“I’m so glad to hear that, Annalise,” he said, and I savored the sound of my name coming from his lips. “You do a lot of fantastic work for us, and I absolutely want to make sure that I emphasize that, first and foremost. But I have noticed a change in your demeanor over these past couple of weeks. You seem distracted, like you’re carrying around more stress than usual. And that isn’t to say that your work has suffered in the slightest, because it hasn’t, not by any means. I just want you to know I’m here to listen, if there’s anything going on that you want to talk to me about. If there’s anything that’s bothering you at the office, or just if there’s anything I can do for you, I want you to feel like you can discuss it with me.”
Maybe it shouldn’t have felt like it did. He was my boss, and I was his employee, after all. He pretty much held my entire fate by a string. He’d hired me and he could fire me just as easily, and so it was strange to feel like I was suddenly in the presence of a Zen master, offering me the chance to unburden all of my pain onto him.
I suddenly found myself holding back tears at his offer, and finally had to let a few trickle out along the bridge of my nose as I attempted to answer him.
“That’s so, so sweet of you,” I said, and took in a few deep breaths to try and calm myself down. He waited patiently, and I could feel him watching me, ready to listen attentively to whatever was on my mind.
“It has been a rough couple of weeks,” I finally admitted. “I promise you it’s nothing to do with work. Work is great. I love my job. It’s just that I’m trying to get over a breakup. And it’s… It’s not going that well for me right now.”
I dabbed my eyes with a napkin, feeling a little bit foolish, but reassured by Malcolm’s kind, sympathetic eyes gleaming across the table at me.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Breakups are never fun.”
I shook my head. “No, they aren’t. And it just feels so stupid… A part of me feels like I could do so much better than my ex, anyway. But a part of me feels like… Well, what if I can’t, you know?”
“I don’t think that at all,” he said sweetly. I smiled at him through my tears.
“Really?” I asked. He shook his head.
“Really. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it. You’re a lovely human being, an extraordinary worker, an incredible problem solver. It’s easy to only see the worst in yourself after you’ve gone through a breakup. Believe me, I’ve been there.”
I smiled a bit disbelievingly at this. “Really?” I asked again. “But I mean, you’re a billionaire… No offense, but even on a bad day, hasn’t the world already pretty much assured you of your value?” This instantly felt like the wrong thing to say, but I was grateful when he shook his head and laughed it off.
“You would think that, wouldn’t you? But no, I’m afraid love is one of those problems that even money can’t solve for you. Trust me, if I thought it could, I would’ve tried it by now. Relationships are just always complicated. Genuine relationships, I mean. They take a lot of work. And sometimes you’ll end up with one person putting in all that work, and the other person doesn’t want to contribute anything at all. It’s really hard for a relationship to function like that.”
I took a quick sip from my glass, pondering this. “Are you sure you aren’t talking more about yourself now than about me?” I asked.
He blinked, and then gave me a conceding smile.
“You caught me,” he said, and we both laughed. “Yeah… That’s kind of why I wanted to stop for a drink in the first place this evening. Trying to put off going home.”
“Ouch,” I said, and he nodded.
“I mean, it’s not that serious. Just some turbulence between me and my fiancée. It’s just that I’m really trying to work through things with her, but she’s the kind of person who holds grudges instead of trying to move past things. Sometimes it just feels like we get stuck in a certain place and it’s impossible for us to move on.”
I felt the inevitable pang of jealousy at the mention of the buxom beauty known as Alyssa Muenzel, but then swallowed down my envy, reminding myself that I wouldn’t actually have a chance with this man, even if it weren’t for the supermodel standing in my way.
“Maybe it just needs time,” I suggested feebly.
“Maybe,” he shrugged. “But anyway. I could tell you were probably dealing with stuff of your own back at the office. I figured misery loves company, so maybe it would help us both out to grab a drink and spend an hour or two airing things out.”
