by Wild, Nikki
“My… arm,” he said at last, and I nodded slowly. “But it’s not an issue. I can write just fine. Drive, even. I don’t see what my arm has to do with being a competent salesperson…”
“It doesn’t,” I assured him. “It has nothing to do with it at all. But Mr. Culling feels that the perception of ExecuSpace might be marred by someone who doesn’t look like the rest of us do, and for him, that’s cause enough not to hire you.” I saw the look on his face, the slump in his shoulders, and added: “I really am sorry, Mr. Davies. But after a month of being lied to, I thought the truth might—”
“The truth does nothing for me, Miss Hearst,” he snarled, a surprising rage blazing in his eyes. I could see they were watering. They glimmered like hot coals. “A job is what I need. And even a shitty one for a shitty company would have been enough for me. But you people don’t give a shit about men like me, do you? All you see is a withered arm and you think that means I’m trash, that I can just be tossed into the gutter. You didn’t even have the decency to consider me for the position, did you? You just saw the arm. That’s all.”
I pursed my lips. This was exactly what I’d feared. Not only was Mr. Davies upset by the news, but he was taking that out on me, the nearest available target. I had to swallow the compulsion to invite him back to Ross’ office and knock on his door until he opened up, but Miguel would probably just call security and have them haul both Mr. Davies and myself out.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “If you’d like, I can get you the number for our corporate office in Virginia. There’s a woman named Patricia who could hear your complaint…”
“That’s enough,” Miguel said, finally loosening himself from the doorway and practically pushing me out of the way. “Mr. Davies, I’m Miguel Herrera, the general manager for ExecuSpace. Unfortunately, you just weren’t a good fit for the criteria we’re looking for right now. I’m sorry no one’s gotten back to you sooner, but we’ve all been very busy—”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Mr. Davies asked him, his face taut with barely-contained rage. “You must, because as much as I think your receptionist there could give a rat’s ass about what happens to me, at least she had the decency to be honest.”
I felt my own knot of anger and tried not to grimace. “Receptionist” was something of a dirty word amongst personal and administrative assistants. Even secretaries were higher up the food chain. A receptionist was a person who did the least amount of work in the industry, someone who answered a phone and filed a few papers, maybe. Lacy was a receptionist—barely. I didn’t appreciate being compared to her.
But I understood that this wasn’t about me. This was about Mr. Davies and his embarrassment at the treatment he’d endured. Though I’d meant for the truth to be helpful to him, I knew that it couldn’t have been easy to hear, and I tried to accept his hatred gracefully.
Miguel, however, was showing signs of cracking. I could see his brow lining with deep wrinkles and the muscle in his jaw was steadily twitching.
“Sir, I assure you, what Miss Hearst has said is in no way representative of our company’s values or beliefs. She is obviously misinformed.”
“Then why?” Mr. Davies demanded, his voice rising. “Why won’t Mr. Culling return my calls? Why did you decide not to hire me?”
Miguel sneered. “We’re not under any legal obligation to disclose that. In fact, our HR department discourages us from—”
“Fuck your HR department!” Mr. Davies railed, getting so close to Miguel’s face I could see spittle marring his skin. “And fuck you!”
Before Miguel could retaliate, Mr. Davies left, storming off through the doors to the elevator with steps that shook the office floor.
As the weight of his anger dissipated, I felt another sensation flooding in. What I had done was, objectively, the right thing. I’d given a man honestly when no one else would, and I’d stopped being the whipping girl everyone wanted me to be. I’d stood up for myself and for my own values. But at what cost?
Miguel turned to me. I raised my chin, doing my best to look confident, but not smug. I was preparing to defend my decision when the words I’d been dreading left his mouth.
“Get your things and turn in your key card. You’re fired.”
Almost without thinking and with shock softening the blow, I removed my lanyard and threw it at him.
“You can’t fire me. I quit five minutes ago.”
I grabbed my clutch from the front desk, turned, and strode out the doors, following Mr. Davies. Miguel was yelling something at me, but I couldn’t hear him—probably some clichéd movie-villain line about how I’d “never work in this town again.” He seemed like the type.
The blood rushing in my ears was deafening, and I could feel my body quaking as I pressed the button for the elevator car. Equal parts relief and dread seeped into me, but I tried not to let either one win until I heard Lacy’s shrill voice calling to me over the baritone roar of Miguel’s furor.
“But Maddy! I don’t know what all you do! Send me an e-mail with everything once you get home, okay?”
And then I finally let the dam burst. I laughed.
And as the elevator car finally reached my floor, and as it descended to the next, and the next, I laughed and laughed some more.
My laughter died as soon as I hit the lobby.
