She snickered. “No? Why would it be? Not a high-enough profile job or something?”
I felt like I wasn’t really on the date, but I was having a nightmare about the date and I’d wake up any second to find I hadn’t really left for it yet. “No, but you just gave me all kinds of shit for nepotism but that’s how you got your job too.”
She held out a hand. “It’s totally different. It wasn’t like there were people chomping at the bit and kissing the boss’s ass to be the receptionist. There are probably a ton of people who worked really hard for your position who didn’t really have a chance because the boss’s kid worked there.”
I gritted my teeth. I wanted to scream. To tell her that she didn’t know me or my situation at all and had no business making comments about it, but I just took a deep breath. She was still the most beautiful woman I’d seen in a long time, if ever. Maybe I just had to get through the weeds a bit before I could get to the good stuff.
“Maybe,” I forced out and then took a large gulp of my wine. “Anyway. You’re a receptionist, what else?”
She looked back at me with indignance. “What else? What do you mean?”
“Well, I haven’t heard of any professional receptionists. It’s a job to tide you over to something else, I assume. Are you in school? Have something else you want to do?”
“No. I like my job,” Parker replied. “I have an associate’s degree, and I’m good at this.”
I tilted my head with my nose scrunched up. “So you’re just a receptionist? Forever? Because you want to be?”
Parker leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Yeah, jackass. It’s a lot better than mooching off my dad’s legacy.”
I cracked my neck, trying my hardest not to flip out. “I guess you would assume that’s how I got there without any aspirations of your own, but I assure you, I worked my ass off for everything I have.”
“You worked your ass off and the right guy was your dad.” She glared at me. “And who are you to say I have no aspirations?”
“Do you?” I asked. “Outside of finding the best way to organize your company’s files?”
“You think you can talk to me like that because you have money?”
My jaw dropped. “You fucking started it with all your talk of me mooching off my dad. Don’t criticize my hard work and then get pissed when I do the same thing to you. I made it to C.M.O. because I fought for it. You made it to receptionist because it’s the first square on the board. It’s totally different.”
Parker stood up, took her cup and threw her wine in my face and then stormed off. All the couples around me were murmuring quietly and pointing. I was the most embarrassed I’d ever been. The waiter came over to the table with our dishes in hand and set them down before scuttling away as if I wasn’t drenched in wine. It didn’t take long at all for that date to go to shit.
I paid 2.5 million dollars, for that?!
5
Andrew
Everything got an added level of aggression that morning. I brushed my teeth so hard they nearly fell out, and when I walked into my closet and smelled the scent of wine wafting off the shirt Parker had drenched from my dirty clothes basket, I got pissed off all over again. Who the hell does she think she is? Accusing me of not working hard, of not earning my job. She didn’t even know me.
She wasn’t there when I had my first day at the company and my dad intentionally kept calling me “Alex” instead of “Andy” because he often messed up the names of new hires. She wasn’t there when I was coming in at five am and sometimes staying until eight or nine pm at night because the marketing director I worked under at the time had no work ethic and always left things until the last minute. I had to work my way up through the ranks just like everyone else and I had to interview for the job just like everyone else. The old C.M.O. aged out and I and three other guys went up for the position and I got it, not because I was the boss’s son, but because I was the best suited for the position.
“I’m giving you this job, Andrew.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s hard for me. I’ll be accused of just giving it to you because your name is in the title. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been grooming you for this all along, but you know I wouldn’t give it to you if you weren’t ready.”
“I know that, Dad.”
“Good. Then don’t be surprised when I work you just as hard, if not harder. We both have something to prove now.”
“I won’t let you down.”
I even told Mason when he was questioning things last year that my dad only made him a partner because he believed in him. My dad wasn’t the type to give stuff away for free and if he didn’t think that I was ready for it, he wouldn’t have given me the job. That was the kind of guy he was. He had more integrity than anyone I knew, which was a hell of a lot more than I could say for Parker.
“Stupid, fucking…” I slammed my hand down on the stapler I’d aligned with a stack of papers on my desk, and the bang cracked out through my office.
“Staplers, am I right?”
I looked up and Mason was balancing against the frame of my office door. I rolled my eyes and went back to work, complete with pounding the keys on my keyboard as I typed an email. It was Mason’s fault at the end of the day. If he hadn’t recommended that place to me, I wouldn’t have been millions of dollars poorer just to have been insulted and had a drink thrown in my face.
“You know,” Mason said, walking in and shutting the door behind him, “I’ve heard that beating the ever-loving shit out of your keyboard doesn’t translate after you hit send.”
“Fuck you,” I hissed.
“Whoa.” Mason sat down in one of the leather chairs sitting across from my desk. “What’s your problem?”
“My problem is that you recommended that stupid fucking date club bullshit to me.” I threw some papers across my desk looking for a pen. “What are you doing here anyway? It’s a Saturday.”
“I came to see your dad to discuss some stuff with the wedding. I was gonna see if you wanted to get lunch,” he said, “but now I’m trying to decide if I want to kill you.”
“You owe me 2.5 mil, you dick.”
“What happened? She couldn’t find you a date?”
“Oh, she found me a date. A fucking siren.”
Mason shook his head. “I don’t know what that means. She was hot?”
“Yeah, she was hot, which was a distraction to lure my ship against jagged rocks.” I took down some notes from the email I was reading, but then the pen started to die so I tossed it across the room.
“Everyone I know has had wild success,” Mason replied. “They’re all either married or getting married soon. Maybe you just fucked it up.”
“She was a bitch! She immediately started out the date making comments about my finances, treating me like I was some simp because I have money, then she accused me of mooching off my dad.” I crossed my arms, remembering the disgusted way she looked at me. “She had the nerve to act like she was in some high and mighty position when she’s just a fucking receptionist. With no motivation to do anything other than that. And her cousin got her the job! What a hypocrite!”