by R. R. Banks
I heard a knock on my door and I smoothed my hair back.
“You can come back in, Mr. Glass,” I called.
“Actually, it’s not Mr. Glass.”
The voice was familiar and I felt my jaw tense hearing it. My fingers clenched around each other on the top of my desk and I debated telling her to go away, but I knew that that wasn’t going to fly. I relaxed the tension in my shoulders and leaned back in the chair.
“Come in,” I said.
The door opened and Snow looked around it at me. She looked just about as thrilled to see me sitting there as I did to see her, which was uplifting in a way. If it was going to make me miserable to have to be in her presence every minute that I was at the office, it was comforting to know that I was making her just as unhappy with my presence as well.
“Hi,” she said.
She pressed the door closed behind her, but only took half a step away from it. I couldn’t decide if it was that she was feeling intimidated and didn’t want to be too far from the door so that she could escape as soon as she wanted to, or if it was that she felt the same forcefield of negativity between us that I did, keeping her from getting any closer. I would prefer if it was the former.
“Hello.”
I could have said more, but I wanted to watch her squirm. She stared at me for a few moments as if she was expecting something else and then she took a step toward me.
“Look, I just wanted to come in here and say congratulations on your marriage and no hard feelings. I hope that we can put everything behind us and focus on finding success for the company in working together.”
“Working together?” I asked with a hint of mirthless laugh in the words. “Surely you’re kidding.”
What I could only imagine was Snow trying to look beseeching melted from her face and she tilted her head to look at me with a more quizzical expression that I knew others found adorable, but that I only thought was simpering and obnoxious.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You don’t seriously think that we’re going to be working together, do you? Like some happy little team? Like friends? You can’t really think that.”
“Well, I just thought that since you’re here…”
“I’m here for one reason and one reason only, and that is so that I can climb myself to the top where I have always belonged. You’ve been interfering with my success for as long as I can remember, and I’m not going to allow you to do it any longer, Snow.”
“You’re not going to allow me?” she asked, a sneer dissolving all of the sweetness that had been on her face. “Who do you think you are to allow me to do anything? I worked harder than any person you have ever met to get to where I am. All you did was sleep your way to a seat in this office. That doesn’t make you good at your job and doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful. If anything, it means that you are going to drag this company down in the same way you have dragged down every other agency and project that you have ever been linked to.” She put one hand on her hip and cocked it at me, looking me up and down in a scrutinizing way that filled me with fury. “Of course, you managed to use all of your…assets…to get you out of all of those situations, too, didn’t you? Or did you think that no one knew about that?”
I slammed my hands down on the desk in front of me and was starting to push myself up into a standing position when there was another knock on the door.
“What?” I snapped.
The door opened and Mr. Glass stepped in, one thin hand gripping a stack of folders.
“I retrieved those files that you wanted, Mrs. Royal.”
“Those are my files,” Snow gasped, staring at the files in Mr. Glass’s hands. “Who gave you permission to go into my office?”
“I did,” I said, not able to keep all of the smugness out of my voice. “As far as I’m concerned, every office in this building is mine. You don’t get to decide who goes anywhere, especially when it pertains to accounts that I need to review.”
“I already submitted my progress reports on this account,” Snow argued. “You don’t need my files.”
“Of course, I do,” I said. “This is my company now. Royal and Company is under my guidance now, and that means that I will do absolutely anything that I want to to make sure that I know what’s going on here and make the changes that will need to be made to ensure this company continues to thrive.”
“You mean so that you can ensure that you get to take all of the credit and look like you know what you are doing.”
“I don’t have anything else to say to you,” I said. “You can go now.”
“What am I supposed to do? You just took all of my work.”
“Figure it out. If you are really as valuable as everyone seems to think that you are, it shouldn’t be a problem.”
I settled back in my chair again, looking down at the files in my hands in a demonstration of dismissing Snow. She hesitated for a few moments and then let out an angry sigh before stomping out of the room. I hadn’t been paying attention to the words in the file until she was gone, but almost as soon as I heard the sound of the door slamming, the name of the account sank into my thoughts. I felt the anger inside me growing and heat spread across my cheeks.
“The Diamond Mine?” I asked through gritted teeth. “She is building this campaign?”
Mr. Glass nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “The client told us that Miss Whitman came highly recommended and they were extremely impressed by her initial brief. They asked that she helm their entire campaign and expanded the scope to include print media and unique boutique marketing designed specifically for them as well.”