It wasn’t until I’d shown myself out through the revolving door that I realized the tears brimming in my eyes weren’t the funny ones. They were hot and stinging, tears of rage, desperation, and utter despair. Soon I realized that I really wasn’t laughing at all anymore, not even in that hysterical way people do when they feel like they’ve got nothing else they can do to chase the pain away.
No, I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard it hurt, so hard my chest felt like it would split in two, so hard I was sure I could feel my ribs starting to cave and poke at my lungs.
I was standing on the sidewalk of one of the busiest streets in the city bawling my eyes out in the afternoon rush. Cars and taxis whizzed by too fast for me to see anything more than the blur of their movement, but somehow I was certain that the dark eyes inside them were all on me. Passersby craned their necks to ogle at the crying woman slowly wandering toward home, fascinated by me like I was some kind of moaning spirit haunting 47th Street, a jilted bride still searching for her lover or a desolate mother seeking her long-lost child.
They made the whole thing feel more dramatic than it was, but for the most part, they all left me alone. That was fine by me. The last thing I needed at that moment was a stranger’s pity.
I steadied myself for a moment on a parking meter near one of those pruned-just-so trees cities put up along the sidewalks to imply they weren’t completely destroying the environment. It was every bit as fake as the offices I used to pretend to work for. I could feel cold sweat making long trails down the lines in my palms despite the shade, and my chest felt like someone had taken the muscles and stretching them out paper-thin. I knew what it was. I’d experienced it before. In fact, panic attacks had become a common occurrence since I’d started working at ExecuSpace, and even Zoloft couldn’t seem to keep them at bay. Human beings weren’t meant to work the way ExecuSpace expected them to. Human beings weren’t meant to endure such constant, debilitating stress.
As I sucked in long, slow breaths, I tried to entertain myself with happier thoughts. It’s for the best. Think about your health. Think about your peace of mind. This job couldn’t have been good for you. Even if it was putting food on the table, who’s to say that you wouldn’t end up in the hospital for stress a few months down the line? It’s not like they offered health insurance. You were one medical disaster away from being destitute, anyway…
It was all true. But the fact remained that I wasn’t one medical disaster away from financial ruin anymore. Now, thanks to a rage that had been building for far too long and a mouth that didn’t know when to seal itself shut, I was already there.
I changed tracks on my train of thought,
trying to get a grip on something solid—a plan, maybe. The damage was done, and there was no way to undo it, but what I could do now was find a way to move forward.
I knew the job market. I’d been searching for a replacement position for months now in secret. I’d only had one interview, and that position had offered even less in the way of compensation. Still, I was sure I could find something, but time was a factor, and I had no safety net.
That particular thought made my vision blurry and my blood boil. It didn’t have to be like this…
The reason I had no safety net had a name, and it was Mother.
My mother, Amanda Hearst, didn’t believe in being supportive. She believed in “tough love,” as in, “you better not screw this up, honey, ‘cause you’re on your own.” She had made it clear to me from a very young age that my mistakes were my own. My successes, however, she attributed to her stellar parenting. Classic mother.
“Those other kids failed because their parents let them,” she’d tell me, her carmine lips twisted into a smug smirk. “If it wasn’t for me and how hard I’ve pushed you, you would be just like them.”
I had comforted myself for a time with the idea that she was only that hard on me because we were broke. We were the kind of broke that nobody liked to talk about—lower middle-class, just poor enough to scrape by, but somehow too wealthy to qualify for any kind of assistance. My father had walked out on her when I was just a baby, and for years I told myself that his abandonment and the way the system has spurned her had made her feel like if she didn’t teach me to rely on myself—and only on myself—then I would fall to the same fate. She didn’t want that for me, I always thought. She just chose to show it in a cold and hurtful way.
That illusion had shattered three months ago when my mother had announced her engagement to Charles Harvey, the billionaire CEO of Harvey Enterprises. I had no idea what their business actually entailed, but whatever it was, it brought him more money than God, and as my mother was oh-so-quick to inform me, I wasn’t entitled to a penny of it.
“I didn’t raise you to be a leech,” she’d told me when I’d said that it would be nice not to have to worry about money for a change. I hadn’t meant that I intended on blowing it on some kind of shopping spree. I’d always wanted to finish my college degree, and work was getting in the way…
That didn’t matter to her.
Her scowl had sent chills down my spine and twisted my guts into knots. “You’re not an infant, Madison. You’re an adult. That means you make your own way in this world.” She’d looked so devastatingly disappointed as she added, “I thought I’d taught you better than that.”
In my anger, I’d asked her what, exactly, I would have to do to be worthy of a little help every now and then. It felt like she’d punched me right in the face when she answered, “Marry rich.”
I’d realized then that my mother had never had my best interests in mind. My father leaving hadn’t made her protective of me. It had made her protective of herself. It had made her selfish and cruel, and I hadn’t spoken to her since.
