Page 3 of Stray for You

I glance around like I actually care about our boss catching us. I don’t. Mostly because I know our boss doesn’t care about us swapping “war stories” this way. It happens every time one of us jets off to some sales conference somewhere. It’s like a game — everyone knows what happens after hours at these conferences, and we compete to see who can come home with the wildest story.

Usually, I win.

“Well, I can tell you this much,” I say, “they certainly take the Southern hospitality seriously down there.”

This earns me a round of laughter. My eager crowd includes women as well as men, and all of them know I’m not picky about gender myself. This sort of thing used to be a boy’s club, but these days, everyone’s getting in on it. Look, we aren’t sales reps because we’re geniuses. We’re sales reps because we’re charming and easy to look at. No employer would put it on a job posting,but everyone knows it’s part of the gig. People buy more stuff from pretty people.

I smooth my perfectly shaggy blond hair as I launch into stories of my escapades. This hair gets me a long way, both on the work side and the play side. A sunny smile and blue eyes don’t hurt either. I’m built for this shit, which is helpful, since I love doing it. I don’t care about the pharmaceuticals I’m supposed to sell. I could be selling water to a river for all I care. This job is less about the product and more about the people buying and selling it.

Case in point, the reps clustered around me in my cubicle, hanging on my every word as my stories get wilder and more elaborate.

“Bothof them said yes?” Cathy says.

“Both,” I confirm with a cocky grin.

“Shit, man,” Jacob breathes.

Someone fist bumps me.

“You should hold classes or something,” Brad says. “I seriously don’t know how you do this every time you’re out on a job.”

“Natural talent,” I say.

Everyone laughs again, but it rings hollow. They say these things every time. I tell them stories every time. It always goes more or less like this. The interactions could be a script we’re all following, the laughter the hollow applause demanded of a studio audience.

I hold onto my placating smile as long as I can as the group drifts off, everyone returning to their separate cubicles to pretend to work for the day. Honestly, if I’m not at a conference or in a doctor’s office trying to sell him on some new drug, I don’t really do all that much. What’s the point of a sales rep when I’m not selling anything? But we’re all supposed to come into the office in Manhattan and act like proper full-time employees.

I have some emails to answer, and I drag out the process as long as I can to keep myself busy and away from my thoughts. There’s always a crash after the high of a conference. Coming down from being desirable and funny and interesting to a huge group of people often leaves me deflated. All that awaits me here in New York are these hollow interactions with my co-workers. At lunch, I’ll tell the same stories I just recited to the same people I always talk to around here. The cycle will repeat, but it never leaves this building. We don’t get drinks after work. We aren’t friends outside of this setting. Their smiles are like mine — performances.

Sure, I get plenty of sex living life the way I do. I never struggle to find that, at least. But if I claimed the encounters were more than physically fulfilling, I’d be lying.

I have money. I have sex. I have a good job. I have my looks. But at the end of the day it’s me alone in my sweatpants in an empty, though beautiful, apartment.

There’s only been one relationship in my life that ever felt like more than that, though the other party would probably disagree.

Cameron Ortiz.

When our moms started dating, he was horrified, but I was thrilled. I grew up near him. Went to the same high school. Somehow ended up at the same university. Our lives followed parallel tracks. To me, our moms dating was fate. His dad had just left; I’d never known mine. Our families were supposed to come together this way.

Cameron hated every second of it, however. He hatedmefor every second of it. Yeah, I didn’t exactly make things easier with how I liked to mess with him, but the guy was so damn uptight about the whole thing. If he could have relaxed for two minutes, he might have seen the potential there.

Was it the brother thing? It has to be the brother thing.

I liked calling him brother when our moms were together, buteven if they’d gotten married, we wouldn’treallybe brothers. We had nothing in common. We grew up in separate families. We had separate lives. And we were both already adults when our moms got together. We wouldn’t be brothers any more than any two strangers off the street.

He’s in Seattle now, apparently. I heard about it from our former Boyfriend Café co-worker Henry. I guess Cameron wanted to get as far away from me as possible after our moms broke up.

I’m staring blankly at an email that I haven’t managed to read a single word of in the past twenty minutes when someone knocks on the wall of my cubicle. My boss, Garret, leans his hip against the flimsy partition.

“Have a minute?”

It’s not like I can say no to my boss, but I pretend to finish up an email and nod. I follow him through the office, winking at a co-worker here or there when they notice our passing.

Garret’s office sits along a far wall of the floor we occupy. We have to navigate a field of squat gray cubicles to reach it, then he opens the door and gestures me inside. He closes the door behind us, but that doesn’t mean much. Garret likes catching up with us after conferences and things, and he often keeps his door closed even when he’s alone.

“Have a seat,” he says as he takes his own behind his desk. “How was Nashville?”

He gets a very different version of events than what I regaled my co-workers with. The x-rated version is no secret to Garret; he was a rep himself before ascending into management. Still, I focus on clients, sales, panels I attended, stuff like that. All the boring things. The stuff that’s actually part of the job.

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