Raine (Gods of the Fifth Floor #2) - M.V. Ellis Page 0,52
as far as care or concern, either. If anything, he looked slightly confused, as though he was unused to people showing emotion in his presence.
“I can’t talk about it. I just... can’t.” I could feel the anxiety building within me as I tried. Apart from the tears flowing, my throat seemed to tighten, making it hard to breathe, swallow , or speak, and I felt sweaty and clammy all over.
“Yes, you can.” Raine slid off the edge of the desk and I eyed him warily as he crossed the room toward me. I was in no state to deal with his intensity, and I steeled myself for a fight.
Halfway across the room, he faltered, stumbling as though he’d missed his footing, but there was no reason he would have—there was nothing in his path, and the room was well enough lit that there was no way he’d have had trouble seeing the ground in front of him.
He stopped in his tracks, grimacing heavily, then pinched across the bridge of his nose between the eyes, the way people did when they had a migraine. When he started swaying, I leapt from my seat and crossed the room toward him.
“Are you okay? Do you have a headache, or something? Come on, I think you need to sit down.” I gripped him by the elbow, and led him gently to the couch. When we got close to it, he shrugged me off impatiently, saying, “I’m fine. I don’t need your help.” That clearly wasn’t true. I didn’t know if I’d imagined it, but I thought he’d slurred his words as he spoke.
I crouched down in front of him. “Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need me to get anything for you? Some water, maybe?”
“No. I just said I’m fine. I just need to ease off the three Bs I mentioned before.” That was odd. I’d been with him all day, and he’d hardly drunk at all, hadn’t smoked, and, unless he’d made use of his toilet breaks, he hadn’t had any coke. Given what I’d seen the previous night, there was no way he was drunk—he hadn’t consumed enough—and I doubted he was high, either. It just didn’t add up. I continued to silently assess him, trying to work out what was happening.
“Drop it. I said I’m fine. I’m going to go home and get some rest. I have a big day tomorrow. I suggest you do the same.”
He was still wincing, as though trying to give the impression that everything was fine, when clearly it wasn’t. What the fuck was going on?
Chapter 20
Raine
* * *
We walked out of the midtown building—Carlisle was aiming for edgy and post-cool, but what they ended up with was something just left of corporate—and climbed into the waiting town car. Even though the windows were tinted as black as night, we waited until we’d pulled away from the sidewalk before allowing ourselves to relax, and celebrate.
“Holy. Motherfucking. Shit. We killed it.”
“I think slayed is the word you’re looking for.”
“We killed it, then brought it back from the dead to kill it again. Honestly, I think that they were so awed by the new work that they were hardly even concerned with Kick It To The Curb, and the whys and wherefores of how it came to be in Free PE’s hands.”
“Classic BR&ND. Absolutely fucking classic. We went in there all guns blazing, and nailed that shit to the wall. My first-ever boss always used to tell me to come to him with solutions, not problems. If something went wrong, or I’d fucked up, he wanted me to fix it, or at least look into the options for how it could be improved before coming to him. He also used to say, ‘A problem shared is a problem doubled.’ He wasn’t about the ‘let’s hug it out and work this out together’ life.
“I used to hate that motherfucker for that. I resented the fact that he was basically telling me I was on my own no matter what. Turned out that was some Mr. Miyagi shit right there, and that tactic has dug me out of so many holes in my life I can’t even tell you.
“Today, going in with all guns blazing—the creative work, the strategy, Dill’s data, my PR plan, all of it, it was like there wasn’t a problem and never had been. I swear to God that they were more excited about this than they had been about the original campaign. That’s BR&ND