Page 10 of Splintered
“Hey!” Evan snatched the earbud away, glaring. He tried to stuff it back in his ear.
“Evan, stop!” Ben grabbed his wrist. “Talk to me! Why are you ignoring me?”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“You’ve barely said anything to me since you got back! You haven’t said awordabout what happened today! And you slept on the couch last night!”
For a moment, Evan looked confused, and something else, something almost like fear darting across his features and streaking through his hazel eyes. And then it passed. “I don’t want to talk about today,” he snapped.
“Then tell me about your trip. About New York. Did you get the job?”
Evan stared over Ben’s shoulder. He shifted, sliding sideways, escaping. “They finalized the offer.”
Ben swallowed hard. “So you told GLS then? That you were leaving?”
“No,” Evan grunted. “I didn’t tell them.”
“Then…”
“I told you I don’t want to talk about it!”
“It looks like you were fired! You brought all your things home! You were escorted out by security! They made me comepick you up! If you didn’t tell them about New York, then what was it?”
Evan sighed, a deep, blustering, flustered rush of put-upon hassle. He slammed his cup on the counter behind him. “You wanna know? Fine. My boss called me into his office and started shouting at me. Said I was missing deadlines and had flubbed on a bunch of deals, a bunch of sales. I told him I didn’t know what he was fucking talking about. He pulled out all these emails and bullshit. Made it look like I’d ignored clients until they went elsewhere. That I hadn’t been doing my job, like at all. We were yelling about it.”
“And then he fired you?”
“He told me to go cool down and think things through. Try to come up with a plan to fix my sales, my client portfolio.”
“Did you?”
“Of course. I went back to my office and stayed there all morning, trying to track things down. I was looking through my emails when he burst in, hollering at me again.”
“For what?” Ben had spoken with Hollister, Evan’s boss, at each of the office Christmas parties. He’d been a kind man, fun and warm. He’d treated Evan like a son. He’d been nothing but gracious to them both.
“He shoved an email in my face. Something he said I’d written an hour ago. It was…” Evan shook his head. He shifted, looked away again. “It was fucking awful. Vile. Just… filled with insults, all directed at Hollister. Calling him a horrible boss, a horrible person. A pig. And worse. It was… violent. Talked about wanting to kill him. Shoot up the office.”
“What the fuck? Did you write that?”
Evan scowled. “No! Of course not!”
There was that look again, that flash of fear, of panic. And then gone. “I didn’t write it,” Evan hissed. “I don’t know where it came from. But he fired me on the spot. Called security. I… don’t really remember much after that. Until you showed up.”
“You don’t remember?” Ben sighed. “We should take you to the hospital. Maybe you got hit on the head. Maybe that cut is just the tip of the iceberg. We really should get you checked out—”
“No, I’m fine.”
“You’renotfine. Nothing about this isfine. What the hell was all that, Evan? Emails in your name? Who would send those? We should call an attorney.”
“I don’t know.” Evan threw out his hands, shrugging. “I don’t know what to say. I already had this argument today and I’m not interested in doing it again, okay? Something got fucked up and I took the blame for it. But whatever. It’s done.”
And you don’t care because you’re going to New York.Ben pressed his lips closed, forcing the words back down his throat, back down into his guts, where they tossed and churned on the bile and rage that threatened to come up. “What can I do?” he finally asked instead. “How can I help?”
Evan shook his head as he popped his earbuds back in. “Nothing. I’m gonna shower.”
He slipped past Ben, careful not to touch him, and stomped upstairs.
Ben stared at Evan’s abandoned protein shake, the condensation dripping down the sides of the glass, leaving lonely puddles on the countertop.
