calling me a bitch, making fun of my ethnicity, and calling me an attention whore. Me? Had they ever met Jane? They called me stupid, too, which really struck a nerve. Those assholes knew nothing about me. And no one who knew me would ever call me stupid. You know who was stupid? Someone who would blindly pass judgment on another person they didn’t know at all. I was not stupid. I could out-calculus any one of those troll motherfuckers. Was I clumsy? Yes. Awkward? Absolutely. Did I do stupid things sometimes? Um, yeah. But that didn’t make me stupid.
Messages had also escalated in severity: I saw death and sexual assault threats, and hundreds of requests for nude pictures and graphic sexual propositions. My stomach knotted as I read these vile words. How could people make snap judgments about me based on tidbits of information they gleaned from the internet? It was like racial profiling with uninformed stereotyping and armchair psychoanalyzing. This practice always led to misinformed conclusions, and potentially dangerous results.
I wished this was all just a bad dream, but it was very real. My full-body numbness prevented me from ugly crying in my office.
Wild-eyed, jittery publicist Joe slammed my door open just as I finished my email skimming. Sue trailed a few steps behind him. Since that morning he looked like he’d walked into the eye of a tornado and aged five years.
“Hi. Sue and I need you to look over these new rules of engagement as soon as possible, drafted by Ian, our lawyer, and a few members of the board.” He paced around while I read.
Per these new rules, I was not allowed to talk to the media about the Ultimate Apocalypse game (“hereby in this document referred to also as ‘UA’”—ugh) or about the company itself. This included but was not limited to: information about the people, the culture, and the male-female ratio. I couldn’t respond to any of the email or social media harassment; this was being handled by our legal and PR team. Playing any online games was prohibited, in case someone figured out my gamertag. And last, I needed to refrain from any public discussion about these ongoing developments. There was a chance we may need to file criminal charges if this ballooned even bigger, and the fewer people involved, the better.
Joe said, “I am so sorry about everything. We’re trying to figure out how to handle this on the fly. This is uncharted territory. And all these restrictions, the dos and don’ts, are overwhelming. It’s like drinking from a fire hose, I’m sure.”
Not quite accurate. It was more like I was trying to drink from a fire hose that was actually on fire, while spraying out fire.
And then, just as I hit an ultimate low point in my life, Jane texted me.
I booked a wedding dress appointment at six bridal boutiques this Sat. I’ll need you to tell me if I look amazing or not. Then we need to look at shoes. Btw I’m going to start on the Whole 30 diet thing tomorrow. Maybe you should too?
I was, without a doubt now, so clearly and utterly fucked.
And to make my utterly fucked state even more fucked, Nolan, Mr. Worst Timing Ever, stopped by my office just before I was leaving for the day. Today he had on a brown-and-black-checked shirt, not my favorite on him, but still hugged his body nicely. “You doing okay?”
I nodded. Barely okay.
“Um, do you want the bad news, or even worse news?”
Sighing hard, I melted into a blob in my chair. “I don’t care. You pick.”
“Ian imported the graphs you sent him and accidentally broke all the formulas.”
Okay, that was bad, but that wasn’t horrible.
“He also changed some of our retail pricing for the holidays, so some of our assumptions need to be updated and accounted for in the new graphs.”
I nodded slowly. “You mean, the graphs with the broken formulas.”
“Yeah.”
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
I pointed at Asher’s empty chair and beckoned Nolan to bring it over. He sat and wheeled over to me. Here we were again, right next to each other, me breathing in his intoxicating Nolan scent, faintly woodsy with a top note of fancy hotel soap. He leaned over my laptop to pull up Ian’s files from the hard drives, his muscular arms distracting me from all that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. Instead of staring at the line graphs, my gaze traveled down his body, craving for him