Read Roomies (A Standalone Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) for Free Online Page B

numbers to go over. To make the conversation go more quickly, I just
tell him that it’s already taken care of.
    He smiles, and I only end
up getting coffee for him and half the floor, emptying his wastebasket, calling
his wife to tell her that he won’t be home until after midnight because he’s
slammed with work and then call his favorite drinking buddy to tell him that
they’re still on for six o’clock, water his plants, place his picture of the
Great Wall in a more Feng- Shui -friendly position,
explain to him yet again that I don’t know anything about money laundering, but
reassure him that I’ll look into it, tell him which tie is most appropriate for
a trip to a sports bar and organize his stack of subpoenas by date of
appearance.
    This is my job.
    And college was so
exciting.
    I stayed up every night
before an exam to make sure I’d always be at the top of my class. A social life
was a concept that I only became aware of in a sociology class, and then only
as a study of human behavior. It was never a participatory topic for me.
    Now, I’m the office bitch
and this is somehow supposed to prepare me for life as a big time broker.
    “Hey, Lei-Lei,” Annabeth
says.
    She’s the only one here
who knows the hell that is this job. By that, I mean she’s also an intern.
    “Hey, Annabeth,” I sigh.
    “Bad day?”
    “I don’t know if I
remember what a good one is to make a suitable comparison,” I answer. “How
about you?”
    “Well,” she says, “I
tried slapping Mr. Kidman, thinking maybe that would get him to shut his
fucking mouth without getting him fired, but that only seemed to turn him on.”
    “What the hell is it with
men, anyway?” I ask. “I get that he wants the severance, but even in his
position, with that much money riding on it, I would never treat anyone that
way.”
    “You and me both, girl,”
Annabeth scoffs. “Smoke break?”
    “Please.”
    I don’t smoke, but going
out on the roof with Annabeth is about the only time on the job where I can
pretend like I’m making some kind of a difference.
    Annabeth blows out her
first puff before we’re out the door and I’m holding my breath.
    “Have you gotten any
offers yet?” she asks.
    “Nothing yet,” I tell
her. “I would say that I hope I can get something here when my internship is
up, but I really don’t know that I could handle working in this hellhole for
the rest of my career.”
    She takes a drag. “I know
what you mean. If it wasn’t for Kidman, I’d say we could make it work, but
sometimes…”
    “Have you heard back on
anything?” I ask, walking to the other side of her to avoid the cloud floating
by me.
    “Not a damn thing,” she
says. “I always thought that summa cum laude meant I could walk onto any job I
wanted. Too bad everyone else had the same idea and we all moved to New York.”
    The problem with Annabeth
is that she tries to work how she got summa cum laude and I only got magna cum
laude into every conversation. Still, other than Mike, she’s the closest thing
to a friend that I’ve got in this city.
    “Things still bad with
your roommate?”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t
believe,” I tell her. “Last night, he came in at like four in the morning,
drunk and knocking over just about everything that stands upright on the way to
his room.”
    “Well,” Annabeth says,
blowing her drag out, “at least he was alone this time.”
    “Oh, did I forget to
mention that every time he crashed into something, I could hear the chick
behind him running into the same thing?”
    Annabeth laughs.
    “It could be worse,” she
says, but doesn’t offer any proof to back the theory.
    “I guess,” I tell her. “I
wish that just once, something could go right for me in this city. Everything’s
so competitive and everyone treats each other like dirt.”
    “It’s not the city,”
Annabeth tells me. “You just need to get out there and get your freak on.”
    “My freak,” I tell her,
“is permanently set in