Asking For A Friend

by Parker, Ali

  As long as everyone consented and could keep doing their jobs at the same time, it didn’t bother me. I knew my staff. My people weren’t the type to have petty romances jeopardize their futures. They could get it on at the party as much as they wanted, provided they were back on the job the next day.

  Judging from the excited faces all around me and the atmosphere in the office while we were talking about the party, the staff were excited regardless of the rules bring dictated to them.

  “Shenanigans aside,” I continued, “the party will start at seven and carry on until the last people leave, just bear in mind that work starts at the usual time the following day.”

  There was a low groan that reverberated around the room and echoed in my own head, since I’d decided to take Craig’s suggestion and ask Marissa to the party. I held up both hands and said, “Okay, okay. We’ll start one hour later, but everyone better be here on time.”

  A round of applause followed my words and I took a little bow, catching sight of Marissa staring from the back as I straightened out. My heart leaped.

  I knew she’d be there, of course. All staff had been sent an email requesting their presence at this meeting. I just hadn’t spotted her in the crowd earlier and thought she might have skipped it.

  My eyes lingered on her for a minute, though I doubted anyone noticed since they were all going back to work after the announcement was over. Now that I was getting used to the bright colors and loud patterns she favored, even in the dead of winter, I was learning to appreciate the bright spot she created in the office.

  I was, by no means, ready to redecorate my own office or closet, but it was starting to feel like Marissa was a bright spot that had always been there. That belonged there, with us. I never would have thought when she started that I was ever going to get used to her, much less learn to appreciate the spot of difference she brought to the office.

  Today she was wearing a turquoise cardigan with a long white skirt. Her eyes glowed the same color as her cardigan, so alive even across the distance. She gave me a shy wave, then turned and walked in the direction of her office.

  Office was a relative term, however. It still looked like a nuclear war zone, or at the very least the repercussions of a natural disaster. I was also getting used to that, having such a disaster zone so close to mine.

  Somehow, even that was endearing to me now. It still irked me, but it was all part of the Marissa package. As a whole, I liked that package enough to let the odd things slide.

  Knocking on her door, I waited for her to look up and smile before walking inside. “Are you busy?”

  She flashed me a winning smile before holding up her hand and motioning so-so. “You’re the boss, you know everything I have to get done. I’ve always got time for you though.”

  “Good to know,” I joked, though I was hoping she would have said it, even if I wasn’t the boss. “What did you think about the announcement?”

  Surprise lit her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting this to be the kind of office that had parties that went on until the last person leaves. Like the last man standing or whatever.”

  “We’re full of surprises.” Her office was in the very same state as the first time I’d been in it. I still didn’t understand her workspace.

  Marissa noticed the way I was looking around her space and just like she had before, she sat up defensively. “I told you, it looks like chaos but I promise you it’s organized.”

  “There is nothing organized about this.” I waved my hand around, allowing disbelief to seep into my tone. Those were the same words she’d said to me before, and just like then, I simply couldn’t see them being true. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound like a jackass, but you do know you have a filing cabinet, right? I can even get you another one if you have too much paper for the one.”

  From the looks of it, she had enough paper to build her own office tower out of it. Yet not a single scrap appeared to be in the place designed and built to house it.

  Marissa shrugged, shaking her head. “You don’t sound like a jackass. I get it, trust me. I’ve had to… discuss the state of my office on many occasions at every job I’ve ever had. No one believes that I know where everything is.”

  “Do you?” I raised an eyebrow, hating to form part of the apparent legion of doubters, yet unable to help myself. “Filing cabinets were invented for a reason.”

  “They were,” she agreed, which surprised me until she said, “They were invented to make me feel nauseous. I can’t stand the things. Everything just hanging there waiting. Nothing where you need it to be.”

  “Nothing where you—” I trailed off. “Did no one ever teach you how to use a filing cabinet? Everything in it is exactly where you need it to be. It hangs so as to ensure it doesn’t just lie around in an indecipherable mess.”

  I gestured around her office, because it was the very picture of an indecipherable mess. Marissa shook her head, arching a brow. “You don’t believe that I know where everything is.”

  Allowing my head to hang forward in what I was sure would soon be shame, I just had to challenge her assertion. Even if I was about fifty percent certain she was about to prove me wrong. “I’m sorry, but no. I just don’t see how anything about your filing system can be in any way, shape or means systematic.”

  “It is,” she said, confidently. Placing her elbows on her desk, she formed a bridge with her intertwined fingers and rested her chin on them. “You know the name of every project and account I’m working on. Name any one of them. If I don’t find it within thirty seconds on my first pull out of a pile, I’ll use your cabinet.”

  “And if you’re right?” I narrowed my eyes, my lips begging to curl into a smile.

  A smug smile appeared on her beautiful face and she sat back in her chair, crossing her arms as if she’d already won. “If I manage to find the file within thirty seconds and without pulling so much as one wrong file, you never say anything about my office ever again.”

  My eyes rounded. “Ever?”

