Stuck On My Stepbrother Read Free

awards ceremonies are seriously boring. There is a lot of talking about ‘the industry’ and ‘the state of print media’ and ‘electronic content’ and ‘the blogosphere’ and lots of other really lame-sounding buzzwords that no-one really understands.
    There were awards for ‘Best Opinion Piece On Foreign Policy’ and ‘Best Sports Article’, and they just seemed to keep coming.
    Jen and Patrick were loving it, cheering and whooping when certain names got read out, drinking copious amounts of the free alcohol on offer, really going to town on the entertainment. I still felt like a total fraud, nervous and terrified. The thought that started to gnaw away at me was this: What if we actually won? What if we had to head up onto that stage, the three of us, and make a speech, and say thank you, and bow? I wasn’t even sure in my current, panicked state, whether I’d make it up the tiny set of stairs that led onto the stage.
    Somehow, I just knew it was going to happen.
    ‘There’s no fucking way,’ Jen said, slurring the ‘s’ on there’s . She leaned over the table, her tits practically falling out of her top. I could see the older guy sitting opposite her getting a nice good view of her, licking his lips, the dirty old pervert.
    ‘Yeah. They’ll give it to The Post, again. Those fuckers win every year. I swear they steal all our fucking clients. They’ve got no respect for geographical fucking boundaries. It’s like I always say, why bother having…’ And Patrick was off, ranting about internal politics and the poor management of the team.
    Then, suddenly, it was time. The chairman of the press society took his place at the rostrum. The words ‘Best Classified Advertising Team’ flashed up on the screen behind him, and he started to talk.
    ‘Classified advertising is the backbone of the Newspaper industry,’ he said. Honestly, I’m going to spare you the details of his speech, mainly because I was so nervous that I didn’t take any of it in. He was pretty damn boring to begin with, and my stressed-out mental state meant that I might as well have been somewhere else.
    Finally, he drew in his breath and said, ‘Which brings us to the award. It goes out to a small team. A focused team. A team that brings tremendous results with limited resources. It goes to...’ A drum roll began to fill the room. I knew with every fibre of my being that we were going to win. I can’t explain why. But when he finally said, ‘The team at The Chronicle, Jen, Patrick and Rose!’ I thought to myself, of course it’s us. Of course we won.
    Jen and Patrick went ballistic, hugging each other, and then as an afterthought, me. I did my best to appear as happy as possible, but let me tell you, it was hard. We began to start the impossibly long walk up to the front of the room, past the people who actually deserved to be there; past the press barons and the journalists and the sports reporters and the editors and the subs and the features writers and everyone else.
    I climbed the stage with Jen and Patrick, with our arms linked, in a show of mock unity. Then, something weird happened. Jen looked at me with this kind of drunken intensity. She looked, well she looked evil, her eyes flashing murder at me. Then we were there, at the mic. Jen grabbed it from the hand of the chairman and tapped it twice.
    ‘Is this thing working?’ she said, forcing a weird laugh out of her mouth. ‘I guess so! Well I just want to say thank you to Patrick and to Rose for all of their hard work this year. I’m sure they won’t mind me saying just how difficult it is to work with two people who are so incompetent. Just kidding!’ she said. There were titters of laughter around the room, but this strange intensity that she was leaking seemed to be making people feel very uneasy.
    ‘No, seriously, I would just like to say though,’ she said, ‘what a breath of fresh air it has been to have Rose on the team. She’s so naive and