Page 79 of Mistlefoe
“Nah, that’s what I let everyone think this year. I’d rather change out of these boring clothes and into something more festive,” she says, motioning at her red cardigan. “But I assume that’s not what you were here for.SPORTY, huh?”
Conor switches back to business faster than I can. “Yes, we actually need your help for the annual Christmas event that our company puts together.”
“Hmm, we’re a week away from Christmas so I assume your event will be happening in the next few days. The problem is that we’re already booked with a Christmas themed art exhibition that we’ll start installing tomorrow.”
“It’s not the venue we need,” I say, leaning forward. “It’s the booths you had during the market fair.”
She blinks her perfectly made up eyes. “The booths.”
“Yes, we need to rent them for our event. Our supplier had some issues and we’re fresh out of booths.”
“And it doesn’t matter if the owners live far away,” Conor adds in a rush. “We have a pickup truck and we can just go get them if you help us contact them. We’re more than happy to compensate everyone generously.”
That’s right, screw our twenty percent budget savings.
The woman waves her hand. “That won’t be necessary?—”
“But—”
“Because the booths are ours.”
Both Conor and I gasp.
“There’s only one problem,” she continues saying. “They’re already in storage along with five million other props and equipment, and they’re also fully disassembled already.”
“We’re more than happy to find them and assemble them ourselves,” I say.
“That’s great, but we’ll need our facility manager too and he’s… kind of particular.” She picks up the receiver of a landline phone, and presses some digits on the pad that eventually connect her to this guy. We can hear the droll of his voice from the other end, but the conversation ends quickly and if it wasn’t for her nods, I’d fear he isn’t willing to help.
However, some ten minutes later we stand next to the facility manager inside a large warehouse that is packed withfloor to ceiling shelves. In turn, they’re brimming with junk in all sizes from shoeboxes to whole crates.
The guy is less nice than the CEO, because he slaps some work gloves on our hands and walks off without even telling us where he stored the booth parts in the first place.
I glare at his retreating back before turning to Conor. “I guess we don’t actually need his help. How hard can it be to find those big, super festive-looking booths?”
“So long as they’re not wrapped, we should be able to find them easy enough.” Conor tucks his winter gloves in the pocket of his jacket and replaces them for the neoprene coated ones. “Should we divide and conquer?”
“Good plan or midnight will catch us out here. I’ll take the next aisle over and you check this one.”
“Roger that.” He salutes and I swivel on my heels. “Wait.”
His hand closes around my arm and he pulls me towards him. My back lands against his chest and before I can react, his fingers tilt my chin back and his head obscures the overhead lights. His lips aren’t perfectly aligned with mine but for some reason, that shoots tendrils of sensation down my entire body.
“For the road,” he says as he pulls away.
I gape after his back, and it takes shaking my head like a dog to snap out of the desire to push him against one of these shelves and have my way with him.
“This freaking guy,” I grumble as I march over to the next aisle. “He’s going to give me a heart attack one of these days.”
Anyway, I better get to work if only to distract myself from the tornado of hormones whipping my insides. I’m not sure how disassembled booths even look like but I remember that they were painted brown, with uneven white trimming and decorations that made them look like oversized gingerbread houses. I ignore everything that looks too small or has too much volume, and find a crate with a pile of flat sheets. I rush over to it, but it looks like a bunch of tables instead.
“I think I found something,” Conor announces from the aisle behind mine.
“Oh?” I pick up speed around the shelves. “Should we call the facility guy?”
“No, I think I got it. All I have to?—”
But right as I round the corner, his voice cuts off and the shelf rocks dangerously.
