since we’re just sort of embracing behind the bar and it probably looks weird, then adjust my glasses on my face.
“Why do people like him?” I complain. “Do they not know what an asshole he is? Or do they just not mind?”
“Your problem with Silas is its own thing,” she says, very diplomatically.
“He made me cry in front of the dean!”