“I think you were right about that,” I said with a grin. “I am starting to feel a little bit better, actually.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “And you really should feel better. I know it can be intimidating to start fresh. But I have no doubt in my mind that a young woman like you will bounce back in no time. Any man with half his senses would realize how lucky he is to be with someone like you. And whatever happened in your last relationship, I hope you don’t forget that.”
“Thank you so much,” I said, feeling at once deeply moved, and almost physically aching that this man was already attached to someone else.
“I mean it,” he said. “Things will get better, you’ll see. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and lifted up my glass. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” he repeated, and both of us drank, maintaining eye contact over the rims of our glasses. I couldn’t get over how much better he made me feel, or the degree to which he actually made me believe the things he was telling me. For the first time since Dennis had uttered the word “settling,” I actually felt like I could recover from this- and indeed, that the best days of my life were still yet to come.
The two of us placed our tumblers back down on the table and just sort of stared, smiling at one another, for an awkwardly, intoxicatingly long while.
My lips started tingling. God, what I wouldn’t give to lean across the table right now, plant my lips on this man’s, and taste the alcohol still fresh on his tongue…
Perhaps sensing this desire, and rightfully disarming it, Malcolm’s eyes at last parted from mine, and I followed the line of his gaze to a television playing in a corner of the bar.
I turned in my seat to watch what was on. It was either CNN or MSNBC, I wasn’t paying much attention to which. But I do remember clearly that it was a report about some pandemic in China, about which I was only vaguely aware at this point. Video footage of men in masks and vacated streets flashed by onscreen, and I noticed a few other faces at the bar turned to examine this as well.
“Have you heard about all that?” Malcolm asked me, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
“Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean to think it all started from a bat or whatever, and now the entire country is shut down. Like, can you even imagine?”
“It’s nuts,” he agreed. “Some people are even saying it could spread over here.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard people saying that, but I dunno. I feel like the media kind of does the same thing every couple of years. Not that it’s not serious, obviously…”
“No, no, I get what you’re saying. They like to overhype things, keep people afraid. It keeps people tuned in, it’s good for ratings.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And you know, maybe it could happen, but I’m not lying awake at night afraid of it or anything.”
“Right,” Malcolm agreed, turning back to me. “This country’s already got enough on its plate without making up new things to be afraid of. I figure this will probably just come and go like everything else, and it’s one of those things we’ll all just forget about in a year or two.”
“Exactly,” I said again. “Then it’ll be on to the next thing.”
And in the hundred thousand times or so I’ve replayed that conversation in my head, I still can’t decide whether either of us really believed what we were saying, or whether it was just a matter of self-preservation to avoid f
acing what was right in front of us…
2-
Swelter-In-Place
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t all just media hype.
In a few short months, the four walls of my New York apartment had come to feel like a prison cell, and even then I knew I was one of the lucky ones.
I was working a steady job, with excellent pay and benefits, and of the many things I had to worry about, being evicted, running out of food, or winding up unable to access healthcare were completely absent from the list. I can’t even begin to imagine what things must have been like for people without the same privileges.
Still though, the isolation of lockdown was absolutely starting to get to me by now. In my months of sheltering-in-place thus far, I’d already exhausted just about every single avenue for self-distraction that I could think of. I’d read pretty much every one of the books in my apartment I’d been meaning to get to, but had never quite found the time. I’d watched every halfway decent show on the company streaming service, Goldfinch+, from start to finish. I’d even caved in and bought a Nintendo Switch Lite at one point, after every single person on the internet started going nuts over Animal Crossing. I’ve never been a huge gamer, but I’m almost embarrassed about how many hours I spent selling fruit and catching bugs just to try and get a cartoon dog to play his guitar on my digital island.
I’d staved off insanity for as long as I possibly could, but by now I was starting to get desperate. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have plenty to do as I worked from home, either.
You see, people suck. And they really do their best to suck a thousand times harder when there’s a pandemic going on. And as someone in charge of managing projects for a social media conglomerate big enough to rival Facebook or Twitter, I suddenly found I had my work very much cut out for me as far as preventing the whole damn thing from imploding on itself.
