Domestic Affairs (43 page)

Her bank account. She thought about the twenty-six dollars in her savings account and the thirteen in her checking account. She had never been good with her own money, but this was a low point. Her next paycheck wasn't for two weeks. How could she live on thirty-nine dollars for two weeks? She desperately didn't want to ask her parents. Just then, Vince's assistant came out like a much-needed end-of-day school bell, stopping the downward spiral of thoughts. Olivia glanced up at the envelope in the assistant's hands with a spark of hope.

“Here you go,” the woman said with a touch of kindness.

“Oh, thank you, thank you so much.”

“He's sorry he was late with it.”

Olivia tripped over the assistant's words. “No, no, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry to just show up like this. It's just that we're so close to our goal. And it means so much. Thank you.”

“That's okay,” she said, “I understand.”

“I hope for your sake you don't,” Olivia said with a smile. “Thank you again.”

She looked down at the envelope. Both twenty-five-hundred-dollar checks. One-sixth of what she needed, and yet it wasn't lost on her that this amount of money could cover all of her personal expenses for a good, long while.

She trudged the eight blocks through the remnants of the snow back to Yanni's office, making calls so continuously that she barely had time to even consider trying to hail a cab. Inside the lobby she stopped at the newsstand and picked up a bag of Doritos. She fished through her
bag for change to see if she could add in a soda.
One dollar and thirteen cents.

“Just the Doritos, please. Thank you.”

Yanni's office seemed the same as when she'd walked out of it that afternoon. It hadn't emptied even a little, like most of the offices in Manhattan would at this hour. Actually, she realized, Yanni's money management firm always looked the same. Always the same amount of busy buzz. The stark white walls reflected the same amount of light whether morning, noon, or night, and the brightness of the neon paintings, the best and newest in modern art, of course, kept it always looking like a sharp day. It was much louder than the offices she worked in. A long row of young guys and a few girls sat in clear glass cubicles utterly focused on their changing computer screens. They seemed like Goldman kids in training to her, with their knees bouncing against the bottoms of their desks and their loosened ties, even at the start of the day. She wondered if some of them actually put them on already loosened.

As she walked back to Yanni's office she noticed two men yelling back and forth to each other while also on their Bluetooths.
What's the plural of “Bluetooth”? “Blueteeth”?
Just walking through gave her a little boost of energy and she thought, as she often did, it would have been much more fun to work in these offices.
Maybe Yanni will give me a job since I'll clearly lose mine tomorrow. I will lose my job on New Year's Eve.

“Hey, Yanni.” She flopped down on his couch as if she had just returned home. “Got ‘em.”

Yanni looked up, putting his hand over the microphone part of his headset. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you,” she mouthed back. Usually this would have made her feel worse, but she couldn't have cared less at this point. She opened her bag of Doritos and threw her head back while Yanni screamed numbers over the phone. His knee against the desk was almost like a metronome too. She tried to breathe along with it. Finally Yanni pulled off his headset and stood up.

“Are you okay?” He looked as if he really wanted an answer.

“Hell no!” she said uncharacteristically. “I've got this, plus the five hundred and eight dollars that came in the mail today. No one has responded to my begging emails, my boss is about to kill me, and the campaign hasn't paid me in four weeks, which means this bag of Doritos
needs to last me until I get my impending severance pay.”
Oh, and
, she added in her own train of thought,
the boss who is killing me is also the love of my life.

“What do you mean the campaign hasn't paid you in four weeks?”

Olivia looked up at him, knowing she should not have just spilled her guts like that.

“Oh, it's nothing. Sorry, I'm just being a drama queen.” She sat up and bit into a Dorito. “It will all be fine. Provided you have a plan!” She laughed, trying to turn the conversation from where she had brought it.

“I do have a plan,” he said calmly, not laughing and uncharacteristically focused, “but I want to hear about this. Have they really not paid you?”

