Team Building with a Twist

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

He looked like an unkempt bed, rugged and mussed –perfect advertising for an orgy. One hand on the mouse, eyes slightly glassed, Gabriel didn’t move a muscle, afraid that his head would split in two, despite the hangover fog turning his brain to mush.

All of a sudden, a string of blue swearing filled the room and drowned the tapping of fingers on the keyboards. Several heads popped up, and a few chortles joined in the fray.

Gabriel cringed, and the pulse in his temples went up a notch. Still, he didn’t blink or look up, not even when the guffaws grew louder in the wake of the most inventive cusswords ever voiced on the floor.

A braver sunray hit the right angle, pouring more light through the blinds behind. Dust motes flew in the air, and Gabriel’s eyes narrowed to slits. Nausea grabbed his stomach in a powerful fist and squeezed. He gulped, trying to process the noise.

He knew that he should have intervened. Andy had already crossed the line, and big time. However, opening his mouth felt like too much of an effort. Gabriel’s thoughts still rolled around the previous night’s debacle. He had simply made an a*s of himself.

Exhaustion flirted with his eyelids, but then a mean stubborn streak in his genetic code forbade him to surrender to it.

Sick of the caterwauling on the floor, Gabriel looked up and snarled, “Cut it out, Andy. Do your job and suck it up.”

“Come on, Gabriel, you should come and see what this sorry a*s is saying here,” Andy retorted plaintively, stroking his thick dark goatee.

Gabriel almost gave in. He did have a soft spot for the massive guy, who topped up at 5.9 feet and weighed about 240 pounds. However, he smothered his impulse when another round of chortles rolled over the floor. One of the guys had even started tapping his hands on the top of his desk, while his feet kept the rhythm on the floor.

“That’s enough of that,” Gabriel ordered in a stern tone of voice. “I see three chats waiting in the queue,” his voice cut them off, when he glanced at the screen hanging over his head. “Why not take those instead of receding to kindergarten?”

“Come on, man,” Alex intervened. “It’s not like we aren’t working here, you know,” he pointed out, a bite of anger stealing into his voice.

“It doesn’t look like that from where I stand,” Gabriel bit back. “I’ve got things to do. Do your job, and stop fooling around. When the queue shows zero, do whatever you want,” he thundered, and a sharp pain shot between his temples.

Gabriel blocked out his people’s smirks and frustrated whispers and went back to staring at the graph on his computer screen. The chart still reigned there in all its glory, mocking Gabriel’s efforts to earn an honest pay that morning.

He took another look at it. Nope, no matter the angle, he still couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

It seemed more entertaining to listen to Andy’s creative cussing than trying to decipher that graph, so Gabriel scowled, ready to stick his tongue out at it.

As he had always counted Andy among the good guys, Gabriel regretted that he had had to bring the law down on him. The young man might have bitched a lot, but he got the work done in the end.

The graph still danced before Gabriel’s eyes, taunting him, so he decided to change his focus for a moment and take an aspirin or two.

Exasperated, he rummaged through his drawer cabinet. Finding the bottle of aspirin, he swallowed two in short order, a sulk turning the corners of his mouth down.

He hated the taste of drugs. It lingered on his tongue long after he had washed it down his throat.

Gabriel leaned back in his chair, slowly breathed in and out, waiting for the oblivion to hit. His tension headache had just staved off a little when another litany of swearing blew out.

Gabriel knew that soon enough, he would have to step in, given Andy’s tone of voice. Else, Andy would punch the top of the desk. The guy was fired up big time.

Andy had been working with their team for almost a year. His actions were nothing if not predictable, and most of the time, he expressed his feelings with flair.

His baritone voice would carry all over the floor, and that often brought complaints from the voice department.

That didn’t bother Gabriel. His own team plagued him with enough worries, so he didn’t have any strength left to think about others.

It was their problem not his if they couldn’t deal with the noise. The spewing of nasty words was something common on the floor. It came with the territory.

Those who thought that working on chat was easy-peasy had no idea what they were talking about. Sometimes it was nerve-wracking work, and people needed to express themselves in one way or another. Gabriel didn’t mind it unless he went through a hangover.

