was no missing the excitement thrumming through him. It was good to see, even if I was about to extinguish it.
“You ever stain a deck before?”
Brody’s eyes widened comically. “Uh, no.”
“Looks like you’re about to experience something new, then.”
“Can’t we, like, hire someone to do that?”
I shrugged. “Probably. But by the time we got someone out here, we’d probably lose another day or two minimum. Not to mention we’d have to take it out of the budget Sean’s giving us to set up, and I’d rather put that toward things we need to purchase or can’t realistically do ourselves.”
“But…what if we can’t stain this deck ourselves?”
I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Brody, we can do almost anything.”
“Those words aren’t as motivating as you think. Your tone makes them…ominous.”
“It’ll be fine.”
Brody dramatically unleashed a full-body shiver. “Terrifying.”
“Shut up and come to the store with me.”
With a resigned sigh, Brody followed me back inside. I hoped I was leading him into a future that would benefit us both rather than toward disaster.
Knowing us, I wasn’t sure how good our odds were.
S O P H I A
My first day at Margot Nathan, the marketing firm where I’d gotten a summer internship, was insane.
I’d met with a red-haired, bespectacled woman from HR for almost two hours as she droned on about the intricacies of my internship and not-so-subtly threatened to sue me if I strayed beyond the limits of my job.
I was then sent to find Mr. Prescott, the chief marketing officer and one of the partners of the firm, but his secretary had informed me, rather snidely, that he rarely met with interns, and we’d be reporting to executives named Carole Hawthorne and Jeff Phillips.
When I’d finally managed to track Jeff down, he pointed to a chair next to a long table and told me to sit. My jaw nearly hit the floor as I watched him riffle frantically through a stack of papers on a desk. Was everyone in this place fucking rude or just the people I had the pleasure of interacting with?
Despite my rage threatening to make me rise to the ceiling, I managed to sit down in the chair and looked around the office. It was open-concept, with desks organized around the perimeter of the room and a large conference table—where I sat—in the center. There were two offices that likely belonged to the executives who would be overseeing my internship, but they were currently empty.
Over the rest of the day, I watched people run around the room, sniping at each other and tossing papers back and forth. Everyone seemed to hate each other, which I understood because they all acted like assholes.
The other interns all kept their heads down and stayed out of the way. We’d barely even risked speaking enough to exchange names, but I’d managed to learn that Abigail was from a state school an hour away, Kevin had graduated from a school across town and was hoping this internship led to a job, and Jake was going into senior year like me at a school just outside the city. We traded whispers when no one was looking in an attempt to figure out why everyone seemed manic.
I’d managed to deduce there was an important client who wasn’t happy with their most recent proposal, and the entire firm was frantic to try to make things right before the client walked.
The chaos resulted in my being mostly ignored all day other than being told to run to the corner to get coffee for everyone. Somehow I managed to not poison anyone’s drink.
I was taking that as a victory, albeit a minor one.
Taylor and I had decided to meet up at Rafferty’s since it was close to home anyway, and we both figured we’d need a drink. Or five. Taylor might have actually needed more than that.
As a criminal justice major who hoped to go to law school, she had lined up an internship at a summer program for adjudicated teenagers whose probation officers had referred them to the program to keep them out of trouble. But that program wouldn’t start for about another month, so they’d allowed her to volunteer at an alternative school program so she could get her feet wet.
I thought it would be hell, but I didn’t want to tell her that.
We agreed to meet out front, so I leaned against the stone exterior wall and thumbed around on my phone. After about five minutes of perusing Instagram, I heard Taylor’s