“Yeah,” she admitted, but then tried to cover up what she knew was a totally skewed but completely normal practice of all campaigns. “But it's totally fine. All campaigns do it. They want to show lower expenses for the quarter, especially when we're so close on our numbers, so they hold off on staff pay for the last few weeks and then pay them out after. It's not a big deal. We volunteer to do it. And,” she said in a self-deprecating fashion, “if I didn't have us so close to the numbers, it wouldn't be necessary.”

“Bullshit!” Yanni hit his hand on the table incredulously. “How much do you make a month?”

Olivia thought about not telling him. It wasn't such a small salary, but for living in New York City it was minute. With her $2,000 rent and the taxes she owed from last year, it was just barely keeping her out of debt. She hated the idea of anyone knowing the financial strain her life was constantly in, but she was already in too far.

“I get paid five thousand a month,” she said sheepishly. “Plus I get a win bonus.”

“A win bonus?”

“Yeah, if we win I get an extra ten thousand.”

Yanni looked at her as if for the first time he was trying to figure out who she was.

“Let me get this straight: they are skimping on five thousand dollars? That's absurd.”

“Well, it comes to more. I mean, there are a few of us who are doing it.” She lied, knowing full well only she and Jacob had agreed to do it. “It's okay, Yanni, really. I'll be totally fine.”

“Of course you will.” He got up and went to his desk, shaking his head. “Okay, let me make two more calls to finish my master plan.” He moved his hand like Vanna White over his desk, which was covered in neon green Post-it notes.

“What is all that?” She felt relieved just by his calm.

“I call it the Post-it Plan, but you can call it the Yanni Is a Genius Plan.” He laughed out loud. “I'm starved. You want dinner?” Without waiting for an answer he screamed for his assistant. “Robin!”

The petite blonde woman who seemed to be on constant call to his screams showed up instantly in the doorway.

“Let's order dinner! How about Philippe? That work for you, O? Will you grab us a menu?”

These were the times when Olivia loved people who didn't wait for an answer. Philippe was one of the best restaurants in the city. She had gone once for an event and had never forgotten the taste of the crunchy seaweed salad and the velvet chicken, which literally tasted like velvet in food form. Delicious food form.

“That sounds amazing. Thank you. I'm just going to run to the bathroom.”

Breathing steadily for the first time all day, she knew she needed to compose herself, a good thing since her hair was just as messy as she had imagined. She splashed water on her eyes, which drooped from the lack of sleep and the wealth of tears. Robin stopped her on her way back to Yanni's with a printed-out Philippe menu. There were circles and checks around nearly every dish.

“I brought it around to everyone, so we've got almost all of them,” she said, confirming the thought, “but make sure we have what you want.”

Olivia smiled, even more grateful that she didn't have to make a decision. “I'm good with all of this.”

“Great, I'm ordering a few extras of the velvet chicken and stuff, so there will be plenty. We have drinks in the kitchen.”

“You are my hero right now.”

“Hey, do you want a coffee or anything? We just got this amazing Italian version of a Keurig. It makes sick mochas.”

“Um, yes! Seriously heroic. Do you want me to make it?”

“No! I love doing it! Plus”—she lowered her voice a little and leaned
in—“you're the only one around here who has said thank you to me all day.” She smiled, but Olivia could see the disappointment in her face, especially as the clock ticked to six p.m. on the day before New Year's Eve.

Olivia walked back into Yanni's office and sat down, watching him pace, back on the phone.

“I just need the number.” He spoke quickly, with an agitated tone. Then he listened, scribbling down on one more of the green Post-its that were covering his desk.

The mocha, delivered to Olivia within minutes, was as good as Robyn promised. As Olivia sipped the chocolate coffee, she hoped for a moment that Yanni would never get off the phone and she could sit there, melted into the couch, forever. When he hung up, he sat down with a self-satisfied grin.

“You look better.”

“Your office is better than a day spa.”

Yanni smiled, again pleased with himself.

“Okay, okay, so what's your plan?” she asked. With all the comfort she had almost forgotten the disastrous situation she was in.

“Check out the Post-its.”

