Vice

21: Sabotage

Natara drowns herself in paperwork for the rest of the day after the awful food incident.

On the outside, she's meticulously flipping through stacks of papers, scanning paragraphs, signing and initialing specific areas, and noting her thoughts on various sections. She's barreling through the tall stack of paperwork - both from her department and from the other departments - and getting things done. She's even enjoying the food Jaquie brought.

But, on the inside, she's freaking out. 

She messed up. Again. Badly. And she doesn't even know how or why. In the past, maybe Mr. Vice had viable reasons to dislike her (nobody likes cold coffee and it probably was upsetting for him to receive an inappropriate proposition) but now...he has every reason to hate her at this point. 

Natara doesn't know what exactly was wrong with the food, but she does know that it smelled HORRIBLE for General Tso's and it was bad enough that glass ended up broken.

She just can't put together what went wrong with the food. If it had gone bad, why did Mr. Vice ask to eat it? And if it was just seasoned in a gross way, why would it be so bad that Mr. Vice would break glass? It didn't make sense for her to have made a mistake cooking it, because it smelled that way before she even put it in the pan.

The door to her office opens, interrupting her thoughts.

Jaquie steps in, looking much calmer than he did outside Mr. Vice's office, and wheels in a cart of bathroom cleaning supplies. Natara's shoulders slump. She forgot about the bathroom cleaning agreement.

"I'm heading out for the day." Jaquie's eyebrows slacken and he frowns. "I'm sorry about this again, Natara. The more I think about it, the more it really seems like too much is going wrong for it to be a coincidence. And I don't think you're purposely sabotaging your own job, either. I don't know who you upset, but they're doing their best to make your life here hell."

"Well," he pauses, "make both of our lives hell. Anyway, get as much of the paperwork done as you possibly can before 8pm and then work on cleaning the bathrooms. You can continue on the paper stack tomorrow. I understand the difference between punishment and pure cruelty. I am not forcing you to stay overnight."

"Oh!" He turns around and grabs something off of the cart. "A girl from one of the lower departments asked me to drop this by. I guess she heard you were working late and felt bad? Really nice of her." 

He sets a little blue frosted cupcake down on Natara's desk. Natara raises an eyebrow at the cupcake, trying to think of any girl in the lower departments that even knew she existed.

The only person she can think of is Crystal, but she would hardly call her a friend. She isn't sure why the woman would even ask Jaquie to give her a cupcake.

"Even if you can't befriend your boss, I'm glad you seem to be getting along with some of the other employees. I hope it can help alleviate how things can be sometimes." Jaquie smiles.

"Thanks for being so good to me, Jaquie," Natara replies. She knows he had to go through a lot of trouble today for her. He had to sweep glass, calm down Mr. Vice, deal with threats to her job, and smooth everything over so she could keep her job. 

Even when he had to punish her for what happened, he was going out of his way to make sure she knew she didn't have to work overnight and he even brought her dinner. She wonders how much more he had to deal with that she doesn't know about, but she isn't going to ask. She just feels glad that he's getting to head home now to hopefully relax.

Natara wishes she could do the same. She would love to get home and take a hot shower to relax her shoulders after looming over her desk all day long. She'd like to let the warm water run over her wrist, which feels sore from writing and flipping through page after page of her paper stack.

"Try to have a decent evening, Natara. Put on some music while you clean, too, if it helps. Nobody's going to be around late enough to care except the Vice family and they'll be up in their offices working. Also, just a tip - the company phones have surprisingly nice speakers built in," he offers. "I'll see you tomorrow."

Natara nods. After the door closes behind Jaquie, she looks down at the cupcake on her desk.

She carefully pokes at it, half expecting it to be a bomb. She peels off the wrapper and prods at the mushy outside of the dessert, wondering if Crystal put anything for her to choke on inside it. Crystal has never looked her way without a very clear glare, so she doesn't understand why Crystal would suddenly feel bad for her and have a nice dessert sent her way.

There has to be something wrong with it, Natara just doesn't know what.

But she investigates the cupcake for a while and finds nothing out of the ordinary. The frosting feels like normal buttercream. The sides of the cupcake squish beneath her fingertip like normal vanilla cake. And even when Natara presses on different areas to see if there's anything hard for her to choke on underneath, she doesn't feel anything abnormal.

Maybe Crystal doesn't hate her as much as she thinks she does. Maybe she's a really nice woman and she just looks angry.

After all, the cupcake does look really tasty. 

Natara finds herself drooling as she raises the cupcake to her lips. She's had good food today between the Asian food with Jace and the sandwich Jaquie brought her, but she hasn't had any dessert - and Natara has a weak spot for dessert.

But when she raises the cupcake to her nose, she catches a whiff of scent that makes her shoulders tense and her body shiver. 

The cupcake smells just like Mr. Vice's lunch.