Chasing Waves

Chapter Three: ex marks the spot

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
3: Meetings between Ripley and Valentine will only be scheduled when the requesting party has given twenty-four hours' notice.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Honey loved working.

She'd loved working ever since she was old enough to get a job, and even before that, when she worked for cash-in-hand at one of Valentine Confectionary's brick-and-mortar stores. She loved the thrill of ticking off a task. Loved being presented with a problem, and figuring out how to solve it.

She loved the little things just as much: waking up to a full inbox; the ping of her phone when a reminder for whatever meeting she was scheduled for that day came through; standing in the boardroom and presenting her insights, or sitting at its head to give notes on her colleagues' presentations. And when Valentine Confectionary would get its quarterly performance review ... Honey loved that most of all. It might as well have been her name in fancy block lettering at the top of the page, and a whole lot of gold stars next to the dollar signs beneath it.

Honey loved working. At Valentine, she never stopped.

After one week at Glow, she wondered when they would let her start.

Oh, Honey was on the books. Technically. Every day, at ten-to-nine, she arrived at the office—a white, mellow-lit space brimming with flowers and potted ferns that was located on one of the highest floors of a skyscraper in the heart of the CBD. But her inbox remained empty. Her phone had never been so quiet. Her fingers were starting to cramp from lack of typing. Estelle, her boss—a thirty-something balayage-blonde with sharp acrylics and sharper almond eyes—wouldn't even let Honey pick up the morning coffee order, for goodness sake; that was the intern's job.

Even the intern was delegated more tasks than Honey was.

Though, technically, Honey had gone for coffee—once. A meeting, of sorts, with the only one of Estelle's clients that she'd met. Fleur was a twenty-one-year-old model who'd moved to Brisbane from France after booking nine shows for Fashion Week. Her parents had mortgaged their house to get their daughter the best team in the business—which apparently included Estelle Kimura's PR prowess.

Honey had been tasked with giving Fleur the star treatment. Managing talent was all about making them feel pampered, Estelle had told her. And Honey knew a thing or two about buttering up a client; it was one of the first lessons her father had taught her as a child, long before Honey had learned to ride a bike.

She'd aced the task. She knew she had; Fleur's parents had called from the Riviera to upgrade their daughter's package the next day. The sum they offered was large enough that Estelle had the intern start looking for a second office space in Melbourne. So Honey waited for more tasks to roll in, for real duties to fall on her desk. Heck, she'd take another needy client to attend to. Another coffee date with Fleur. Anything.

The only thing brewing in her spacious corner office was lint.

That, and killer city views.

One week and three days into her new job, Honey stood at the windows and scanned the world below, a collage of writhing highways and buildings glimmering like icicles in the Brisbane sun. It was hard, but Honey tried to stay positive. She checked her emails religiously. Stayed at the office well after the end of her shift, just in case an after-hours crisis sent it into disarray. Because if Honey had learned one thing in all of her years of business, it was patience. Good things came with time. The universe would give her the opportunity to prove herself eventually. And when it came to the latter, she always would.