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RYAN

To be clear, I wasn’t trying to prank Marlow.

It was an accident, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t laugh like hell about it. Marlow…did not. No surprise there. She’s already proven that she lacks human emotions. Except maybe annoyance, which she seems to have a surplus of when it comes to me.

Instead, she’s standing on the opposite side of my desk with her face all puckered up and a stream of glitter running down the front of her clothes.

Marlow draws a slow, sharp breath. On the exhale, she purses her lips together and glares at me. Anyone else would scream, laugh…something. But not Marlow. Even though she’s obviously fuming, she refuses to let it melt that icy shell of hers.

I used to think we just needed to give her some time to warm up to all of us.

I was half right: it took her a good while to warm up to the other rangers.

Now that she’s worked here for a couple of months, most of my coworkers seem to get along with her fine enough.

But for me, Marlow’s icy exterior went from a thin shell to a full-blown wall.

“I’m sorry,” I start to say through a laugh, but Marlow is already turning on her heel to walk out of my office. She’s glowing bright red, just like she always does when she’s upset with me. “Marlow…”

She stops in the doorway but doesn’t turn around. “Just reprint the paperwork, please. I’ll pick it up later.”

And then she disappears.

If she would have given me a second, I would have explained that the glitter avalanche was just as big of a surprise to me as it was to her.

Linda worked late last night, so I offered up my office as an after-school playroom for her kids.

It’s right across the hall from hers, so I figured she could keep an eye on them while she finished her work.

But I’m guessing she didn’t notice when one of them emptied an entire bag of glitter right into the file folder on my desk – the one full of the orientation paperwork that I printed out for Marlow before I left the office yesterday.

I didn’t notice either, until Marlow opened the folder and ended up wearing the glitter.

Even though I maintain my innocence, a pang of guilt hits me when I turn the corner to Marlow’s office a few minutes later.

Her head is tilted down to her lap where she’s picking away at flecks of glitter.

She looks genuinely sad for a second, but her face hardens when she notices me standing there.

“Here…a peace offering,” I say as I set a new folder of freshly printed, glitter-free paperwork down on her desk.

“Right,” she says skeptically. “What’s in this one?”

“It’s a surprise. Hope you’re not allergic to bees.”

The normal, functioning adult in me knows that this would be the right time to apologize (again) and explain what actually happened.

But the stubborn asshole in me knows that it won’t make any difference.

Marlow is going to be pissed off at me regardless.

So, I turn and leave before we have another showdown.

Between the break room stand-off earlier this morning and the glitter explosion, I think we’ve met our quota for the day.

_____

After lunch, Hunter calls me into his office.

Hunter’s office looks like the kind of place a serial killer goes to do his paperwork.

The walls are bare, aside from the shadows of long-gone posters.

There are toppling stacks of paper everywhere.

The two guest seats are gray metal folding chairs from the eighties that I think he found in the forest and dragged back here.

And for some reason, he can’t seem to get both of the fluorescent light tubes to work at the same time, so it’s always too dark in there.

After his big promotion to District Ranger, it took months of coaxing to convince Hunter to move into the big corner office.

He only relented after hiring Marlow to take over my old job.

Either he moved or the newest recruit got the boss’s old office.

Truthfully, I don’t think he saw any problem with the latter, but the rest of us sure as hell did.

It’s easily the best office in the building.

Or at least it was before Hunter moved in.

“You ever gonna spruce this place up, man?” I ask.

Hunter grumbles something at me without looking up from his computer screen.

“The supervisor’s office just sent over the paperwork for the new interns,” Hunter says more clearly as I lean against the doorframe of his office.

“Oh yeah? Think we’ll get a decent batch this year?”

Hunter shrugs. “Do we ever? You know how this usually goes.”

Unfortunately, I do.

For the past five years, I’ve been the Volunteer Coordinator for our district, which means I’ve also been responsible for training the summer interns.

That’s how I know that on a good year, we’re lucky to get one decent intern.

Most of them are disastrously incompetent.

They’re more of a hindrance than a help around here.

But we’re stuck with whoever the regional office picks for the program.

At least they’ll be someone else’s problem this year.

“Think Marlow’s ready to take them on?” Hunter asks without looking up from his computer screen.

I don’t think Marlow will last a week with the interns, but I can’t tell Hunter that without making it seem like I did a shitty job of training her.

When I don’t answer after a few seconds, Hunter glances up at me.

“Yeah, probably,” I say quickly. “She had some trouble getting their uniforms ordered though.”

“Sounds about right. The purchasing department is still sitting on some of my POs from over a week ago.”

Hunter takes everything at face value. It’s a trait that makes him a good boss, but a frustrating as hell friend. He doesn’t hear the way I spit Marlow’s name out like venom or notice that the two of us can barely stand to be in the same room as each other.

“I’m going to copy you on the emails I’m sending to Marlow with all the internship information. She might have some questions about some of it.”

This is Hunter’s way of saying that he has no idea what he’s supposed to do with any of the emails from the regional office about the summer interns.

And he’s right – Marlow won’t either. Not that I blame either of them.

The emails are mostly auto-generated garbage.

They’re tax ID numbers that we’ll never use and letters of recommendation from the interns’ high school gym teachers that we’ll wish we never read.

“No problem,” I say. “I got a call about some stealth campers up near Ramsey Gulch, so I’m heading out there for the rest of the afternoon. I’ll check in with Marlow tomorrow.”

Hunter nods, but he’s already squinting at the computer screen.

I can’t tell if he needs glasses or if his eyes just haven’t adapted to technology yet.

Before he met his wife and she dragged him back to civilization, Hunter was pretty much a forest hermit.

Granted, he was a government-sanctioned forest hermit…

but still. A CB radio was just about his only encounter with technology for years.

Now that he’s the boss, I won’t be surprised if all the computers are not-so-mysteriously replaced by typewriters.

On my way out to my truck, a text alert chimes in my pocket. I pull my phone out and see Blair’s name flash across the screen. It makes my stomach twist into an uncomfortable knot.

The last time we called or texted each other was when we were coordinating the logistics of our break-up more than two years ago.

Turns out, there are a lot of moving parts to consider when your girlfriend is moving out of your shared home and straight into your stepbrother’s condo.

We had a lease that needed her name removed, furniture that needed to be divvied up, and a cat.

Okay, she had a cat.

But I’m man enough to admit that I would have loved the hell out of that cat if Blair didn’t insist on taking him with her.

All of this is in the distant past though (except the cat, who is still very much alive), so what could Blair possibly be texting me about?

I open the message, which reads: Hey, sorry to bother you. Need your date’s name for the wedding place cards .

Oh right…that. That little line I left blank on my RSVP because I don’t know the name of my date for the wedding; I just know that I will have one. There’s no way that I’m attending my ex’s wedding alone. Especially since she’s marrying my stepbrother.

When I shove my phone back into my pocket, it’s not Blair or her stupid wedding that’s on my mind – it’s Marlow. Because when it comes to being a pain in my ass, there’s no one on earth who does it better than those two women.