Zoe's Saturday morning started off a with bang—one resoundingly loud and earthquake-inducing enough for the ugly art piece hanging on her office wall to fall off its creaky hinges and smash into the ground.
No matter how secretly elated she was at how she could finally find an excuse to erase that sore sight's existence from her office, Zoe frowned at the open door, worried about the mark the door knob may make on the new wallpaper she'd recently gotten up.
"Zoe!" A maelstrom of wine-red curls and flappy oversized windbreaker gushed into her office in clicking heels.
Zoe's gaze shifted from the art piece that had somehow obstinately survived the steep dive off her wall, and remained, very—unfortunately—unscathed, turning to her best friend, her ears still smarting from the loud smash of her glass door against the wall.
"The door's glass, Raine." Zoe reminded, before returning her gaze to her desktop. Usually when Raine tornadoes in, it meant she had something unimportant, or unrelated to her work, she had to announce.
"Have you seen my phone?" Raine's palms slamming down on her marble worktable failed to jerk her workaholic friend from her work. "I lost it."
"You left it here?" Zoe tapped away on her keyboard; she had to finish the sorting out the millions of zillions of photographs by tonight. And yes, she had to sieve through one by one because she didn't want to miss out any good ones. "You can check with the counter, they'll have it if anyone picked it up and sent it to the lost and found."
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"They don't, I checked. Zoe, how do you file a police report?" Raine leant across, now half sprawling across all the things Zoe had laid, very tidily, on the worktable in a very I'm-very-ready-to-play-pool position.
"You go to the police station for that." Maybe if Zoe was a guy, or a bent girl, her eyes would be glued to how her midnight blue romper was hiking up her thighs, and how her windbreaker sliding off her shoulders revealed her pale collarbones.
But sadly, being her straight best friend, Zoe tapped away at her keyboard, very used to her unsightly and highly suggestive position.
Ever since Raine found out the company her best friend worked at was a family business, she would come over and play, a lot, and somehow even managed to magick up an internship position Aspr. Studios didn't even offer.
Zoe remembered how flummoxed she had been when her Aunt—the person sitting at the tippy top of the pyramid hierarchy here—declared her love for bright (sleep-deprived) and hype (latte-overdosed) people like Raine.
She'd even suggested (coerced) kindly (malevolently) for Zoe to either hire Raine or hire Raine, and hence the job-shadowing episode happened. Thank goodness her Aunt settled for hiring her as an 6-month intern instead.
"Zoe, help me." Raine got off the table, rounded the oversized marble obstruction to hike herself up on the armrest of Zoe's leather swivel chair.
Zoe passed her her own phone, eyes still on her desktop screen. "Speed dial 9 for the police."
Plucking the phone from Zoe's hands, she hopped off her seat and bent, reaching for Zoe's handbag she placed below her desk. Ignoring her Zoe's exasperated gaze, Raine started plucking things off the worktable, plunking all the necessary junk she believed Zoe would like to have inside her handbag. "Let's go Zoe."
"Where?"
"Phone hunting!" Raine grinned.
"I need to fin—Raine, you left you handbag here." Raine walked out, Zoe's handbag in her hands.
The girl waved the back of her hand at Zoe. "I took yours so take mine for me."