Page 39 of Sunny Skies Ahead
“Thank you for everything,” I said earnestly. “I don’t know what we’d do without you. This place would probably fall apart.”
I would fall apartis what I wanted to say, but I held back. The last thing I wanted was for Imogen to get it in her head that I wasn’t serious and write off my comment as nothing more than me being delirious while sick.
Something flashed through Imogen’s eyes that looked suspiciously like disappointment, though it was gone too quickly for me to say for sure.
“Always happy to help. It’s my job, after all.”
Chapter thirteen
Imogen
We didn’t have wait a week. Just a few days after we got the original email, we received notice that we were advancing to the video interview stage. The next week was spent facilitating a watered-down version of media training for Kameron. The selection committee had sent over a list of questions they planned to ask in the interview. Most of them were pretty surface level—questions about the mission and the population served. The interviewers already had the answers to most of those questions in the grant application, and the video interview was designed to put a face to the written proposal.
The day of the interview finally came, and I had never seen a more stressed out man in my life.
“What if the Wi-Fi goes down?”
Kameron was pacing around the kitchen, alternating between muttering to himself and playing the “worst-case scenario” game.
“Then we’ll set up a hotspot,” I said, pouring the freshly boiled hot water over a bag of green tea. Kameron was pacing around the kitchen, wearing a crisp white shirt, jeans, and boots. The whole ensemble was highly distracting on a good day.
Couple that with the way he kept running his hand through his hair to calm himself down, and I was a goner.
“What if they don’t show? Or worse, what if theydoshow up and then they realize that they actually meant to give this opportunity to someone else, and—”
“Kameron,” I sighed, putting my mug down on the kitchen counter. I walked over to him and took his face in my hands, unable to bear the back and forth.
“Stop psyching yourself out over this,” I said, shaking his face gently for emphasis. “You’ve done everything you can to prepare. Focus on the questions at hand. Go ‘military work mode’ or whatever it is you used to do when preparing to do something that stressed you out when you were on active duty. You’ve got this. You’ve done everything you can to prepare. It is what it is.”
Kameron’s breathing evened out, and I patted his cheek.
“I’ll be waiting down here when it’s over. Whatever happens.”
Kameron, to my surprise, enveloped me in a bear hug. He murmured a muffledthank youinto my hair and squeezed me. I let out a small laugh of bewilderment, trying desperately not to think about the hard lines of his body pressed against mine. Which was disrespectful, considering that he was in an emotionally vulnerable position right now.
This is your boss. This is Kameron. This is one of your closest friends.
Maybe if I repeated it enough times to myself I’d start to believe it.
Ninety minutes later, Kameron came bounding downstairs, exclaiming that he hadn’t bombed the interview. In fact, he was pretty damn confident that he nailed it.
“They stuck to the list of questions they sent out earlier. I was expecting at least one curveball, but it never came,” Kameron said, slouching down in the dining room chair. I smiled and took the seat across from him.
“So, are you in a place where you can admit that you might have been panicking unnecessarily?”
Kameron waved a hand. “Me? Unnecessarily panicking? Never.”
“So, now that the interview is out of the way. . . what should we do next?”
“We’re taking the day off,” Kameron said, closing my laptop. I yelped in protest, attempting to remove his hand, but my efforts were futile. “Leave the inbox how it is, and go put your bathing suit on.”
I slouched back in my chair, glaring at him.
“Some of us have work to do.”
“I thought I was your boss,” Kameron said, the ghost of a smile on his lips. Something about the way he said the word ‘boss’ had my mind sprinting in a direction it should stay far away from.
“In most workplaces, it would be inappropriate for a boss to tell one of their employees to put on their bikini.”