Which was why I couldn’t call her now. I couldn’t dial her number and say, “Mom, I need help.” She wouldn’t give it. I doubted if she would even bother to answer the phone.
As usual, I was on my own.
I was still trying to achieve a stiff upper lip when I let go of the parking meter and set off down the sidewalk in the direction of home. Unfortunately, the moment I did, I barreled straight into a man who’d had the misfortune of stepping between me and my downward spiral.
His chest was so hard under his button-down shirt that I was sure he’d broken my jaw, but the material of his blazer was so soft that it felt like I’d landed on a cloud. It was silken, almost, and as I gently pressed it with my fingers, tilting back my head to look up at who I’d just assaulted, I felt his breath hitch at my touch.
As the halo of the sun faded behind a cloud, I got a good look at the stranger’s face. My throat clenched and I uttered a sound that was half a snort, half a wheeze.
“Preston? Seriously?”
“Maddy,” he said, his stormy blue eyes glittering as he spoke my name. “Well, this is a surprise…”
I wanted to tell him to fuck off. I wanted to push him away and sweep past him in a fit of disgust. I wanted to walk so fast down the sidewalk that I left all memory of him in my wake, a spoiled brat who got absolutely everything his heart desired while I couldn’t even manage to convince my own mother to keep me off the streets.
But I couldn’t do any of that. Instead, to my shame and horror, I buried my face in his expensive blazer and cried.
I stood on the sidewalk, frozen in place as Madison Hearst cried into my chest, her delicate shoulders racked by the sobs stealing from her throat. I wasn’t used to hanging out with a lot of crying women, but I knew enough to know that these weren’t tears of pain or sorrow. These were hot, angry tears, tears of rage and frustration held in so long that the damn had burst, and now they had to come spilling out.
I grimaced before gently placing my arms around her. I’d shed a few of those kind of tears myself in my life, and it seemed like offering her the comfort I’d always been denied was the right thing to do, no matter how awkward it might look to the people surrounding us.
It wasn’t just that Maddy was crying, though I was certain that was strange enough on its own. What really made me feel like a spectacle was the fact that we were brother and sister—or at least, we would be in just a few short weeks.
My miserable fuck of a father was marrying Madison’s shrew of a mother. They may have deserved each other, but I held onto the opinion that neither Maddy nor I deserved either one of them. It rendered us stepsiblings, which I had assumed would count for something, but up until this moment, I’d been one hundred percent sure that Madison hated my guts.
Everything she’d ever done had practically screamed it. She looked at me with nothing but disdain, and each time I entered a room with her in it, the temperature dropped at least two degrees. She only offered me curt, clipped responses whenever I tried to strike up a conversation, and that was only if she chose to speak at all. I wasn’t certain what I’d done to deserve her ire, but whatever it was, I’d been under the impression that there was just no reversing it.
As a result, I’d given up on having any kind of relationship with my soon-to-be stepsister. And who could blame me? Yet here we were, locked in an embrace on the sidewalk of a busy street—and in broad daylight, no less.
Something had to be wrong. I knew she’d worked in some kind of office nearby, but was she coming to see me? If she was, something had to be seriously wrong. It occurred to me that it could have something to do with one—or both—of our parents.
My breath caught in my throat, but before I could ask, she lifted her face again and said, “I lost my job.”
I looked down at her, noticing for the first time how very green her eyes were. If she were any other woman I probably would have been looking straight down the neckline of her blouse, but something about Maddy’s face had always struck me as celestial, angelic. That wasn’t to say I didn’t appreciate her womanly body, those supple curves that made me wish our parents had never met the very first time I’d seen her... It only meant that those rare and beautiful eyes were the most breathtaking pair I’d ever seen.
Which was saying something, because I’d looked into the eyes of a lot of women.
I didn’t tell her that. All I could think of to say that didn’t sound incredibly stupid was, “I’m sorry.” And then, as soon as those words left my mouth, I realized that they did sound incredibly stupid. No wonder she hated me.
But instead of fixing me with that frigid stare she’d inherited directly from her mother, Maddy shook her head and said, “Don’t be. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault…”
That thousand-yard stare she was sporting made me uneasy. I didn’t know a lot about her job, except that she’d worked as an administrative assistant for some rental comp
any, but I got the impression that Maddy definitely didn’t have a lot of money. She’d never said as much, but her mother sure as hell had implied it. It was almost as if that woman wanted her daughter to fail, like she got no greater joy in life than watching Maddy flounder. It seemed a little wrong when she was spending her days milking my father for every dollar he was worth.
I shifted uncomfortably. Maddy suffered a hardship I’d never known. I came from money, and lots of it. In fact, if it weren’t for being the sole heir to the Harvey fortune, I wouldn’t have had to work a day in my life. But Dad insisted, and when he made his mind up about something, there was no changing it—not even if it made everyone else around him miserable.