I felt my body shaking, the anger inside me at a point now that I wasn’t able to control it. Mr. Glass had already heard the angry exchange between me and Snow and I didn’t care if he knew just how infuriated I was about finding out that Snow had landed the account that I had been courting for months. An extremely exclusive nightclub, The Diamond Mine promised to be an exceptionally lucrative account that would only become more valuable the more popular the club became. This client really only needed to advertise to the most elite of clientele due to the restrictions of the club, and what Mr. Glass was describing went well beyond that. What Snow had proposed, and was now planning on delivering to them, straddled the line between true advertising and PR, something that was more than what other advertising agencies would have ever offered, but that was exactly what had handed this highly sought-after account right into her waiting hands.
“She’s the best,” Mr. Glass said. “It is my professional opinion that you would be best served aligning with her and continuing to encourage her to expand and pursue further clients for the agency.”
I looked up at the man with fire in my eyes. He had to be fucking kidding. He wanted me to become yet another of Snow’s many admirers and admit that she was better than me? Absolutely not. That was never going to happen. There was only room for one of us in the industry and that meant that Snow was simply going to have to go.
Chapter Four
Hunter
I stepped up to the door of what was once Mr. Royal’s office and hesitated. I didn’t really want to go through it. I didn’t really want to step into the office and face the woman now sitting behind the desk. In fact, if I could have just turned around and left, pretending that I had never gotten the memo that she wanted to speak to me, I would have, but that wasn’t an option. Unfortunately, the new Mrs. Royal had inherited the entire company from her new husband and that meant that she had inherited me right along with it. I was at the mercy of her bidding.
I took a quick glimpse over toward Cindy’s desk and saw the slight woman hunched over her computer, typing feverishly. I was fairly certain that she wasn’t actually typing anything of consequence and was instead just trying to do whatever she could to look busy so that she didn’t have to face the new Madam President. This never would have been a concern if Mr. Royal was still leading the company. Cindy was his se
cretary, responsible for all the same things as the classic 1960s version of the position, just without the shady innuendo. She answered phones, took messages, and typed up memos. If Mr. Royal needed something more than that, he came to me. As his personal assistant, I took care of all of the other musings of his mind, either helping him to accomplish what he was envisioning or doing what I could to rein him in and turn his focus back to more practical pursuits. It had once been an ideal job. Walter Royal was as hilarious and eccentric as he was romantic and impulsive, which meant that his ideas were often far-flung and a blast to try to follow, but also that it didn’t surprise me in the least that he had gotten swept up by the thought of a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a young, mysterious woman.
Now the job was nothing short of a nightmare. Lucille Royal had been in the office for less than a week and I already hated her. She was cold and harsh, smiling only in that way that I half expected to see a forked tongue flicker in and out when she looked at certain people in the office. Her absconding with the doughnuts and coffee from the break room had resulted in a small riot, but that had gone nowhere but back into the conference room for an impromptu seminar about the importance of health and nutrition in the workplace. Being her assistant had left me feeling like a twelve-year-old hoping to get an interview for his school paper by shadowing a powerful CEO. She had me scurrying for juice and sourcing essential oils rather than doing anything that even closely resembled advertising. It had been an order to drive two hours to an herbal shop that turned out to be the tiny back room of a woman’s cottage to purchase particularly ominous-looking substances intended for “women’s uses” that pushed me to threatening to quit. Lucille had hung my contract over my head, though, and I knew that I was screwed.
Knowing that I couldn’t delay it any longer, I knocked on the door and waited for Mrs. Royal’s response.
“Yes?”
Always pleasant.
It had taken only two days for the saccharine smile and false enthusiasm to disappear and for the new president to start showing her true character. I wasn’t sure how many other people within the company had seen her the way that I had, but I knew that the changes that she had already implemented were just the beginning and that Mr. Royal would have been crushed to see even the beginning of her façade cracking.
Not bothering to announce myself, I stepped into the office and closed the door behind me. She was sitting at the desk with a stack of files in front of her. There was something in her eyes that I might have called a glint if it wasn’t so dark. With a foreboding feeling in my gut, I walked up to the desk and dropped down into the chair across from her.
“You wanted to speak with me?” I said.
Lucille looked up at me from the paper that was on the desk in front of her, then back at it.
“Yes,” she said. “I want you to bring this to H.R. for me and then assist with the removal.”
I watched as she added her sharp, severe signature to the bottom of the page and then took it from her as she held it out to me.
“Removal?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I have a feeling that this might be an unpleasant dismissal and I would prefer that the former employee not cause disruption for the rest of the team.”
I looked down at the paper she had handed me. It was a notice of dismissal letting the H.R. department know that she had decided to remove someone from their post. I glanced at the name and my eyes snapped to Lucille.
“Snow Whitman?” I asked in shock.
“Yes,” she said.
I was really beginning to hate hearing that word come out of her mouth.
“Why could you possibly want to fire Snow?”
“I have my reasons,” Lucille said. “I don’t believe that I need to justify them to you.”
