Page 16 of Unexpected You

Instead of answering, I went back to my sandwich.

Chapter Six

Cade

Welp, the cat was out of the bag as far as the tattoos went. I almost died when she told me that she’d looked at my social media. There were too many things on there that I didn’t want my boss to see, and not just the silly pictures from nights out with too many shots. The silly memes and other bullshit that I posted wasn’t the kind of stuff you wanted to see from your assistant that you trusted with booking your plane tickets.

I almost wanted to escape from her and go through my pages and wonder what she’d seen. She’d said that she hadn’t seen any red flags, but there were miles between red flags and complete humiliation. Hell, I posted sex jokes on there and a whole lot of lesbian things.

My boss didn’t need to know how many scissoring jokes I’d made this week. Hopefully she hadn’t looked too hard. Maybe she’d just done a quick scroll and that was it. Otherwise, I would not survive the mortification.

This was why Hunter had told me to have public accounts and then secret accounts for close friends, but I hadn’t wanted to juggle multiple login information because I forgot my passwords enough as it was, and I would inevitably mess up and post on the wrong one, defeating the purpose.

At least things were going better with focusing now that I had my headphones. She hadn’t complained about them, and every time she’d needed me for something, she’d just sent me a message. Seemed silly, but if that was what she wanted, she was the boss.

It was unbelievable how many emails she got per day. I’d thought my inbox was bad, but it was only bad because of all the spam from companies I got and kept forgetting to unsubscribe to. Eloise got actual important emails, just a lot of them. So many were high-priority that it was blowing my mind that she was so calm about it all, but she’d been doing this for a long time, so I guess it was all old news.

Eloise had given me a very extensive template for responding to emails that she didn’t need to see. All I had to do was add the greeting and mostly copy and paste, which made it so much easier than trying to sound completely professional on my own.

She also had me going through her past social media and coming up with which posts had done the best numbers so she could replicate them with new content. And then there was coordinating the delivery of thousands of special edition hardcovers for her most-recent release so that she could sign them all individually. Apparently, I would be helping move them all from the garage to the basement where she already had tables set up because she’d done this before. We’d pack them all back up and coordinate pickup so they could be sent out by the publisher.

There were so many moving parts and keeping track of all of it made my head spin. I wasn’t panicking yet about managing it all, but it was close. Using all my tips and tricks and apps and lists helped, and I had to keep reminding myself that this was a new job, and there was always an adjustment with something new. Anyone else in my place would have felt similarly. Eloise wasn’t shy about correcting me either. The third time I hadn’t done something in the right font, she had reminded me, and I’d apologized, but she’d just moved on and gone back to work while I tried not to have a breakdown. I couldn’t make mistakes like that. I had to keep it together and impress her.

At one point I was going through the tagged posts on social media for inspiration and found some absolutely incredible fanart creators for one of her most popular romance series. My personal homework for this weekend was to read at least three of the books, which centered on a family of seven growing up and finding love. Already two of the books had been made into blockbuster movies and the third was currently in negotiations, of which I was somehow a liaison.

I pulled up a new message to Eloise and started adding some of the fanart, as well as links to the creators. Why not share and celebrate them? She’d never really done anything like that on her pages, which I found a little odd for an author who had built such a close and inclusive community on her website.

Even though this was only my second day with Eloise Roth, I got the idea that she either didn’t like social media that much, or she wasn’t as comfortable with it. Understandable, seeing as how she had built her website up years ago and had much more control than she did on other social sites. Plus, dealing with that many followers and comments and everything else was daunting even for a regular person, let alone a bestselling author. I’d already seen some that were vile and had to ban and block too many accounts. There was a reason Eloise didn’t have any easy way to contact her on her sites. She did have a general email account, which was going to be mine to manage, and that was a cesspool that I had been actively avoiding. I knew there were going to be threats and dick pics aplenty in there. Not to mention the people who had decided that romance novels were porn and that Eloise was responsible for the downfall of society. I knew that a lot of those messages were from women, and it just made me want to weep for the future of humanity.

Yeah, looking up fanart was much more enjoyable.

I also found a few memes that people had made of the books and I didn’t know if they were accurate or not, but I added those as well. Maybe we could start adding one or two of them in her weekly newsletter that I would be compiling.

I sent Eloise the message with the memes and fanart and then got a message back immediately. Taking off my headphones, I turned my chair to face her.

“This is an interesting idea,” she said, tapping her finger on the desk. “I’ve commissioned art before, but not for a long time and I’ve never highlighted individual artists. I have shared pictures of quote tattoos, but this is different.” She seemed thoughtful.

“Why don’t you start reaching out to them and ask if we can feature their art on the website? We could have a revolving carousel. You can build it out with a few images and send it to me to look over. Make sure you have at least twenty artists lined up with agreements, minimum.” Oh, was that it?

Before I could stop myself, I blurted out “I’ll get right on top of that, Rose.” Shit.

Eloise seemed stunned for a second. “Do people your age still watch that movie? I would have thought it was too passé.”

I shook my head. “No. My mom loved it and made me watch it growing up.”

Eloise let out a little scoffing sound. “Stop reminding me how much older I am than you are.”

“I’m sorry?” I said. “It’s not something I can really do anything about.”

She waved a hand and rubbed her forehead. “Yes, yes, I know. Let’s get back to work. This chapter and I are in a battle and right now, it’s winning.”

Curious about her writing process, I asked if she wanted to talk about it. “Maybe saying something out loud will help you process. I know it helps me.” More often than not, just saying what a problem was, out loud to another person led me to a solution in the moment.

“No, thank you. I’ll manage. But I do think I need a break.” That was a surprise. Eloise scheduled her breaks and she wasn’t due one for another hour at least. From what I had observed, she treated her schedule like a religion. I made a mental note of the deviation.

“Would you like me to make you some coffee?” I still had yet to conquer the French press, but I needed to practice if I was ever going to get good at it. If all else failed, I could look up a video tutorial.

“Yes, thank you. I’m going to pace around the garden for a little while.” Fair enough.

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