SLEAZE: A Hollywood Comeback Story (Book #1)

Chapter 27

I spent the following Monday alternating between three self-assigned tasks: draining the office’s coffee pot at hourly intervals, ignoring my inbox alerts, and rewriting the apology text I’d meant to send Sophie the week before. Spinning my chair in lazy half circles, I read the fiftieth version of the message I’d come up with and wondered why it still didn’t sound right. I toyed with the idea of throwing in a few sad faces but just looking at the row of devastated parentheses marks on my screen felt like an auto-revocation of my man card.

At four-thirty, I scrapped the draft entirely, stuffing my phone into my pocket and shaking my head in disgust. How was it possible that I’d wasted an entire day and I didn’t even have 140 characters to show for it? I pushed aside a stack of papers that had magically doubled in size since lunch and keyed Melanie’s extension into my landline’s intercom.

“Hey,” she said, answering at the start of the second ring.

I fashioned my fingers into the shape of a gun and pretended to fire at the clock hanging on my wall. “Thirty minutes left.”

“And counting. What are you doing?”

“What do you think?”

“Something requiring intense focus and care, as always.”

“Nailed it.” I ripped a sheet off a notepad and folded it in half, wishing I knew how to turn the paper into something other than a lopsided triangle.

“Are you doing anything after work?”

“Nope, just heading home. You?”

“Same. I’ll walk out with you.”

She hung up and I yawned despite feeling a rush of excitement at the prospect of leaving. I swiveled in my chair for a few more minutes, emptying rounds of invisible bullets into the broken copy machines that cluttered the former supply closet. As the clock crept closer to five, I pressed down on the corners of my failed origami attempt and thought back to all the times Scott and I had gotten into trouble for tossing identically shaped paper footballs around the classroom as kids. Almost ten years later and I still took great pride in knowing he’d never trumped my long-distance fly record.

Carefully placing my creation at the corner of the desk, I lined it up with the door and waited for Melanie to walk in. Sure, it was childish, but so was the fact she’d added salt instead of sugar to my latte during lunch. She swore it was an accident but there was nothing accidental about the minutes she’d spent doubled over with laughter. A knock came as the clock’s hour hand hit five and I grinned, poised and ready to strike.

“Yeah, come in.”

I probably should’ve waited to make sure that it was Melanie before firing off my projectile but a lack of sleep and chronic boredom has never led me to making good choices.

“And the kick is good,” I cheered when the finger football bounced against the girl’s chest as she entered, realizing only after the door swung all the way open that the person on the other side was far from my actual target.

Sophie bent to pick up the folded sheet and studied it for a moment beneath raised eyebrows. I lowered my arms from the victory pose I’d assumed and cleared my throat, too embarrassed to look at her as she walked up and tossed the makeshift football onto my desk.

“So is this the big project you’ve been working on?” The judgment came through loud and clear.

I crumpled the paper into a ball and added it to the mound of waste already piled high in my trashcan. “Yeah, no, I was just... Sorry, I thought you were Melanie.”