Gabe was pretty, and his dark eyes might have caught my attention, but I distrusted him somehow.
“So, you’ll come with?” His whole body relaxed.
I clenched my fists to turn him down, knowing it might push me into that bitch territory. I winced. “Sorry. I’ve got other plans.”
He nodded and inched closer. “I realize I sprung it on you at the last minute. Surely you’ll be free later this week?”
How did people navigate social obstacles like this? “I don’t—”
Gabe’s eyebrow dipped. “I’ll let you get back to work.” With a small bend at the waist, like he was literally bowing out, he backed out of my cube, slowly, as if he expected me to stop him and tell him I’d changed my mind.
When he turned to go, I stood there glowering after him.
“What was that about?” Shane leaned against the cube wall, almost the same way as Gabe, except instead of adorning it like a gentleman, he made the wall look like a prop in a fake office. His bicep dwarfed the narrow width of the bar running along the top. I hoped he wouldn’t bring the whole thing down.
“Nothing. He writes some of the reviews for the magazine.”
Shane’s head shot up, and he scanned the office. “That guy writes reviews? Shit. I should have introduced myself.”
“Oh, he knows who you are.”
“Really?” He grinned. “Cool.” With a smug nod, he modestly added, “That’s to be expected at a magazine that focuses extensively on rock music, I guess.”
I didn’t let him know that Gabriel had referred to him as “a second-rate drummer.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ajit slip into the meeting room. With a sigh, I said, “I need to get to work.” I bit my lip unsure whether Shane intended to pull up a chair and hang out with me all day.
“Oh, right. I guess it would be unprofessional to kiss you here?” He snagged a pen off my desk and tore a corner of paper from my notepad. Leaning forward, he drew a picture of what appeared to be a pair of lips. “Just pretend that’s me kissing you goodbye. I’ll see you later, right?”
“Yes.” Definitely. I was into seeing him later. I was relieved he still wanted to see me. “Later.”
As soon as he’d left the office floor, the charge went out of the room, like when the power shuts off all of a sudden and sounds you hadn’t noticed before become noticeably absent. The absence of Shane was palpable.
I followed the developers into the meeting room, ready to answer any questions they might have about the changes I’d proposed, only then remembering I’d left my laptop at Jo’s.
Crap.
I could get through this meeting, but after that?
Byron broke in before we’d even started. “Layla, do you have Chatter turned on?”
The office used an internal chat program that I had, in fact, not opened up yet, seeing as how I was computerless. “No, sorry.”
“Lars is looking for you. Can you go see what he wants?”
My stomach flipped.
Lars Cambridge was summoning me?
I swallowed down the immediate panic that he’d figured out I was just masquerading as a competent addition to his magazine and had decided to let me go.
Maybe Shane had mentioned me to him. I gathered my things and left them at my desk before smoothing out my clothes and heading in to see the head honcho.
I’d seen pictures of Lars, but they must have been out of date. The man seated at his desk was weathered like the distressed shiplap I saw in hipster bars. As I entered his office, he gave off the impression he was watching me over a pair of aviator sunglasses, though he wore none. He waited, like he was curious to see what I might do, while I decided between standing or sitting. At last, I took a chair across from him, and he said in a gravelly voice, “Hey there.”
“Hi. I’m Layla Beckett. Byron said you sent for me? I’m the new social media admin.”
“Social media,” he said, though it hung in the air like a question, like he didn’t understand the term, or maybe like he could see straight through me to the social anxiety that made my role ironic.
“And web content?” I wasn’t sure why I answered him with another question. His narrow eye slits unnerved me. “I’ll be helping to configure the software to take advantage of auto tweeting and shares to Facebook, among other things.”
His sharp intake of breath seemed an acknowledgment of his sudden