Olivia got up and walked over to his desk, scanning his chicken-scratch scribble. There were at least eighteen Post-its, each of them with tons of numbers and a few initials.

“Ummm, are you going to turn all Rain Man on me and win us the lottery?”

“So much better than that. Each of these Post-its is someone's credit card and the amount we can charge up to on it.”

Olivia's eyes shot open in disbelief. “What?! Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Yanni was overflowing with pride. “It's no big deal.”

“Yanni. This is such. A. Big. Deal. This is a huge deal. This is . . . I mean . . . you did it.” She was almost overwhelmed with relief.

“Okay, don't start that crying thing again.”

Olivia laughed. “I promise. No more crying.”

“Good. Then take this too.” He handed her an envelope.

“What is it?”

“Just take it.”

Olivia took the envelope and looked in. It was a check for five
thousand dollars. Then she looked closer. It was a check for five thousand dollars written out to her.

“Ohmygod. Yanni, what is this?”

“It's a bonus.”

“Yanni, you can't pay me!”

“Fine, it's a gift.”

“Yanni, I can't take this.”

“You can too and you will. It's offensive what they pay you and it's unbearable that they're holding out payment on you. I'm going to talk to Landon about that.”

“No, no, Yanni, please don't. He'd kill me if he knew I told you. Actually there will be a line to kill me if anyone finds out. I so should not have said that aloud. And this is way too much. It's so kind of you but really, I can't take it.” She held out the envelope across his desk.

“Fine, I won't tell a soul. It'll stay between us, but it's a gift. It's rude to give it back.”

Olivia hesitated, thinking about her thirty-nine-dollar account balance.

“Plus your introductions have brought more money into this firm than most of my employees, and they get paid much more than you. Actually, if I knew you were this cheap, I would have tried to hire you away months ago.”

Olivia started to protest.

“Liv. I'm not talking about this anymore. I spent more than that on dinner last night.”

Olivia looked down at the envelope, knowing that was true. Knowing that this check that could pay her bills for two months would not even be a blip on his screen. Literally.

“Wouldn't you do the same for me if the roles were reversed?”

“I . . . Yes.”

“So stop being a little bitch and take the money. Consider it me taking you out to dinner.”

Robyn popped into the doorway. “Philippe is here!”

Yanni laughed. “Okay, consider it me taking you to dinner twice.”

“Thank you, Yanni.” Olivia went over to give him a hug.

“Sure thing, kid. Come on, let's get some food and pick out who's gonna pay what.”

W
hen Olivia had told a donor, Jason Sackton, she worked twenty-four/seven, she was exaggerating. And when Jason said he would “max out,” give the maximum amount allowable—twenty-five hundred dollars—if she was at her job at midnight on New Year's Eve, he was joking. But it was a joke they had taken farther than it should have ever gone. At 11:59 on December 31, as promised, Jason Sackton called the office, and as promised, Olivia sat waiting for the call. She didn't need the twenty-five hundred dollars and she didn't have, as she had told her friends and family, piles of work to climb out from under. The truth was she just wanted to be alone. She was never one for New Year's celebrations but this year it seemed simply intolerable. She was exhausted, sick of people in general, and with her secret relationship in shambles, she had a broken heart that she couldn't share with anyone. She talked with Jason as he gave her his credit card information in bewildered amusement at her insistence on staying in the office.

“You should come down here to St. Barths! Everyone's here. You could stay on our boat—we have three extra rooms. I saw Addie on the beach today. You wouldn't have to pay for a thing. We're going from here to Ibiza, but I'm sure you could bum a ride home on someone's private plane.”

“Bum” and “private plane” just don't seem like they belong in the same sentence, Olivia thought.
She laughed as he went on, describing the
beaches, restaurants, and of course, shopping, thinking that fabulously posh place was her worst nightmare. Just the thought of having to be around all those people made her grateful that she had been able to convince everyone that the office was where she wanted to be. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and sat back in the silence. She looked down at her BlackBerry.