Page 5 of The Law of Attraction
“But you still need a reference for the leadership program.”
Olivia’s stomach tightened. “I don’t know if I can go through this again.”
Penny leaned forward and patted her on the knee. “Sure you can. You just happened to pick the biggest butthead in the office. Which, admittedly, is bad luck—but now you’ve gotten all your bad luck out of the way. No one else is going to say no to you. How could they? You’re awesome.”
“What if he’s right though, and I have no business applying for this?” Olivia sagged forward and pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead. “Maybe I’m fooling myself thinking I’ve got a chance.”
“He’s not right. He doesn’t know anything about you. I do, and I’m telling you you’re going to make an amazing manager.” There was steel in Penny’s voice. Mama-bear mode was still in full effect.
“You don’t know what I’m like at work,” Olivia protested. “I’m a different person there than I am around my friends.” Penny probably wouldn’t even recognize the fake, friendly, positive person Olivia pretended to be in her professional life. She was such a fucking fake, she made herself nauseous.
“Well, duh. I’m sure you don’t walk around the office calling people dickweasels or buttnuggets—even when they probably deserve it.”
“They do deserve it. And I never say anything.”
“Of course you don’t. You have to get along with people at work, and from everything you’ve ever told me, you’re really good at it. Don’t let this miserable jackass undermine your confidence in yourself. You’re smart, kind, and professional.” Penny reached out and squeezed Olivia’s hand. “People love you—a lot more than you think they do.”
Whether that was true or not, Olivia was going to have to gather the shattered remnants of her dignity and face Adam Cortinas at work on Monday. Pretending he didn’t exist wasn’t an option. The two systems they managed needed to interface, which meant so did they.
But hopefully not too much. As long as their interactions were kept to a minimum, she could handle it.
Maybe.
“What do you think’s going on in there?”
Olivia swallowed a sigh of irritation as Trevor, one of the other junior analysts on the commercial systems team, perched his ass on the corner of her desk.
Trevor was always coming over to chat whenever he didn’t feel like doing his own work. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except his idea of chatting too often involved him explaining stupid internet memes to her, as if she didn’t have her own Facebook account and hadn’t already seen the same jokey photo in her feed a dozen times already.
The thing about memes was that they weren’t nearly as funny when someone was describing them to you—assuming they’d even been funny in the first place.
“In where?” she asked, offering Trevor a false smile.
“Conference room.” He gestured with his coffee mug, which featured a cartoon of a bear pooping into a bucket for reasons that Olivia had never understood and did not care to ask about. “Gavin is in there with Cortinas and the CIO, and he doesn’t look happy.”
All the men around the office called Adam by his last name, like he was some kind of hero in an action movie. It was a physical effort not to roll her eyes.
“Which one doesn’t look happy? Gavin?” She refused to turn and look.
“All of them. Well, except Cortinas, who looks the same as always. Nothing ever fazes that guy. He’s like a robot.”
Yeah, an evil robot, Olivia thought to herself.
“The CIO looks pissed, and Gavin looks like he’s about to wet himself.”
“Really?” That inspired her to turn around for a peek.
Sure enough, Gavin was pacing around the conference room with that constipated look he got whenever things were going badly. Brad, the CIO, was seated at the head of the table looking annoyed as fuck, which was never a good sign.
Olivia told herself she wasn’t going to look at Adam, but her eyes slid over to him of their own accord. He was kicked back in his chair, either listening intently or on the verge of falling asleep. It was hard to tell from his bland expression.
As she was turned around in her seat watching them, Gavin suddenly stopped his frenetic pacing and looked right at her. Brad and Adam immediately followed suit, so all three of them were now staring directly at her.
“What the fuck?” Trevor whispered as Olivia snapped her head around again, turning her back on the conference room. “Why are they all staring at us?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are they still looking?”
Trevor stared at the conference room with the self-preservation instincts of a possum that had wandered onto train tracks and been hypnotized by the light of an oncoming train. “Yeah. Totally.”
