1
Brady
The number on my desk phone’s call display makes my heart skip. If he’s calling first thing in the morning, nothing good can come from this conversation, but I’m such a slut for punishment that I’ll talk to him no matter how pissed he is.
I settle the headset over my ear, waiting for the call to connect. “Good morning, Brady speaking.”
“Brady!” His voice cracks over the speaker, and I can’t help the way I sit up a little straighter.
“Oh. Good morning, Nash. Everything okay?”
“No. It’s not fucking okay.” It’s never fucking okay when he calls before ten in the morning. After that, he’s calling because they have someone new starting, or the printer isn’t working, or someone left the projector on again and burned out the bulb. Before, though . . .
“Something I can help you with?”
“What the hell did you do to my phone?”
I take a very long, slow breath and let it out on the count of nine. I’ve learned if I start talking too quickly, he thinks I’m trying to cover something up and jumps all over me. If I pause, he thinks I’m trying to find a solution.
Not that I’d mind if he jumped me.
“Your phone?” I set up his new cell phone yesterday. He can’t possibly have broken it since then, can he? Nash is hard on his hardware. Two laptops this year, and he’s never managed to outlast his phone contract, but twenty-four hours would be a new record.
“Yes.” His voice drops low in a way that should be a warning but lately has been doing strange things in the general area of my crotch. “My phone. The phone you set up yesterday.”
I lean back in my chair, wrapping my hands behind my head. “What seems to be the problem?”
“My contacts are gone.”
I almost make a joke about whether he has a spare pair of glasses in his desk, but that way lies a verbal flaying I am not ready for on a Friday morning, so instead I say, “Did I send you the email about importing them?”
“I don’t check email.”
He doesn’t. He says it wastes time. But wasting my time is perfectly reasonable.
I close my eyes. “Did you plug your phone in last night?” As far as I can tell, he works a lot and has no social life at all. When I first got the queer film festival contract, I expected an office full of beards and torn T-shirts. Women in plaid and with long hair pulled up in messy buns. I was not expecting the festival director to come to work every day in pressed pants and a button-down. He’s even been in a tie on more than one occasion when I had to stop in. And he’s uptight and abrupt, but it’s hard for me to ignore the spark in his eye, the jaw that could cut glass, and the flecks of silver that pepper his dark hair.
Plus, he pays his invoices on time, and that is basically the only criterion for being my BFF these days.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t need to plug it in. It was fully charged when I left work last night.”
Right. Except plugging in a phone does more than charge it. But he’ll get his back up if I tell him so.
Ramona comes through the office door and grins at the exasperated look on my face. She mouths, “Nash?” with wide eyes and waggling brows. I flip her off.
“Okay. Do you have the charger?”
“Of course I do.”
“And your computer is on?” I am leading the mountain to Mohammed, but it’s what keeps my lights on.
“Brady, get over here and fix my goddamn phone,” he growls. I have to bite back a shudder at the sound.
“Okay, so plug your phone into the computer.”
The line goes quiet. He fumbles with something and curses softly. I wait.
“Nothing’s happening,” he snaps.
“Nothing?” When I finished my degree, I never envisioned this was how I’d be putting it to use.
“Nothing. The damn wheel is spinning and spinning.”
Thank God for that. Sometimes technology can be unpredictable, and I’d have to hop on the streetcar and go down there to walk him through something that should have happened automatically overnight.
“Still spinning?” I say.
“No.” His voice has lost some of its earlier fury. “Now there’s a menu.”
I do a quiet fist pump, and Ramona giggles. “What does the menu say?” I ask, trying to keep the glee out of my voice.
“Do you want to import contacts?”
Which is exactly what we talked about last night. When I showed up to help him finish getting his phone set up, he’d been on a call. I wound up waiting for almost forty-five minutes. Finally turning his attention to me, he’d said, “You have me for five minutes, and then I have to go.”
I would take him for any time he would give me, but not in his office, and not like he meant. So instead, I’d scrambled to get his email pushed over, synced up his calendar, and given him the very simple instruction of “plug your phone into your computer tonight so your contacts will download automatically.”
Which he had obviously completely forgotten.
“And do you want to import your contacts?” I say, unable to stop the grin that slides over my face.
“Don’t get smart with me, Brady,” he snarls, but his words only make me smile more.
“No, no, sir. Not smart.” Never mind that I run my own company. I am the lowly IT consultant, and he’s the big, bad, big-city executive.
And also, never mind that he’s in charge of a queer film festival, not a bank or a real estate conglomerate. We all have our roles to play.
“Is it syncing?” I say.
His pause before his sheepish yes tells me everything I need to know. I have fought the dragon and lived to fight another day.
“Is there anything else you need this morning?”
He grumbles for a minute. “The new marketing intern is starting on Monday.”
“Harpreet has his laptop.”
“But he doesn’t get a phone,” Nash says.
“No, sir,” I drawl. “The minimum wage intern does not get any perks.” Frankly, I’m glad Nash is paying him. He’s probably nineteen and has an unlimited data plan on his own phone. No sense giving him company collateral on top of that.
“It’s done,” Nash says.
“And are your contacts there?”
In the silence, I can picture him, the frown he gets where his whole forehead wrinkles and his lower lip pushes out.
“I think so.” He harrumphs, and for a second, I expect him to call me a whippersnapper. He’s older than I am, for sure, but he’s not my grandfather. “Okay. This looks better. If it’s not, I’ll be in touch.”
“Of course. I’m a phone call away.” I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt because Nash O’Hara would be lost without me, and Ramona’s making kissy noises.
He never says goodbye when our calls are over. The line goes quiet, and I’m supposed to take that as a job well done. I groan as I stretch, and Ramona laughs.
“Nash again?”
“Who else?” I scrub my eyes with my hands. “Oh my God. That guy. He’s so old-school about tech, it’s adorable. Sometimes I can’t decide if I want to call him daddy or if I want to call him daddy.”