Page 99 of With Spite

Like, literally dead.

It instantly had my hackles up.

“Odin,” I said. “You got a second?”

Odin stood, abandoning his coffee and his muffin, and came my way.

We stepped out of earshot, and I opened my mouth to say “you’re not hiring this guy” when he said, “I’m not hiring him.”

I blew out a relieved breath. “Good.”

“He gives me the creeps, and that’s pretty hard to do seeing as I’ve been to prison with some of the worst men imaginable,” he said. “I should’ve listened to Bernice’s gut in the first place. He hasn’t even been here twenty minutes, and I already dislike him.”

I nodded. “I’ll stay in the office to make sure that he leaves okay.”

He nodded. “Good.”

It took them thirty minutes of “fake interviewing” to get him out of the office with the promise of giving him a call to let him know by the end of the day.

As he walked out the door, his eyes came to meet mine, and I saw something there that I hadn’t seen before.

Smugness.

I continued to jiggle my leg on my knee and watched him go.

“Here’s hoping to never see that one again.” Magnolia echoed my own thoughts.

“Here’s hoping.”

Twenty-Three

Your level of stupidity rendered me speechless.

—Bernice to Patrick Huber

Bernice

Today had been surprisingly great.

It was the new nurse, Chan’s, official one-week anniversary, and we’d celebrated by cleaning the entire office with Lysol.

I liked him.

He was fun and he worked hard, and seemed to fit well into our clinic dynamic.

He took on the extra workload without a complaint and had no problem splitting the work with Sage.

Sage looked like she was finally getting sleep.

And Magnolia started picking up the slack where she could.

All in all, the last week had been one of the best I’d had at the clinic.

Sadly, today Hux wouldn’t be picking me up.

I was getting a ride home with Sage.

“So how did you like the last week?” she asked.