  “Ever.” She drew the word out, eyes locked on mine. “Not even when I start building paper towers against the walls or hang colorful bunting.”

  “Bunting?” I barely suppressed a shudder at the thought of having colorful bunting hung anywhere in my orderly office, but then I looked around her workspace again.

  It really was a mess and thirty seconds was a very short time. She’d restricted herself even further by saying the file I named also had to be her first pull. People often pulled out incorrect documents the first time, even those of us normal people who used file cabinets.

  I was hedging, but eventually I took the leap. “Fine. I’ll never say another word again, provided that you meet your own terms.”

  “Thirty seconds and first pull?” She confirmed the deal and I nodded. The left side of her mouth kicked up into a supremely satisfied grin that immediately made me start to second guess myself, but I stuck to my guns.

  “Fire away, Bridges. And get ready to shut your trap forever.”

  “My trap?” I pretended to be offended, but she saw right through me and rolled her eyes, making a rolling motion with her fingers for me to get the proverbial show on the road. “For the record, I don’t have a trap. I have a very fine, very—”

  “Quit stalling,” she said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “I’m starting to think you’re regretting our wager.”

  “I regret nothing,” I said stubbornly, prying into the deepest confines of my brain for an appropriate file to pick. Eventually, I settled on an account I knew she had worked on—as opposed to all those she might not have touched yet, because I didn’t want to win on a technicality—and yet was a small enough project that it wouldn’t have been one of the obvious files.

  “Tantamount,” I fired off, naming an up and coming real estate developer who had hired us to design his biggest office park yet. It was still small in terms of the accounts we were used to landing, but we were also breaking ground within the next coup
le of months.

  My assistant had copied me into an email to Marissa about an initial report, which was how I knew she should have worked on the project by now. The look she shot me spoke loud and clear, suggesting that naming that account was an insult to her.

  She grabbed one of the files near the top of the pile of papers behind her and sure enough, it was Tantamount. Flashing me a coy smile, she said, “Right, now are you going to give me an actual challenge so you’ll believe me, or is that enough for you?”

  Marissa proved she had some semblance of control over where things were, but I still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced it wasn’t pure luck. That email from my assistant had been sent in the last couple of days. For all I knew, Marissa had just finished working on it.

  “Engelmore.” The German property tycoon was expanding into the United States and if I could keep him happy, he could be big business. But we’d only received our first mandate thus far, and as such, hardly anyone even knew about the new client. The file, if she’d even made one yet, could have nothing more than the mandate itself and perhaps one or two instances of correspondence in it.

  The client was flying in within the next month to discuss their brief and exactly what they wanted out of the design. I landed him myself when I was seated next to him at a charity auction a few months ago.

  If anyone else in the office besides my assistant even knew of him, I would have been surprised. Marissa, however, didn’t flinch.

  She simply rolled her chair slightly to her left, ran her fingers down the spines of the pile there and wordlessly handed over the file she had in her hand. My jaw almost fell open when I read the name on it. “It’s Engelmore.”

  “That’s who you asked for,” she quipped. “Now, Mr. Big Boss Man. Why are you really in my office? I doubt you came here after your announcement simply to challenge me in my own domain.”

  “Right again,” I conceded, hooking my thumbs into the pockets of my trousers. “I wanted to ask you something, actually.”

  Interested, she leaned over and tilted her head, a wide smile spreading on her lips. “Shoot. I’m dying to know what was so important you risked getting lost in my mess over it.”

  Chapter 20

  Marissa

  Layton surprised me when he came to my office after making the announcement about the party. He hardly ever ventured over to my side of the building. My heart rate kicked up a notch when I saw him approaching, looking dapper as ever in another one of his impeccably tailored suits.

  Even if they were the only thing I’d ever seen him wear, they never got old. He looked too damn good in them. And since I’d copped a feel at what lay underneath the expensive layers of material, it was hard to look at him and not imagine what he might look like without the corporate suit of armor.

  A powder blue shirt brought out lighter flecks in his green eyes, especially since the tie he was wearing matched his eyes but had an intricate paisley design in the exact color of the shirt. I briefly wondered whether it had been made especially for him to wear with that shirt and if it was, whether the person who made it had chosen the green of the tie based on the color of his eyes.

  I nearly swooned over the thought of a male clothing designer who would put such thought into something as simple as a custom made tie, but then I remembered that I didn’t actually even know whether it was custom made. And even if it was, whether that had been the intention.

  If it hadn’t been the intention, it was a super happy coincidence in my humble opinion, because I would have been perfectly content for him to stand in my doorway all day, just so I could just look at him in that get up. I could openly admire the highlighted flecks in his eyes that I’d never noticed before. It would have been bliss.

  Layton, however, hadn’t dropped by simply for my viewing pleasure. Once I had satisfied his bashful disbelief, a rather interesting mix of emotion on a man usually so sure of himself, I waited for him to state the true purpose of his visit.

