The Frame-Up (The Golden Arrow #1)(2)
The guy doesn’t take a hint.
I turn to face him, my sassiest hip thrown to the side. Rip off the Band-Aid, MG. Sometimes there’s no other way. With one look, I can tell this guy’s interest is severely misplaced. I usually date the type of guy who can dialogue about Batman’s backstory, and I’m definitely not J.Crew enough for Herbal Tea. I have a meeting to get to, coffee to consume, and regret for breaking my usual silence in the waiting line.
“Look.” I stop him in his tracks with a glacial glance, right over the top of my fire-engine-red wire-rimmed glasses, a look I’ve perfected at comic convention open-bar nights. “I’m sure you’re a nice person, and you’re cute and all”—if you’re into the rumpled, sensitive, tea-drinking type—“and I am sure you have a lucrative hipster job that allows you to drink cof—er, tea, at all hours of the morning, but I’m not interested.”
He steps back, shock and a lot of embarrassment registering in his eyes. He’s not used to being brushed off. Score one for the home team. “Well, that’s prickly,” he says, going blotchy red at the collar of his shirt.
“It’s not prickly. I just don’t put up with bullshit. And there’s a lot of bullshit in this world.” I spin around to continue my trek and don’t look back. I have bigger fish to fry this morning. “Winter is coming,” in the words of Jon Snow.
Stuck, stuck, stuck. à la Gregory House, MD, I throw the ball even harder against the wall of my office. To be more specific, the half-height modular wall that separates my working pod from Simon’s. It’s supposed to foster creative collaboration, but it just allows us to annoy the living daylights out of each other. Kyle and Andy have been talking the story from this morning to death—the one with the tied-up drug dealers. Neither one of them has noticed the rabbit outline or overall resemblance to The Hooded Falcon, and instead of coming up with something brilliant for my project, I’m wondering if I should jump into the conversation with my tinfoil-hat theory. It surprises me that Simon is silent on the topic; usually if someone is wearing tinfoil alongside me, it’s him. But my problem is solved momentarily when Andy gets a call and leaves the room. I sigh.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
“I think if you throw it harder, you’ll figure it out. Maybe you’ll hit yourself.” Simon doesn’t even raise his head, and I’m surprised he can hear me over the music screaming through his headphones. I stick my tongue out at him. Of course, like a good kid, Simon polishes his pages while I am sitting here with nothing. Well, not nothing. I have my basic outlines, but I’m stuck on the last frame of the page. It refuses to fill itself in, no matter how hard I try to bleed something brilliant onto the page. There’s an idea that’s been cooking in the back of my brain since my run-in with Herbal Tea Guy yesterday, but for the life of me I can’t pull it out. I can only hope it’s genius when it emerges, because I’ll be just under the wire for this week’s green-light meeting. And unlike the last three times, I have got to nail this presentation. My brilliance seems to go unappreciated in meetings. Just last month, my boss, Edward Casey Junior, was unable to overlook the tiny fact that I’d insulted the current story line—a beast of Kyle’s making, not mine—before offering my own ideas. So I may have called the villain—my boss’s favorite to date apparently—a direct copy of our competition’s and may have used the words “trite” and “tired.” What I saw as honest feedback he took personally. Fine. I need to work on my delivery, that’s all. I’ll keep working on my presentation for this month’s green-light meeting, wow them with graphics, and prove I have the best ideas. Because I do . . . when I can figure them out.
I resume my throwing, and even Kyle shoots me the stink eye from across the room. He’s just in a bad mood because he got all banged up playing Pokémon GO on Sunday night. He insists he was trying out parkour—from the new “nerd fitness group” he and Simon had joined—to nab a Jigglypuff, but my guess is he was staring at his phone and walked into a tree.
“Are you finished annoying the rest of us? You’re not the only one with a deadline this week, you know.” He’s absentmindedly rubbing what looks like rope burn on his arm. I narrow my eyes. Kyle is about the nerdiest, most nonathletic guy I know, next to Simon. Papercuts would constitute an emergency in his book. Rope burn? Has he taken up slacklining too? That doesn’t seem likely. Maybe he was injured in some bedroom parkour instead of at the park. Certainly something I’d lie about to coworkers too. I raise my eyebrows at him and throw the ball against the wall, maintaining eye contact. I can’t say I’m always proud of my antics, but being the only woman in this office, I sometimes stoop to their level of boyish tactics.
Thwack, thwack, th—
The ball bounces off the wall funny and flies over my shoulder into the aisle near the printer. I’m halfway under the printer when I hear my name called. Busted for workplace “distraction” again, I bet.
“Oh, eff off, Andy. My draft idea for the green-light agenda isn’t due until three p.m., and I have at least—” I pause mid-kneel, holding my red ball, and stare up at Herbal Tea Guy. What. The. Hell. I climb to my feet awkwardly, complete with hitting my hip on the table holding the printer.
“You have a visitor,” Andy says. He’s trying to smooth his flyaway curly blond hair. It would be surfer hair on a cooler person. “I had to go get him from reception.”