Page 42 of Best Served Hot

She made no comment on our entwined state. An entwined state that was extremely unprofessional, considering I was currently at work. For her father. In his office.

What was I doing?

I sprang back, shoving Bennett’s arms away, my rear hitting a shelf piled high with copier paper and various packages of stationery. I cleared my throat. “Sorry. Um, I couldn’t find whatever it was you left in here, Emerson Leigh.”

She was still smirking. “No, I think you did.”

The words didn’t register until I was sitting back at my desk, smoothing down my skirt, taking deep breaths to try and slow my racing heart. Had she set us up in there?

Deep breath in, deep breath out. Whoooosh. It wasn’t like I could say anything to her. She was my boss’s daughter.

“Julie?” Bennett was hovering over my desk now, and I could not deal. I could not deal with this now at work, with Emerson Leigh watching, with Mr. Decker smiling at me from all those copies of his memoir.

“Yes?” I said crisply, picking up a packet of paper from my desk and lining up the edges against the wood like it was the most important thing I had to do all day. Hopefully, he wouldn’t notice that the papers were upside down. “I have a lot of professional work to do. In this professional environment.”

His shadow moved away. I didn’t dare look up until I heard his feet step back. “I see,” he said. “Professional. Yes. Well. I should get back to the office. My boss will be looking for me.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll still see you at West later? I hope?”

“Can’t wait,” I said, and that was true. I couldn’t wait for the food. And maybe there, away from my office and the offspring of my boss, I could talk to him about what had just happened. Emerson Leigh and I watched Bennett lope to the door, look over his shoulder to flash us a lopsided, uncertain smile and then leave.

Deep breath in. The door closed behind him. Deep breath out. Emerson Leigh picked at her cuticle.

I just forced my usual smile onto my face. “Anyway, what’s up, Emerson Leigh? Did you need something from your dad’s office?” Aside from the fake thing in the copy room that I couldn’t find?

Before she could respond, the phone rang, the short pattern that meant it was a call from the front desk downstairs. I grabbed for the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hi, Julie? I’ve got two girls here for you, an Alice Wong and a Kelsey Courtney?”

I blinked in surprise. Had I told Alice we should meet for lunch and then forgotten in my post-Jada haze? No, it would’ve popped up in my calendar. Also, we never met for lunch, since my office was in Midtown and hers was all the way down in the Financial District. Also also, there was no reason Kelsey would be here, too. “Um, send them up, please? Thank you!”

Emerson Leigh was staring at me, wide-eyed, as I set the phone gently back into its cradle. I said in explanation, “Um, my best friend and her work friend are here? For some reason?”

Those green eyes brightened like a forest beneath the emerging sun. She clapped her hands together. “Oh, how nice!”

When I heard footsteps coming down the hall, I pressed the buzzer under my desk that automatically opened the door. Hopefully, the footsteps belonged to Alice and Kelsey and not two light-footed murderers, though to be real, if someone truly wanted to murder me, the door latch wasn’t going to hold them off.

But the door indeed opened to reveal Alice and Kelsey. They rushed in, and everything else around Alice blurred, because her eyes were red.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen Alice cry before.

“Who did this?” I said, jumping to my feet. “Say the word and I will murder them. It will be bloody.” I paused and considered. “It actually probably won’t be bloody. If I were to murder someone, I’d probably poison them, because it’s harder to trace and also, hello, upper body strength.”

Alice sniffled and swiped at her nose, and she turned her eyes in my direction. They blazed with the fire of the cast-iron pan filled with something bubbling the waiter warns you not to touch when he sets it on your table. “Please don’t murder anyone on my behalf. I don’t want to have to visit you in prison. It sounds stressful.”

“I will do my best to refrain, then,” I said. “But what are you doing here?”

“We quit.”

“What?”

“Our jobs,” Kelsey said, stepping forward.

I blinked. The words took a moment to wind their way into my brain, past all the Emerson Leigh and Bennett–related junk. “You guys quit your jobs? What happened?”

As Alice and Kelsey told their story, their words jumbling together and sometimes spilling over each other, Emerson Leigh and I sat on the couch together, our eyes darting back and forth. The story was one I’d heard from Alice several times before: their teammates being dicks and making their lives difficult.

Only today, Alice had snapped. It hadn’t even been because of something “big”: it had been the one pate a choux that made the entire pastry tower collapse. One of her teammates had come to her with a pretty basic question about something she’d been working on, then interrupted before she had a chance to fully answer with “that doesn’t sound right” and then went to her subordinate dude, who had the same answer. Alice had snorted and rolled her eyes. The first guy had snickered and said, “Of course you’d get emotional.”

“I realized I couldn’t do it anymore,” Alice said, sucking in a deep breath and holding it.