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hand.
    “Holy mother of God!  You scared the hell out of me!”
    “Such language, Vanessa.”
    “Sorry.”  The guy took three years off my life.  What did he expect?  “Is there something I can help you with, Mr. Paulsen?”
    “Just looking for this.”  He holds up the hose in an ominous I-could-choke-you posture.
    At nine o’clock at night?
    I jam my clothes into the washer, slam the lid, and take off for the stairs without a word.
    “William!” I scream when I get back upstairs.  “Never, ever again am I going back down there.”
    “Mr. Paulsen?”
    I nod profusely.
    William snorts. “I don’t even want to know.”
    “I’ll never go into the basement again.”
    William wraps his arm around me and escorts me back to my room.  “You won’t have to.  I’ll do your laundry from here on.”
    The pounding of my heart returns to normal and I set back to the task at hand.  The hell with creepy Mr. Paulsen.  It’s all about my career now.  Impressing the boss.  And impressing Kyle.  Why did Griz put such thoughts into my head?  I’m not losing my job for flirting with the new guy!  I need to do a bang up job and prove they promoted the right girl.
    Although flying makes me want to wretch into an in-flight paper bag, this Marketing Coordinator is ready for wheel’s up.

Chapter Four
     
     
    T ed Spencer and I share a cab from our Cambridge office to the airport.  Bumper-to-bumper traffic hampers our commute on I-93 south to the Callahan tunnel.  And I’m stuck with someone who can’t stop complaining about every single thing.
    “This traffic is retahded ,” Ted says in a thick New England accent, not even looking up from his Android.  “We should have left earlier.”
    “We left in plenty of time,” I say.  “Traffic’s traffic.”
    “I hate this town,” he mutters.
    The cabbie just looks in the mirror and glares at us.
    Ted’s typically an okay guy, but because he’s so into himself, it’s hard to like him.  Poor guy’s got more hair on his face than on the top of his head.  As the sales manager for The Compass, he’s one of those dying-to-be-a-millionaire types.  Always scuttling of to his cell phone to check online stock prices.  He’s quite pretentious, but then I’d expect no less from a guy with an eight-by-ten glossy of himself teeing off at some famous golf course on his cubicle wall.
    Twenty-eight minutes later, we pile out of the cab at Logan Airport.  We get our boarding passes at the kiosk and check our bags.  Then, we slip over to the Samuel Adams Pub to meet Kyle, who was smart enough to take the T instead of a cab.
    When I first see him in his blue dress shirt and baggy jeans, I feel like my tongue almost lolls out of my head and licks him up one side and down the other like a dog that has been without love and affection for years.  I need to stop gawking at him like this.  It will get me nowhere and I don’t need to be distracted while I’m representing the company.  As if my nerves aren’t already an unsettled mess at the thought of engine failure at 35,000 feet, twisted steel, and babies crying.
    “Hey guys,” Kyle says when he sees us.  “I got us some seats.”
    “Great,” Ted says.  “I need a beer.”
    Maybe I can get away with one glass of wine.
    As Jerry the Bartender hands over an eight-ounce glass of white wine he calls a “lahhhge Chah-duhnay,” Ted and Kyle chat as if I’m not there discussing a client issue they’ve been working on together.  I try to sip the wine, but the thought of the impending flight makes me take much bigger gulps that I usually would.  I signal for another glass of wine while the guys keep talking about the quality assurance we need to do for the customer.  I’m just hoping the ground crew here at Logan did their quality assurance on the airplane I’m about to get on.
    “You okay, Vanessa?” Kyle asks.  He grins at me and then tips his beer in my direction.
    “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.”
    He