Girls Who Travel Read Online Free Page B

sales associate, a peroxide blond who did not look old enough to be working in a sex shop, foppishly pinned his knuckles to his waist as if I was being difficult.
    â€œLook, they’re not for me. Can we please just get on with it?”
    â€œFiiiiine, suuuuuure,” he said, bringing the item to the register. “Looks like someone needs the chocolate one,” he muttered under his breath.
    â€œJust ring it up.” I checked my phone. I had been out of the office far too long, and Holland had already called me twice.
    I dashed out of the X-rated store, out $65 and my self-respect. It wasn’t like I was a prude, but call me old-fashioned for thinking that sex toy shopping shouldn’t be outsourced. That’s what the Internet and discreet brown boxes were for.
    Now I was stuck toting around a neon-green shopping bag clearly labeled with the store’s disastrous name and filled with things that would make Christian Grey blush. To make matters worse, Bae lived all the way downtown in the Financial District.
    My phone buzzed again, but it was a text from Holland this time: “Where are you?!”
    â€œIn the fetal position,” I almost texted back, but I left the text unanswered. I didn’t have time to go downtown; I had no choice but to wait until after work to drop off Bae’s bags.

6
    S EVERAL HOURS LATER , I crammed a fluffy Cronut glaze-first into my mouth and chewed without taking any pleasure in it. To me, it tasted like tragedy.
    (Okay, fine, it didn’t
really
taste like tragedy—it still tasted awesome—but it didn’t make me any less depressed.)
    Beside me, a man in a suit discreetly shifted his eyes in my direction. I blatantly stared back without bothering to wipe off the glaze from the sides of my mouth.
    â€œVont von?” I asked him, my teeth caked with masticated dough. I held up the box and accidentally spat a few gooey crumbs onto his shoulder. He shook his head with disgust.
    By the time the Long Island Rail Road train pulled into the Plandome station, there’d only be one Cronut left. I glumly licked a fleck of sugar off my fingernail and replayed the scene with Holland from earlier:
    â€œKika, where the he-ll” (he pronounced it with two syllables: ha-elle) “have you been?”
    I would never be able to forget the appalled expression on his face when he caught me passing the packed conference room with my hands full of Cronuts, sex toys, and disgrace.
    â€œUmm, delivery?” I croaked, as Holland stared murderously and I turned fifty shades of red.
    â€œLet me say this to you so you can see it from my perspective: You messed up my meeting with Richie Rich, which means I won’t have advance notice for any changes to the Dubai schedule. And then, instead of coming clean about it, you make me waste my morning going all the way across town so I have to hear it from that self-satisfied gold digger, Bae Yoon.
    â€œâ€˜But Mr. Holland,’” he mimicked Bae’s condescending voice, “‘Kika
never
scheduled a
meeting
for you and Mr. Richmond. I haven’t
heard
from her
all
day.’”
    I nearly bit off my bottom lip at Bae’s backstabbing, but Holland’s rant wasn’t done, so I let him continue.
    â€œThen when I get back to the office you’re not here and unreachable for the next hour. And when you do finally show up, I find out that you were out getting Cronuts and God knows what else, dressed like a college kid who just came home from ‘finding herself’ at a semester at sea!”
    I didn’t dare tell him that the dessert and dildo outing was Bae’s doing, an obvious fool’s errand in retrospect. It would just make it worse if I admitted to being so gullible.
    His vibrating wrath was one thing, but then his shoulders drooped with disappointment.
    â€œYour heart is not in this, Kika. I know you’re not stupid,but I also know that you’re not taking