Page 37 of Never Landing

“Why are you embarrassed?” Everett asked, looking up at me.

Upon reflection, I...didn’t really know. Everett didn’t make me feel small or stupid for not knowing all the same stuff everyone else seemed to. And really, I just wanted to think about kissing him. So why did it make me squirm to know he’d caught me thinking about it?

“I...want you to think I’m cool,” I whispered. “Or, like...I want you to be able to trust me to know what I’m doing? I wantto sweep you off your feet. I don’teverwant you to catch me fumbling.”

Everett hummed again, his chin against my stomach and his eyes on the wall beside me as he thought it over. After a few seconds, he caught my eye again.

“Well, first off, you’re cute when you fumble. I like it, like you, so please don’t deny me your fumbling because then I’ll feel like I’m the only one who ever does it.”

I huffed, pushing on his shoulder. “No, you never do.”

He laughed. “I doallthe time. But second...you said you wanted to figure everything out with me—all the big firsts and stuff?”

I bit my lip hard. I did, even if I didn’t want to make him go through stuff he’d already been through. Everett was why I’d come out. I wantedeverythingwith him.

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“What if I said that’s good for me too? I could use a redo on figuring stuff out. I don’t think either of us needs to know it all right away, but we can work together on it.”

“Okay.” My voice came out even quieter, trapped behind a knot in my throat. What he said was everything I wanted, and I was scared it wasn’t real or that he was just trying to take care of me, not himself.

“I’m serious,” he pressed, pushing a kiss into my stomach through my T-shirt. “I like that you’re thinking about it, and you can absolutely use my computer whenever you want to researchwhateveryou want, but I don’t want you to be perfect. I just want you to be Peter.”

And, well, if I drew him out of his seat and kissed him after that, savoring the bitter taste of coffee on his lips, who could blame me? Hewantedme, and nothing had ever felt better.

23

Everett

“Tom doesn’t have the Crosslife ads,” was how James Warren greeted me when I picked up the phone.

I paused, considering. Halfway through December.

It took Warren until halfway through December to even think about the Crosslife account enough to look for the files and realize he didn’t have them.

“Why would you have expected him to have them?” I asked. “He didn’t make them. Didn’t help with them. Didn’t have anything to do with them. Just like you.”

He huffed out a frustrated sigh, and I could hear his fingers tapping on the other end of the line. “Now is not the time for cute games, Bailey. Where is the Crosslife file?”

I waited a moment. How should I handle this? It wasn’t like I could sell the files to anyone else. Technically, I’d done the work while in Warren’s employ. On the other hand, he’d broken trust with me, so I also didn’t have a reason to give him files I wasn’t going to get the promised bonus for. “Well, I haven’t looked, since I’m on vacation, but I assume it’s right where I left it when I was working on it. You know, on my computer.”

“And where’s that?” he demanded, tone suggesting he was speaking to a recalcitrant child. “We checked your desk, but it seems like you took company property out of the office.”

“No, I didn’t. You didn’t give me a computer. Artists are too picky and you couldn’t be bothered, remember? I’ve never removed so much as a stray paperclip that belonged to you from the office. Only my own property. Like my personal laptop.”

There was a loaded silence where he digested the information, realizing how much of a barrel I actually had him over. I’d never heard anyone speak to him this way in my years with the company, but I had watched one person after another leave suddenly, and then be mocked around the office as “weak” and “unable to handle the pressure.”

I wondered if he’d go sickly sweet and once again promise me the imaginary bonus he had no intention of giving.

How long, and with how many brand-new college grads had he and Tom run this con? Here kid, pay for your own tech and take this barely living wage, and give us the hard work that pays for our jaguars and yachts, then we wait till you get jaded and leave, rinse, repeat.

Instead of trying to lure me back with honey, though, Warren went ice cold. “Now you listen here, you little shit. I own you. I own every bit of work you’ve done on that account. And your contract says you can’t go work for another ad company for five years after leaving me.”

I knew that. It was why I’d been looking for freelance work instead of trying to find another nine-to-five job, because that was the one loophole I’d found in the contract—Warren was old school enough that he hadn’t accounted for freelance work at all.

“I thought you made the ads for Crosslife yourself,” I reminded him. I was digging my own grave, but seriously, calling me a little shit, when he’d lied and used and manipulated me? Fuck that guy. “That is what you told their CEO, if you recall.You had to get down in the trenches because I was too much of a wimp to do the job. If that’s true, there’s no reason you wouldn’t have your very own copy of them. I mean, why would I even have them at all if you made them?”

When he answered, he was panting, like he was on a fucking treadmill or something. “You want to get fired? Is that it? You make me fire you, you’ll never work in this industry again. I’ll blacklist you, and you won’t be able to get a position sweeping floors at an advertising agency, in five years or fifty, it won’t matter.”

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