Page 3 of The Worst Man

Two

“So, Miranda. Hank tells us you have a rather interesting hobby.” Natasha Blankenchamp wrapped her lips around her straw and hollowed out her cheeks, sucking down her twenty-four dollar gin and tonic.

Like Hank, Natasha had graduated from Thackeray, but unlike him, she’d headed west for grad school instead of staying in New England. Now she taught Early American History at a fancy pants private academy in Seattle.

I didn’t have anything against her, per se, but I got the impression she didn’t much care for me. Every word out of her mouth seemed laced with disdain, and more than once I’d wondered if she somehow saw me as competition. What for, I wasn’t sure, and supremely ridiculous, considering we were as different as two women could be.

Whereas she was approximately six feet tall and looked like the real-life version of Jessica Rabbit, I was barely five-foot-two, wore glasses best described as “nerdy” to compensate for a weird astigmatism I’d developed as a kid, and regularly dressed in jeans and no-nonsense button down mens’ oxford shirts. If I was getting dressed up—which she certainly was at the moment—I wore my dishwater blonde hair down instead of up in a messy bun, and I maybe threw on the tweed jacket I’d picked up in Scotland a number of years ago. Basically, she was sexy and beautiful and I was … not.

“Hobby?” I asked, looking around the circle in hopes of being clued in.

In addition to Hank, Natasha, and me, there was Samuel Gallagher, a professor of antiquities at Trinity College who I’d dated briefly back in the day, Rory Wellstone, my college roommate and the current Dean of Admissions for a small liberal arts college in New York, and Charles Tate, an aging university administrator who’d retired two years ago but still attended these conferences because “they make me feel young and in touch.” A few years back, we’d been assigned to the same group project during this conference, and we’d sort of just stuck with the pairing.

“Yeah,” Hank said, his lips tipped up in a condescending smirk. “The sock folding.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” I cast a quick glance down at the drink in my hand—only my second of the night. Maybe it was stronger than I thought because his comment made absolutely zero sense. Then again, Hank was the one speaking, so it stood to reason that the discussion bordered on the ridiculous. The man rarely spoke a sensible word.

But then it hit me. “Are you talking about Marie Kondo?”

A couple of months ago, Kondo had become a cultural sensation for the second time in her career when Netflix aired a show about her rather stark methods of personal organization. I’d gotten sucked into watching the show while grading papers for my freshman seminar, and while I couldn’t bring myself to employ many of her tactics, one weekend I’d gone through my dresser and thrown out all of my mismatched socks.

But how would Hank have ever known that?

“Who’s Marie Kondo?” he asked, his thick brows dipped into a deep vee that signaled his confusion.

Inwardly, I tossed him a smirk of my own. I always enjoyed it when I could turn his snide comments back on himself, and making him look like an idiot when he’d intended for me to look like a prude was fine by me.

Natasha threw back her head and laughed, a sexy, throaty sound that had three sets of male eyes swinging her way. “Oh, Hank. You’re so funny. Who’s Marie Kondo, he asks.”

Rory turned to me with a no-nonsense expression that hadn’t changed much since we first met our first year of college. “Should I know who Marie Kondo is?”

Rory certainly marched to the beat of her own drum, not caring one way or the other for cultural fads, but since she was responsible for making sure the best and the brightest freshman attended her university, she had to keep abreast of them. Frankly, I was surprised she hadn’t heard of KonMari already.

“I feel like I met her once,” Charles was saying. “Maybe back in 2011. Smart woman. Very clever.” He clearly had no idea who we were talking about, having mistaken the Japanese woman for someone else.

“Marie Kondo is a professional organizer,” I explained, putting a stop to the merry go round of trying to figure out who she was and how people might know her. “She’s the one who said to throw out anything that doesn’t bring you joy.”

Rory stared at me like she couldn’t possibly comprehend why anyone would be advocating for something so ridiculous—she was a bit of a pack rat—while Charles’s ears turned pink with embarrassment as he realized his gaff. Samuel chuckled, his eyes cast down into the amber liquid he was swirling in his glass.

Meanwhile, Hank scowled at me from across the circle. “You threw away your socks because they didn’t bring you joy?” His eyes bounced down to my feet, which were sheathed in a pair of sensible-yet-stylish ballet flats. I’d learned the hard way years ago not to wear heels to these things.

I sighed audibly. Leave it to Hank to make it sound like I was some addlepated nincompoop. The man seemed to live for humiliating me at work functions. “Don’t be ridiculous. I tossed them out because they either had holes in them or hadn’t had a mate in months.”

“Sounds like someone else I know.” He smiled wolfishly before his eyes scanned dropped down again to scan me from head to toe.

Natasha brayed, smacking his arm lightly and letting her palm settle on his bicep. “You’re just too funny, Hank.”

“See, Whitcomb. Someone thinks I’m funny.” He raised a sardonic eyebrow, daring me to respond.

I wanted to. Really, I did. But I was ill equipped to go toe-to-toe with him in this arena. If we were trading barbs about literature or politics, I could best him four out of five times. But when it came to insults about our love lives, I tended to sound inarticulate, or worse—immature. The best I could do was make fun of the fact that he had a lot of sex. Meanwhile, I was having none—which he had no problem pointing out.

My neck grew hot, my stomach churned, and a bead of sweat dripped down my back. I couldn’t beat him at this game, but that didn’t mean I had to play it.

As a waiter sailed passed, I set my half-full glass on his tray. “If you’ll excuse me, it’s been a long day, and I need to prepare for my talk tomorrow.”

“You’re heading up already?” Samuel asked, glancing down at the elegant watch circling his wrist. Yes, it was still early, but the sooner I got out of there, the less I’d have to endure from Hank and his one-woman cheering squad.

“I want to go over my slides again to make sure everything is perfect.”

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