Un-Tying the Knot {h.s.}

Chapter 2

I huffed up the stairs, shaking the water off of me from an unusually rainy day. It hardly ever rains in LA, so it's always a struggle when it does. The drive into Santa Monica took me an hour and a half, which may or may not have been worse than getting drenched in the two block walk to the office after struggling to find street parking.

"Morning, Stacey," I nod to her in her general direction.

I slam my bag down on my desk and shrug my coat off. I pray it doesn't drip puddles of water everywhere. My job was already complicated enough.

Over the last two weeks of working for Eleanor, I had built up a bit of a morning routine. It didn't take me long to realize that my morning rituals were about the only routine thing about my job. The moment that Eleanor came into the office, all hell would break loose. It was just up for chance to see when and what kind of hell would arrive that day.

So far, my morning ritual consisted of showing up early, about 7:30am. I would greet Stacey, brew coffee, check my email and Eleanor's, get any documents printed and prepped for any meetings for the day, and make sure the office was in tip top shape. If I didn't do it in the morning, the day would explode around me -- because the moment Eleanor walked in? Good luck.

"Olivia?" Stacey chimed in her sing-song voice. I had grown quickly accustomed to her tactics. She was great at making me do the things she didn't want to do, and her tone of voice usually revealed the mask behind her intent.

"Yes?" I responded.

I just finished putting the coffee filter in the coffee pot before hitting the brew button.

"Hannah called in sick," she finished.

I couldn't help but roll my eyes. Hannah was Harry's assistant, and based on the interactions we had thus far, it's a miracle that the building housing his office was still standing. She was your typical bubbly blonde Valley Girl, saying "um" and "like" until you lost an additional brain cell. Maybe five.

The last time I was there, Jack White had called, and she had merely told him Harry was busy "doing stuff" before taking his name down, where she actually asked him to reference how to spell his last name contextually, like one would hear in a spelling bee. "White, like the color?" Yes, I'm serious.

Stacey sighed, obviously already annoyed by my inaction. She quickly moved down to pull the keys out from the middle of her desk drawer.

"You have to go open Harry's office," she muttered, as if this new revelation should be obvious to me.

I was about to pour the coffee, but froze instantly at the words. My morning was about to go from uncomfortable to downright unknown.

Harry was...interesting, to say the least. He was a massive goofball despite his ridiculously sexy, sometimes-graceful and sometimes-not exterior. He was goofy, entertaining, and always laughing -- usually when he was making some kind of unintentional mess for himself. When I dropped off materials to him last week, I walked in on him stapling his tie to a record contract. If he had a proper assistant, he wouldn't be stapling contracts in the first place, but that wasn't my fight to have. Regardless, he took most things in stride and did his best to fill in the gaps where Hannah failed him.

"Uh, Harry's office?" I asked. "But doesn't he have another assistant like Eleanor? Can't she do it?"

The key ring dangled off Stacey's perfectly manicured finger, taunting me with a tight smirk. "Well, I suppose I could call his stylist or his publicist, but I doubt either of them would know much about his filing system." Her tone was sarcastic, and I wanted to slap her.