The guy doing the cursing right then wasn’t the only source of filthy words on the floor. Even Gabriel went at it sometimes, and with enthusiasm.

Most of the time, expletives would come from all over the floor, and not always in the baritone voice of a man. Such invectives sometimes flew off soft lips, the suave, delicate voices in stark contrast with the crude sounds uttered under pressure.

To Gabriel’s dismay, Andy’s swearing didn’t stop soon enough to satisfy him.

“Andy,” he barked. “I said cut it out,” he shouted, fire in his voice.

Andy’s sweet words changed their destination, but Gabriel turned a deaf ear, pretending he didn’t listen to him.

“Who the hell, does he think he is?” Andy growled, his fingers tapping furiously on his keyboard. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t write and have a conversation with his neighbor, Dan, at the same time.

“Probably, he thinks he is the boss,” Dan replied dryly, and Anna, who sat next to him, bumped him over the shoulder with an enthusiastic thump.

“You fiend,” she giggled, brushing her hair behind her ears and pulling her dress lower off her shoulders to give everyone a better view.

Gabriel rolled his eyes, although a sparkle of pity gleamed inside him. Anna had been advertising her wares for some time now, and Gabriel was sick and tired of it. He didn’t have the heart to ask her to stop it, but she did put his teeth on edge with the display of her bony, pimple-covered shoulders.

With a shake of his head, Gabriel forgot about her and glanced toward Andy, realizing he shouldn’t allow the guy’s words to slide. However, after a couple of seconds, he reconsidered his thoughts with a shrug. His head was killing him, and he didn’t need any more grief.

Lately, Gabriel had been drinking heavily although the booze didn’t help him sleep any better. His alcohol-fueled nights had merely hatched vivid and noise-drowned nightmares, which haunted him even in the daytime.

“Gabriel, I’ve been taking chats for an hour and a half without break now, and there are others who aren’t doing anything,” an angry voice sneaked into his thoughts.

Gabriel’s eyes turned to the side, where a heavyset young man had braced his elbows on top of his desk.

“Remind me what are we paying you for?” Gabriel asked through his teeth.

A red mist crept over the guy’s face and neck, and his throat tried to swallow down.

“I know what I’m paid for,” he started, but Gabriel didn’t allow him to continue.

“Then continue doing your job, Al, and stop looking over other people’s shoulder,” he said in a hard tone of voice to conclude the conversation.

“I am doing my damn job,” Al growled. “But why should I work my a*s off for a measly pay when others have it for a lark?”

“Really, Al? Only for a lark?” Gabriel countered, narrowing his eyes to slits.

“Yeah, like your girlfriend there,” Al pointed his chin toward a dark-haired girl, who was leaning in her chair, her legs tucked beneath her while browsing through a catalogue.

Gabriel glanced at the woman and gnashed his teeth, guilt gnawing at him. Nevertheless, he didn’t back down.

“As I said before, you shouldn’t be checking what others are doing. If you’d been as busy as you claim you were, you wouldn’t have had any time for that,” he pointed out.

“Look here,” Al smacked his fist on the top of the desk, losing his temper.

“No, you look here,” Gabriel pierced him with a laser-like gaze. “If you’re tired, take a damn break and leave me the heck alone. I have work to do. I’ll take care of the others later.”

Al chewed his lower lip for a few seconds, then nodded and straightened up. He turned to go back to his desk but couldn’t refrain from spitting through his teeth, “Jerk.”

Gabriel’s first impulse was to bite back and take him to task. He opened his mouth for a stiff reprimand, but then changed his mind and shrugged.

The man was right. Some people cashed their paycheck without doing the work. Gabriel could have gotten into the face of some of them, but not all of them. With a sigh, he returned to his work.

A heavy headset covered his ears, yet all the noises in the room mingled in a cacophony that threatened to insinuate into his thoughts. That constant racket should have shuttered the man’s hard-acquired peace, but that didn’t bother Gabriel. A veteran of the floor, he had almost become immune to the surrounding clamor and seldom lost his focus.

“Need to talk to you,” a heavy hand fell on Gabriel’s shoulder, and the suddenness of the unexpected gesture, as well as the harshness of the tone, almost startled him.