Page 18 of Last Night Was Fun

“Yeah. And maybe if you’d ever been on the field, you’d feel it too.”

Emmy paused midbreath like he’d punched her. The room went painfully quiet. She was quickly reminded they weren’t alone. Everyone was suddenly staring at her, her Only Girl status on full display.

So. He was going to play that card, then.

An awkward tension rippled around the room. Alice, Pedro, Silas, and the pair of analysts from the finance department uncomfortably shifted in their chairs. Somehow, Emmy found the strength to maintain her composure. She cleared her throat.

“I may not have field experience like you do, but I understand that data don’t lie. If you want to make multimillion-dollar decisions based onfeelings, go make movies.”

He stared back at her, and she swore she saw one corner of his mouth twitch up.

“Okay, well, there’s still time until the deadline, so we’ll see how his numbers move around,” Director Allen said. “Who’s next?”

Emmy reluctantly broke her eye contact with Gabe, silently wishing she could channel the fury burning in her gut into melting him with her gaze. She turned back to the dashboard. “O’Haron,” she said, and launched into his details.

The meeting followed a predictable pattern of numbers and stats being thrown around, names being moved up and down, Emmy emotionally detaching herself from all of it rather than thinking about how decisions made in this small room could cause a whole family to move across the country. But the players had signed up for it when they entered the league, so it was all part of the process.

By the end of it, Gabe had cut her off three more times. She knew by the depth of the indent in her hand from squeezing her pen in angst. His all-time single-meeting record was six times, and that poor pen had snapped.

When the meeting was over, and everyone went to leave, they arrived at the door at the same moment. Gabe cast her a glance and then stepped in front of her.

Emmy scoffed. “Cut me off every chance you get,” she muttered.

He heard her and turned back with a glower.

“You really are ruthless,” she muttered again.

He stopped walking, and she almost ran into his back. When he turned, his face was cool. “No, I’m committed. And I told you: I don’t lose.”

She opened her mouth to snap back with some frosty retort, but Alice stepped into the hall and saw their standoff.

“Jameson, lunch?” she asked.

Whether Alice was throwing a desperate lifeline to save her or to prevent her from publicly tearing into her co-worker with a stream of obscenities worthy of an HR visit, Emmy couldn’t be sure. But she took the excuse to make an exit.

“Sure,” she said, and followed her toward her office. She brushed past Gabe and intentionally held her breath so as not to inhale a waft of his cologne.

“Don’t let him get to you,” Alice said once they were inside her office. Emmy could hear echoes of Gabe making lunch plans with Silas and Pedro out in the hall.

She was about to defend that no one was getting to her, but Alice saw right through the denial on her face. “Well, it’s hard when he’s always doing it on purpose.”

“And that’s exactly why he does it. Heknowsit bothers you, so don’t let it. Or at least don’t let it show.” She looped her purse over her shoulder and dug around in it for her sunglasses even though they were still underground. She put on the gold Gucci frames and looked like a total badass.

“How do you do that?” Emmy asked.

“What?”

“Not let anything get to you.”

Alice shrugged and headed for the door. “Years of practice. Eventually, you just realize stressing over it is not worth it. Come on, I’m starving, and it smells like socks down here.”

Emmy followed her back into the hall where the men were still chatting by the conference room door. The director stepped out and nodded at Gabe.

“Olson, a word?” He started down the hall in the opposite direction without waiting for Gabe to acknowledge, but of course Gabe instantly cut off conversation and followed him. Emmy momentarily thought of running over and tripping him. Maybe letting loose a bucket of baseballs on the floor to roll under his feet. Finding a bat to do some real damage.

Her facetious thoughts of sabotage made her hurry along to catch up with Alice going the other way though she longed to follow and hear what they were discussing. The director was probably inviting him for a round of golf to talk about thefeelinghe had about Hollander.

“Alice,” she hissed with a glance over her shoulder. “Are the rumors about Olson true? Did he actually get someone fired?”