The lights flickered, dimmed, then finally went out. The car came to an abrupt halt and forced me to put a hand out to steady myself.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” I mumbled as the palm of my hand grazed a human body. I stepped back so my back was against the elevator wall.
A moment stretched and thinned, like a piece of gooey taffy being pulled and softened.
“Well, this is awkward,” I said, a small, nervous giggle escaping from between my lips.
“Indeed,” my boss muttered and I was suddenly glad it was pitch black so he couldn’t see the sheer panic on my face.
Leonard was intimidating under the best of circumstances, and it was safe to say, this wasn’t the best of circumstances.
“How long do you think …” I began, desperate to fill the black void with … something, even the sound of my own squeaky, slightly prepubescent, voice was better than nothing at all.
“I slept with Vicki,” he said. It was said so matter-of-factly, and with little to no inflection that he might as well have said, “I had tuna for lunch.”
I blinked into the blackness. My brain went into overdrive. Vicki … Vicki … I mulled the name over in my mind. Would that be …
“Your secretary?” I blurted out. I instantly wanted to snatch those two potentially loaded words back into the bowels of my being.
The lights buzzed and came back on.
It was awkward before – now it was intolerable.
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Write From Karen 