Page 15 of Cuts like a Knife
So we exchanged barbs, a few laughs, and … fine, I admit it — he got under my skin a bit. There’s just something about him. And then…
I don’t even know how it happened, but we’d just finished filming a fake family event for the show and Drew and I were alone in Claire’s dilapidated barn, arguing about something that I don’t even remember, when suddenly … we weren’t arguing anymore.
Suddenly we were doing something else.
Something hot.
At the thought of that particular memory — of Drew’s hands on my a—, lifting me up like it was nothing, the bare wood boards of the old barn against my back, his breath against my neck, and later, the dry bits of hay stuck all over us as we lay on the ground, recovering — the flush that was started in my cheeks spreads down to … other places.
“Jesus, Lex, are you okay? You look like a tomato.”
Dani has popped over the wall again and is peering at me from her side of the cube. She has an incredible nose for gossip. Like a blood hound. I open my mouth to confide in her about Drew, because if he’s going to be there tonight, I need to talk to somebody about it, but then shut it quickly, remembering her little dig about the apples and my apparent gullibility.
“I’m fine, just texting my sister, why?”
Dani’s face twists into a frown. She knows I’m not telling her something — multiple somethings — but what can she do about it? She flops back into her seat on her own side of the wall.
Curse my tendency to blush. We Madison kids all have it. It’s something to do with our unusual genetic mix, I think. We’re part Asian, part European. Our skin just … goes red sometimes. It’s really irritating.
“You just look like a tomato, that’s all,” Dani mutters.
“Gee, thanks. Appreciate that.”
“She’s probably thinking about me,” interjects Callum.
“You wish,” I retort.
“Don’t forget that I’m waiting on your pitches, by the way. From both of you. When can I expect them?”
Even with all the problems inherent at Citidaze, this is probably the most aggravating part of the job. Callum is just slightly senior to Dani and I, and as a result, this empowers him to elicit work from us. Pitches, specifically. Ideas. And boy does he take advantage.
Every little while he gives us a deadline and an offensively enormous tasks — 50 new pitches by 5:00pm tomorrow, for example. For most people, it would be impossible. A pitch can’t be a one-line idea. It has to be a full paragraph, and it has to include who exactly we’d interview to fulfill said pitch.
He asks for way too much, then he shouts at anyone who doesn’t finish the task (inevitably Dani), which is a behavior he obviously learned from Lars43.
Anyway, the piece de resistance is that then Callum, that dickhead, makes a note of the fact that Dani didn’t finish her pitches, so that her HR file shows her as never meeting targets at work, and then the file is used as justification for her never getting raises or promotions.
The thing is, I always finish my tasks. No matter how insane the workload, I do it. No matter how tight the deadline, I meet it. Callum wants to pretend to be my boss? Fine. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me fail.
Besides, as already explained, it’s literally my only play. If the truth about me comes out, being a superstar at work is the only slim chance I have of saving myself.
I don’t usually give Callum my best work, of course. I’ve learned the hard way that he will inevitably sort all our pitches and cherry pick the ones he deems best to write up himself, the second-best ones to assign to us, and that the rest will go in the trash. I doubt he even fully reads them all. So historically, I wasn’t going to kill myself to come up with ideas when half of them were headed for the bin.
But I do the work. I’ve always done it, every single time. I don’t miss deadlines. I don’t balk. I take a sort of sick pleasure in meeting Callum’s insane demands. At first he responded by making the asks harder. Like, initially he’d ask us for 20 pitches. So I produced 20 pitches, no sweat. He bumped his next ask up to 25. Then 30. And so on.
Now that he’s landed at expecting 50 pitches in less than 48 hours, he’s hit a sort of breaking point. He can’t make the unreasonable job any more unreasonable without looking absolutely insane. So he just asks for his stupid pitches, then gets really viscerally irritated every time I provide them without complaint.
So … Ha. Ha!
I win.
God, this job. It’s pathetic. And I’m pathetic, because I’m desperate to keep it.
“Pitches aren’t due until 5, are they?” asks Dani, nervously. I don’t understand why she’s fussed about it. She’s not going to have enough, regardless. Callum’s going to make her feel shitty about it. That’s the formula and she needs to accept it. It is what it is.
“Mine are done,” I say.
Dani drops her voice to hiss at me.