I resisted the urge to crumble the notice up and turned, stalking out of the office. When I got a few steps away from the office, I looked down at the paper again, looking at the section where Lucille was supposed to indicate the reasoning behind her dismissal of Snow. This was not the first time that I had seen one of these forms, though all of the others that I had brought to H.R. had been from Walter. The others that I had seen had long explanations, detailing problems with the person and the specific breeches of contract that they had enacted to justify the dismissal. This page, though, only had one phrase. Incompatible with work environment.
The simplicity of the statement made the entire situation even more frustrating. I had been working at Royal and Company for a few years longer than Snow had, and I had never seen anyone like her. She came in like she already owned the world, yet was never oppressive or arrogant. Instead, her confidence in herself seemed to have injected the entire office with more energy and enthusiasm, and immediately everyone worked harder and pushed themselves more. I understood why the new accounts always wanted her. She had a way of looking at a company and being able to create a campaign that made them feel as though they were the only focus of her life. Her work was unique and exceptionally effective, which was why Mr. Royal had been actively grooming her to step into a higher leadership position when he eventually retired. Now that Lucille was around, however, that seemed less and less like a realistic prospect.
I took a few steps toward the H.R. office, but then changed my mind. If the She-Devil of Advertising was going to oust Snow, the least that I could do was give her a heads-up before security stalked down and escorted her out of the building. I made my way to Snow’s office and walked in without knocking. She looked up at me, more startled by my sudden appearance than she was irritated that I hadn’t announced myself before entering.
“Hi, Hunter,” she said.
I noticed that she appeared to be building a statue out of paperclips and it temporarily distracted me from my original mission.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She looked at her project and shrugged.
“Madam President confiscated my files for the Diamond Mine account and I finished my other campaign presentations, so I figured that I would design some furniture.”
“Well, not having access to your files seems to be the least of the worries that you have when it comes to Lucille.”
“What do you mean?”
I held the paper out to her and Snow dropped the paperclips before taking it. She read it in stunned silence for a few seconds before standing up sharply and glaring at me.
“Are you serious?” she asked. “She’s trying to fire me for being incompatible? She’s the one who wanders in here and starts changing things, and I’m the one who’s incompatible?”
“I’m sorry, Snow. I wish that there was something that I could do about it.”
She sat back into her chair, shaking her head with a look of pure shock on her face. There wasn’t even the anger that I would have anticipated, just an almost hollow look, as if she didn’t know what she was supposed to do and didn’t want to step out from behind her desk because if she did she was going to have to really accept what was happening. After a few seconds of processing the information, she looked up at me and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere. She can’t just fire me. She has to have a reason for getting rid of me, and she doesn’t have one. I’m not going to let her get away with it.”
I felt a surge of hope.
“You don’t have to,” I said, thinking about one of the more eventful firings that I had been a part of in the last few years. “Do you remember when that girl Tina was fired a couple of years back? There were about ten different reasons why she was eligible to be fired, but she said that she wasn’t and threatened to bring it to court. I don’t think that it needs to go that far, though.”
“Why not?”
“Anybody with eyes can see that the two of you don’t exactly get along.”
“That’s an understatement.”
“And she wants more than anything to be more successful than you. So, let her try. Get out of her way for a while and give her
a chance to see that it’s not competition with you that has kept her from being as successful as she thinks that she can be. If you just stay out of her sight for a while, I’m sure that the heat will die down and you’ll be able to come back without this turning into one big hot mess.”
“What am I supposed to do? Hide in my office and pretend that I’m not here until she figures out that the reason that she isn’t as successful as I am is because she doesn’t have the skills that I do?”
“No,” I said, my mind churning now. “You’re going to actually go away. Give her exactly what she wants. Be out of the office and out of her hair for a while.”
“How?”
“When was the last time that you took a vacation?”
Snow looked off into the middle distance for a second as if she were trying to pull that memory forward.
“Never,” she said. “Wait! Five years ago, I took three days off for that horrible christening.”
“That was over a weekend, so you took one day off, and you came in for a couple of hours that Friday morning and then stayed late Monday, so you took exactly no days off.”
Snow pursed her lips at me.
“Never,” she said.
“Exactly. That means that you have some serious accumulated vacation time. Ball it all up and take it.”
She looked at me as if she wasn’t entirely convinced.
“That would be about three months of vacation,” she said.
“We’ll call it a leave of absence. Just go. I’ll take care of getting Mrs. Royal in there to back off for a while.”
Snow nodded.
“Alright. I’ll go. But do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Steal back the Diamond Mine files and submit my preliminary ideas to the client. Explain to them that I’m taking a leave of absence, but that I will keep working on their campaign if they want me to when I return.”
“I will,” I said.
Snow pulled a huge purse out from under her desk and emptied her drawers into it. Swiping the paperclips into the bag and scooping her empty coffee mug into her hand, she walked around the desk and toward the door.
