Weddings, Pizzas & Paris | HIATUS

Two

"Okay, so, get this," I started, turning my swivel chair to face my friend Hilton from the senior editing department. "My housemates and I are going to Hawaii this December."

"Whoa!" Hilton said excitedly. "Snap me from there. I never get to go anywhere, my girlfriend's a damn workaholic."

"Sarah, right?" I turned back to my laptop and the four manuscripts I had to hand in by today. "You promised that I'd get to see her soon."

Haden snorted.

"Yeah, sure. I don't remember the last time I saw her myself."

"What? Actually? Boy, you must be deprived as heck." I chuckled.

"Trust me, I am. She keeps travelling so much, I can't even keep track of where she goes."

"Yeah, Logan keeps complaining about Haden too. But Haden's job pays too much for us to allow him to quit, he basically keeps our condo from getting auctioned." I made a face at the manuscript that was submitted to me. It was so badly written, with no plot whatsoever.

"Our job pays well too, though," said Hilton.

"Yeah," I tossed the manuscript to the side. "But all of us live extravagant lifestyles. I'd rather keep these Chanel boots than our house."

Hilton stared at me. "Are you being serious?"

"No, my Gods," I laughed. "But things are tight, we buy too many unnecessary things and I live with five boys who don't know the definition of the word self-control."

"I've seen Haden before, he always wears expensive things," Hilton said thoughtfully, "And smells expensive too."

"He swears his life goal is to buy off Yves Saint Laurent." I shook my head.

Haden was weird like that. So were the others. We all had a brand we stuck to constantly, as though they personally endorsed us. It also made it easier to blame  each other when some one mixed up the colors in the laundry.

Logan, unlike his boyfriend, was the sporty, athletic type, and wore Adidas everywhere. Luke dressed in hoodies for any given occasion, and Zee was convinced that Kanye needed his help to run Yeezy's business. Nick was generally better than the rest of us, but I hardly considered the guy who paired a lime green polo shirt with some bright yellow pants sane.

"Sarah must be really amazing for you to still be with her after this damn long, to be honest," I said. "You guys must be like, soulmates, or something."

Hilton laughed a little.

"Yeah, kind of," he said. "She is amazing,  we do all kinds of stuff together. It does get hard when she isn't around."

"What will you do for the holidays, then?"

Our department had holidays for winter and Easter and such, because we hardly had any work anyway and it wasn't like people write books that frequently.

It was funny, actually, to see the amount of things people write in the name of fiction, half of them come in as plagiarised versions of Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, and the ones that look like they might be slightly different end up having the worst possible grammar. As much as it paid, it was hard to keep your frustration at bay when it came to such things.

Hilton was one of the most patient people I knew. He would gladly give Harry Potter the Second another chance while I'd toss the whole book away the second I read a line that went "...and he was an orphan."

Hilton used to say that the only reason he liked this job was that he used to work in finance before, and if he saw one more thing to do with money he'd actually toss himself off a cliff.

"Sarah might come back," he replied thoughtfully. "She said she'd come home for Christmas. I don't even know anymore."

I smiled at him.

"It's okay, Hilton," I said. "She'll settle after a while. Don't worry."

For a second, I didn't know who I was convincing, him or myself.

Sarah had been Hilton's girlfriend for as long as I can remember. He would always talk about her and stuff, but things were always wrong between them. Sometimes I wondered whether Sarah was even real, but then she called him at work once so that suspicion was thrown out of the window.

I didn't know how they'd made such a long distance relationship work for this long.

"Thanks, Ave. You're the best." He said.

I laughed and bowed awkwardly from where I was sitting.

"You're most welcome."

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