“You’re not. You could even argue—and if you ever tell anyone I said this, I’ll deny it—that Deb should have made it clearer what she expected. Though with her this sort of thing is more of a strategy than an error.”
“What do you mean?”
He stood and began uncoiling the reports we’d already coiled, in anticipation of, you know, plugging in five new final pages oh my god what had I done. I tried to get my breathing under control and focused on what Jack was saying.
“...to know Deb through her wife, who was one of my professors and pulled me in like a little waif. Anne’s the same way. She’d leave an assignment open-ended just to see what people would come up with. I know it seems a little backwards, but this will endear you to Deb more than producing the same thing she expected you to produce. Of course, that’s only if we pull the rest of the Fling off.”
The notion of Jack as a “waif” derailed my internal mortification train. “So you’ve known them for a long time?”
He glanced at me. “How old do you think I am?”
“Not...that old. But if you went to undergrad out of high school, then you’ve known your old professor for a while.”
Seeming to decide I wasn’t insulting him (if that was a perk of me making a fool of myself with a book binding machine, I’d take it), he shrugged. “A while.”
“Is that why you’re working here?”
“I applied for my job just like everyone else.” Not as defensive as he would have been a few weeks before, but a little touchy all the same.
“Uh, yeah, it really had not occurred to me that Deb hired you to be nice. Like, for a long time I thought she only kept me around because she liked me, but that’s obviously dumb. She’s not that kind of boss.”
“True.” He paused. It felt like a pause. Not a terminal point.
So I waited.
And sipped my now cold coffee.
And watched him uncoil reports. Which was soothing except for the guilty voice in the back of my head that kept prodding me to help.
“My grandparents are having trouble living independently,” he said finally. “They raised me, and despite the problems we’ve had in the past, I care a lot about them. It’s hard to see them struggle. I’d had a relatively high-pressure job before this and I couldn’t keep up with the strain of it while also trying to watch over them when I wasn’t at work, so I...quit. And started working here.”
Whoa. Dire Jack had a semi-tragic backstory. Not that I should have been surprised, but in a way I was. “I’m really sorry about your grandparents. That sounds super hard.” Super hard probably didn’t scratch the surface of it, but it was the best I could come up with on the spot.
“It’s difficult to convince independently minded people they need more help than they can get on their own.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
He began stacking the uncoiled completed reports in alternating vertical and horizontal sections. “Do you want to pull up the new final five pages? Should we send them to the printer or print them ourselves?”
“Maybe the printer? They should match.”
“That’s true. Some of the printers here are high quality, though if there are images we might want to have them professionally done. We could print a few test pages and see if it’s a noticeable difference.”
“Good call. It’d be faster to print them now and get them swapped out for the bad pages immediately. Also, I think that might help with my sense of mortification; if I have to do that tomorrow, I’ll feel bad all over again.”
He waved a hand, elegantly dismissing my ennui. “This is all just details we’re learning for next time we do this. Like demand a finalized report by a certain date. And price check having the reports bound, especially if they’re longer than this. We can’t comfortably punch more than twenty pages, which is manageable at this length, but for longer it probably wouldn’t be worth the labor.”
I started gathering up the coils to bundle them back into the little compartment on the binding machine. “Yeah, imagine trying to do this many 500-page reports. Shudder.”
He shook his head. “Hard no.”
“Agreed.”
The phrase the next time we do this kept bouncing around in my head. I would have said the last thing I wanted to do—besides becoming a permanent employee—was work with Jack again. But now? I wasn’t as sure. Suddenly it felt like we were in it together...and all it had taken was him having a minor breakdown before coffee and me initiating a bunch of mutually wasted time.
“Oh god, I’m really sorry,” I mumbled.
“If this is the worst thing you’ve ever done, Declan, you’ve lived a charmed life.”
I nearly didn’t say it. After all, I didn’t have to. Jack would never meet my friends, would never hear their handy little tagline for me. But on the other hand, it sort of felt like a dismissal, like he really thought it was the worst thing I’d ever done.
“I left my last boyfriend at the altar.”
He looked over. “Shit. Sorry. But...”
“I know. It’s horrible. He’s still friends with me and stuff. It’s not like he hates me or anything. Now, I mean. He was pretty pissed at the time. For obvious reasons.” Shut up, Dec.
Jack stared at me for a very long moment. “If my failed experience at marriage is anything to go by, you might have saved him a whole lot of heartbreak.”
Jumping jackrabbits.
“Anyway, I didn’t actually think making use of company supplies for company business and inadvertently saving the company a huge chunk of money was the worst thing you’d ever done. On most lists, it would qualify as a good thing. If you’re networked to the printer by the bathrooms, I think that’s our best bet for quality.”
So...topic closed, apparently. I sent the finalized five pages to the printer by the bathroom and went to refresh my coffee while waiting for it to print. When I asked if he wanted a cup, he said yes. Which, while earlier in our work relationship I would have taken as an affront, as if I was serving him, now almost felt like camaraderie.
If this was how you won friends and influenced people, I should pile extra work on my colleagues more often.
Chapter Twenty
Pre-wedding drinks at the Hole were being held at our second favorite table, a booth along the windows, but thankfully nothing seemed to be fazing the brides-to-be.
“Our last drinks as single people!” Mia said, kissing Ronnie.
“Which means drinks in two weeks will be so much more relaxed!”