Page 339 of Manhattan Bossholes

4

OLIVIA

The next day I woke up in my peaceful yellow room, determined to start fresh. My first day on the job had not been…ideal. My boss clearly knew nothing about modern childcare. It was frustrating because there had been moments when he seemed to care deeply about Catie, and she him. But then he’d all but vanished for that business call. And when he had come back, he’d barely listened to anything Catie or I said. He’d just nodded absently and agreed with anything Catie said.

“But that was yesterday,” I reminded myself. Today would be different.

I found some neatly folded bath towels in the wardrobe and headed to the bathroom. Declan had his own bathroom attached to his room, but Catie and I would be sharing the one in the hall.

I propped my phone on the window ledge and hit my favorite playlist, keeping the volume low so as not to disturb anyone. Then I got naked and tried to turn the shower on.

It was harder than it looked. There were six nobs and two showerheads—and no matter which way I turned any of the nobs, it always seemed to come out cold.

I stood in the bathroom shivering, goose bumps rising on my skin.

You can do this, I told myself. You can take a cold shower.

I lasted approximately four seconds before jumping back out of the shower.

There was a simple solution for this. I could ask Declan.

But I could just picture his smug face. The one he’d used when giving me career advice. No, I couldn’t bring myself to ask Declan for help.

I studied the shower. Maybe the problem wasn’t that it was a fancy rich person shower. Maybe the problem was that it was a fancy European shower.

If that was the case, then maybe there was someone I could ask. I didn’t know if he’d be awake at 6:40 a.m., but it was worth a shot.

I snapped a photo of the shower controls and sent it to @DBCoder, zooming in as close as I could so that the shower control took up the whole screen and he could actually read the various buttons.

If you can tell me how to turn on the hot water, you’d be my hero. You’re the only nice Irish person I know, I typed, and hit send.

He surprised me by responding back immediately.

Unfortunately, he just sent a string of laughing emojis.

Don’t mock my pain, I typed. I am wet, naked, and cold in a foreign country.

Two of those are good things, he typed back.

My stomach fluttered. Every now and then one of us would say something that strayed perilously close to flirting, but then the other one of us would chicken out. There was something undeniably fun about flirting with a smart, funny guy. But then I’d imagine what it might be like to meet each other in real life, and my courage would fail me.

This time @DBCoder was the one to shift the conversation back into safer territory.

Sorry, he wrote. You have no idea how badly I needed that laugh. That’s a pretty common shower set up. Sending over instructions now. Let me know if they work.

I followed his instructions when they came through, including waiting five minutes for the water to heat up. When I saw the shower start to give off visible steam, I almost cried in gratitude.

I sent him a thumbs-up, then set my phone aside and hopped into the shower.

When I finished and toweled off, I saw he’d sent me one more message before signing off. Welcome to Ireland, a chara.

I stepped out into the hallway, wrapped in a towel, and all but ran into Declan. I squeaked and stumbled back, clutching at the front of my towel to keep it from falling or flapping open.

Declan grabbed my arms to keep me from falling back and tumbling down the stairs. His big hands rested on my bare skin a few seconds longer than he needed to before he released me and stepped back.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, his voice gruff. “I just wanted to show you how to use the shower. Someone pointed out it might be confusing for Americans.”

I did not want to think about what conversation of his could possibly have included me, his showerhead, and my lack of intelligence.