At eighteen, Ivory Sterling has learned that love is as fleeting as it is painful. The weight of a past she cannot escape has left her heart frozen, her world reduced to silence and solitude. The one person she never had the courage to love is gone...
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The entire day was a blur of tension, frustration, and a level of anger from Mr. Ford that I had never seen before. Normally, he was cold and distant but today, he was downright hostile, snapping at anyone who even dared to breathe wrong in his presence.
He stormed through the office, throwing out commands and criticisms with a fury that could rival a storm.
And of course, I was right in the line of fire.
"Sterling," He barked as I walked past his office for the third time that morning, carrying a stack of files, "What is this mess? How can you let things pile up like this?"
I narrowed my eyes, unfazed by his outburst.
"It's not a mess, Mr. Ford. I just didn't have the chance to reorganize them yet." I replied, my tone as icy as his.
"Where's your assistant?" He asked when I shrugged.
"Go look for her and see if you can find her." I snapped back at him, my frustration showing.
He didn't respond, just glared at me as I went about my business. The tension between us had always been thick but today it felt like an impenetrable wall that neither of us knew how to scale.
By lunch, I had already been reprimanded for a variety of minor issues—none of them even remotely worth the ire he was directing at me.
I could tell something was off, even though I wasn't about to ask him about it. I had enough of his volatility.
As the afternoon wore on, I found myself more and more on edge. Every time I spoke to him, it seemed like he was looking for a fight.
His words were sharper than usual and his voice colder than the Arctic. Even the tiniest mistake would send him into a tirade.
"Are you even listening, Sterling?" He snapped after I emailed him a document with a minor error I had overlooked, "Do you think you can get away with this kind of incompetence just because you're managing an event? You better shape up."
I stood straighter, resisting the urge to retort with something just as biting. Instead, I kept my voice steady.
"I'll fix it, but I'm not your punching bag, Ford." I told him.
His eyes flashed with something darker but he didn't argue. It wasn't enough to rattle me, though. If anything, it only made me more determined not to let him get under my skin.
The day dragged on and by the time the evening came, I could feel the weight of the tasks still left undone.
Mr. Ford had piled more on me than I could handle in a normal day but he seemed more insistent than usual today, making me sit in his office and do the work there because, as he put it so nicely, I was 'incompetent' to do it all on my own.