  When he told me he had something to ask me, I didn’t know if my heart or my genitals got more excited. While my heart had no invitation to be acting out because of him at all, my genitals certainly did.

  A smallish, dusty and yet seemingly perfectly functioning corner of my brain conjured up at least two hundred images of possible outcomes should his question be of the carnal variety.

  Like perhaps whether I might enjoy another quickie against the wall or whether I was interested in taking the copy room for a test drive. From the original two hundred dirty scenarios, there were many offshoots, such as: if we did end up in the copy room, would he allow me to Xerox his ass so I could keep the copy as a souvenir. And if he didn’t let me, whether it would be possible to sneak a copy without him noticing.

  On and on it went, all in the space of the couple of seconds it took him to wrestle with asking the question he was evidently really there to ask. Layton leaned against the wall casually, thumbs hooked into his pockets like he was posing for the cover of some men’s fashion magazine.

  “On the night of the party,” he started. “Would you like to go out with me?”

  As he asked the question, my stupid brain was off on another tangent about whether it would be a fashion magazine or a business magazine he could have posed for instead of simply going around looking like that for another day at the office.

  The irrelevant thoughts slammed to a complete halt as I threw my brain into reverse gear, trying desperately to determine if I could have heard him right. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “I was wondering if you would like to go out with me that night instead of coming to the office party,” he repeated, a thin line starting to appear between his eyebrows. He wasn’t the kind of guy to backtrack, but it sure looked like he might have been considering it.

  “You do realize the day of the party is Valentine’s Day,” I stated, as if that should clear up my stunned reaction once and for all. To my mind, it did.

  Layton’s frown deepened. “So? I was thinking we could go for a tour of the Freedom Trail. They always do it up for the holiday and it would be a lot more fun than standing around drinking beer with Ted from accounting and Marge from operations.”

  I had no idea who either Ted or Marge was, though by the name I was assuming Marge was a woman obsessed with the Simpsons. There was a lady I overheard from time to time going on about the show when I walked past her office, and it would have been brilliant if she was named Marge.

  I was about to ask Layton about it when I realized I was no closer to answering his question than I had been when he asked it. “Wouldn’t we have to be here for the office party?”

  He shrugged, clearly not overly concerned. “We could come to the party for a little while, make a suitable appearance, and then leave in time for the start of the tour.”

  “The Freedom Trail.” I repeated his proposition quietly, but he heard me and nodded anyway. “I’ve never been.”

  It looked like he might have been about to roll his eyes when he smirked instead. “First shaved ice and now the freedom trail? What have been doing with your time since you arrived in the city? Obviously, you haven’t spent your time actually getting acquainted with it.”

  Let’s see, I’ve been working and raising my daughter. I didn’t give him the honest answer, though. I wasn’t ready to tell him about Annie. I had no idea how much he knew about me before he hired me, but if he did know it didn’t bother him enough to bring her up, and if he didn’t, well, she was my personal life. We were getting closer, there was no doubt, but I just wasn’t ready to drag Annie into it.

  In the end, I settled for the truth without the details. “I’ve been busy.”

  “What do you say to finally getting around to some much overdue sightseeing, then?” As he asked, the tiniest, barest hint of nerves had crept into his voice.

  It was clear he wasn’t used to having to convince women to go out with him. While I totally understood why others might have said yes right away, I didn’t have that l
uxury.

  The first time he asked me out, the only reason I said yes so fast was because Denise was right next to me. Before I could agree to any nighttime activities, I had to check with her about her schedule. And since it was Valentine’s freaking day we were talking about here, I couldn’t just assume Denise had nothing planned.

  I had to talk to her about it before I could commit. “I’ll have to see about some things.”

  “What do you have to see about? Come on, it’ll be fun. I promise. Fun and educational. It’s a double whammy. How can you say no to that?”

  I couldn’t, but unfortunately I also couldn’t say yes. “It shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ll need to get back to you on whether or not I can make it.”

  “Weren’t you already planning on coming to the party?” He asked the question with a playful grin I never would have expected to get from him at the office. As it was I’d only ever seen it that night we had dinner. It didn’t look like he broke it out for just any old occasion. “We’ll play hooky. If you were already coming to the party, no one will even notice we’re gone. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  I shook my head, my ponytail bopping along behind my head. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”

  “Okay,” he shrugged, straightening up from the wall. “If you need time to sort out whatever you need to sort out, that’s fine. Just let me know, okay? No pressure.”

  I couldn’t tell what was going on in his head, but he backed out of my office and gave me nothing more than a cursory wave as he walked away. Perhaps he was concerned about that dude from HR who had been at the announcement labeling what he was proposing as ‘shenanigans’.

  I coughed over a giggle that Layton might be worried about something as silly as shenanigans, but then spent the rest of day trying out different pitches in my head for asking Denise about Valentine’s Day. Annie, Denise and I usually spent the evening together. We watched a sappy rom-com, Annie fell asleep on the couch, and once we’d tucked her into bed, Denise and I drank a ‘Parting Glass of Wine’ to another year of single-dom behind us.