By Zephyria 
They had produced and uploaded several videos for firefighter applicants. One of them compared good and bad examples in preparation for the interview…
“You said that exactly?”
“Yeah.”
Wilkins, seeing Station Chief nod, let out a dumbfounded laugh and said, “What a clueless guy. Is it because he’s a rich young master? No one would think of copying it exactly like that.”
“Right.”
Station Chief agreed, but what he wanted to say came next.
“But what I mean is, it’s a problem because he copied everything, down to the finger gestures.”
Wilkins froze with his smile still on his face, blinking.
“…Huh?”
At the foolish question, Station Chief snapped back faster than usual.
“Not just the answers, he copied the video exactly, the expressions, the fingers, even the way he coughed and moved his eyes in the middle! He did all the questions from the video like that!”
Wilkins was just stunned by the unexpected words. People often memorize after watching the video, but at most, they only memorize the answers. But he copied even the gestures?
“But, but you must have asked questions that weren’t in the video. …You did, right?”
“Of course. But he probably saw it in another video and copied it exactly. I haven’t checked, but I’m sure of it.”
Seeing Wilkins speechless, Station Chief harshly pressed him.
“Do you understand now? That guy is a psychopath. So just leave him alone before something happens, don’t touch him! You don’t know what he’ll do. Grayson Miller must be a Dominant Alpha driven mad by Pheromone, he’s not in his right mind!”
Wilkins could only say, “Yes, sir.” Amidst the confusion, regret that he had done something unnecessary welled up in his heart.
Desire Me if you can
“To the victor of today, cheers!”
At Valentina’s shout, the women gathered there cheered and raised their beer glasses. Grayson, the only man among them, sat smiling as they all cheered and emptied their glasses.
“We end up here after all.”
At Rivet’s words, another employee said, “The familiar place is the best. And this is the only place that’s suitable for a group gathering.”
There were only a handful of places that could accommodate this many people. That’s why they always came to this bar for company dinners or gatherings. It was the very place where they had held a welcome party when Grayson arrived.
“We could just join the guys, but no.”
Valentina put a French fry in her mouth and glanced to one side, and everyone’s gaze focused in the same direction at once. On two wide tables placed side by side, employees who had started from the same place were sitting in separate groups. To be exact, Grayson and the female employees, and Wilkins and the male employees. The atmosphere flowing at the tables was as contrasting as the gender ratio.
DeAndre spat out roughly at the obviously audible voice.
“Mind your own business, we’re not going to get a free ride from that guy like you guys.”
“We decided to drink among ourselves. Thanks, but no thanks.”
Wilkins quickly stepped forward and politely declined. Station Chief’s warning was still vivid in his ears. In a brief moment, Wilkins imagined a fight breaking out between the two tables, Grayson getting angry and overturning the table, then picking up a bottle with a smiling face and smashing it over DeAndre’s head. Station Chief’s words that the problem was not Miller but Grayson himself were true.
Ahem, he coughed and pretended to drink beer, avoiding their gazes, and the women promptly turned their heads and surrounded Grayson as if to say, “Do what you want.” In fact, they didn’t care at all about the wounded pride of their male colleagues. Their recent behavior had even seemed quite pathetic. Listening to the sounds of laughter and chatter, the men silently drank their beer.
If they had gone to another bar, it wouldn’t have been this miserable. They had gotten fired up at the mention of Grayson buying drinks and decided to go for it, but the problem was that they had overlooked the fact that there was no other place to go. Sitting and drinking with the cheerful table next to them, they couldn’t get into the mood at all.
“Hey, did you all come to a funeral? Why are you so down?”
DeAndre, unable to bear it any longer, shouted in a hushed voice, and Ezra replied, “There’s nothing… to be happy about, is there…?”
At the reaction of the guys who nodded in agreement, DeAndre burst into anger and glared.
“Are you going to be so obviously miserable like this? Look over there, we can’t lose! Everyone smile, I said smile!”
The colleagues, looking at each other, reluctantly laughed, “Haha.” DeAndre laughed loudly as if to show off and slapped his thigh.
“Wahahaha, hahahahaha! Wahahahahaha!”
“Ah… haha, hahaha.”
“Haha, haha, hahaha.”
The other guys laughed along and followed DeAndre. Even in the midst of that, they glanced at the next table, but the women weren’t interested in them at all. Isn’t trying to raise your voice on purpose to get the attention of a girl you like something you only do in elementary school?
“Stop it, you look even more pathetic.”
At Ezra’s dissuasion, everyone including DeAndre fell silent. How did things turn out like this? As they were drinking in a gloomy atmosphere again, Wilkins, who had emptied his beer, put down his empty glass and suddenly spoke.
“Losing the competition, okay, that can happen. But there’s something I just can’t understand.”
Everyone looked at him at the sudden words, and Wilkins fixed his gaze on Dane and asked, “What the hell happened? It’s okay that you were late, but you couldn’t have just been late, right? Something must have happened, what do you all think? Am I right?”
“That’s right. Dane, we’re dying to know. How did that bastard beat you?”
DeAndre asked in a rapid tone. Receiving gazes mixed with curiosity and impatience, Dane answered nonchalantly.
“It’s nothing. We just exchanged a few blows.”
“You fought? Why?”
“Suddenly?”
Everyone was surprised and asked the reason, but Dane didn’t answer. Only DeAndre drank his beer anxiously. Dane didn’t even look at him and said, “I just wanted to hit him.”
What does this mean? Everyone looked at each other in bewilderment, but the words weren’t completely out of the blue. Ezra also nodded in agreement.
“Well, yeah, I’m holding back the urge to punch him every moment.”
“Like right now?”
As one person agreed, confessions poured out one after another.
“I’ve even thought about dragging him to the warehouse and locking him up a few times.”
“I was thinking of puncturing the tires of his fancy Jaguar.”
“Anyway, I just want to punch that handsome face of his just once.”
“That’s not true, you should use your wish for something more important. Like winning the Powerball.”
“This bastard?”
After a round of retaliation against the traitor, the conversation continued.
“Fighting is fighting, but why were you late?”
At Ezra’s question, Dane paused for a moment and said, “We were fighting and accidentally rolled and almost fell off a cliff…”
“What? A cliff?”
“That one at the end of the slope? Wow, that must have been really dangerous!”
At the shouts of surprise, Dane replied indifferently, “You don’t have to react like that, nothing actually happened.”
Half of it was true and half of it was false. Fortunately, they didn’t fall off the cliff, but they were in a situation where they had to climb up a steep cliff. Until just before, they had been beating each other up and fighting, but now was not the time for that. Now, the priority was to find a place to climb up the wall for survival. And they found it almost simultaneously. And…
Dane brought the beer glass to his mouth and lightly added, “We almost fell, but we climbed up anyway, and Miller was faster than me, that’s all.”
As he said, greatly abbreviating the reality, one of the guys, looking at each other with doubt, asked, “But be honest, you could have won, right? Huh?”