Fake news was one of the biggest headaches I had to work to try and deal with. Between bad information being spread about COVID-19, with nearly the same deadly speed, and the outright conspiracies about where it came from, and what James Bond-esque villain was responsible for its proliferation (I swear to God, I’ve never been so tired of reading the name “Bill Gates” as I was during this phase of the pandemic,) it was almost as though the staff at Goldfinch was playing a game of Whack-a-Troll. No sooner would we put out one fire than another was raging up to take its place, and I was largely responsible for strengthening the systems already in place to try and put an end to this nonsense, as well as creating some new tools for fact-checking and preventing the spread of fraudulent information from the ground up.
Suffice it to say, I was being worn down to the bone by all these efforts, and the fact that I had to juggle a million things at once while being cooped up inside my cramped apartment wasn’t doing much at all to benefit my mental health.
Malcolm Finch, the secret object of my affections, had been conspicuously absent from my life in the months since this whole rigmarole had begun. Myself and several of my higher-up co-workers had been conducting regular video meetings throughout the course of the pandemic, but Malcolm, for whatever reason, had yet to attend any of these meetings. Liz Cummings, his second in command, would always begin these teleconferences with something like “Malcolm sends his regards,” but then we would plow straight into business with no further explanation as to his whereabouts.
However arrogant or ridiculous it might sound, I found myself hurt by my boss’s silence, perhaps to an unreasonable degree. I mean sure, I understood, he had a lot on his plate at the moment. He was the man in charge, and it was silly of me to expect him present at every single meeting that took place between his underlings.
Still, though, I was so used to him treating the people he worked with like family. Maybe it was naive of me not to simply take the whole “family” business as the feel-good corporate doublespeak that it was, but I really had thought that Malcolm himself had believed in it. If we were back at the office instead of holding meetings at home, I told myself, Malcolm almost certainly would have been in attendance. Or at the very least, we would hear from him about why he wasn’t.
And that was another thing. If he didn’t want to attend online meetings, fine, that was entirely his choice. But I hadn’t so much as heard from the man outside of company-wide newsletters and the like since the world shut down around us.
It was true, he was still engaged to be married to that airhead Alyssa Muenzel, and I knew that full well. Maybe it was my fault for expecting it to come to anything, but it really had felt as though the two of us shared some kind of connection after that evening we’d spent in the bar together. In the remaining weeks we’d spent around the office since our little chat, I sometimes caught him peering over at me across the office. We smiled at one another, and started making casual chit-chat more often than we ever had before.
Things never quite heated up to the level that I wanted them to. There was no direct follow-up to the sparks that flew between us that fateful evening, as desperately as I longed for that to happen. Still, though, I was grateful for what interactions did take place between us, and I kept deluding myself into thinking things might actually progress in the direction I’d been hoping they would, if only I gave it enough time.
Only there was no time. In the blink of an eye it was like the entire world got swept away, and I was left wondering if I’d been nothing but an immature romantic the entire time.
God, how I wished I wasn’t single…
It’s not so much that I missed Dennis. In fact, it was almost alarming how quickly I’d managed to erase him from my memory after that night at the bar with Malcolm. Still though, the solitude now confronting me felt like it might have been easier with someone by my side. Of course I was still fantasizing about that someone being my billionaire boss, instead, but at this point I was just longing for anyone at all to keep me company.
_____
I awoke one afternoon to shafts of golden sunlight streaming in through my window. Yes, I said afternoon there, my days and nights having blurred almost completely together at this point, and my sleep schedule leading me to turn in at ungodly hours of the morning.
I sat up, stretched my stiff muscles, and ran my fingers back through my untidy bedhead, strawberry blonde locks dripping down over my bare shoulders.
I was seriously going to need to get it cut soon…
It wasn’t too out of hand just yet, but it was right on the verge of becoming so. I figured I just might have to end up biting the bullet and cutting my own hair, as horrible an idea as that seemed.
But hey, who knew? Maybe 2020 was the year when the bowl cut finally got its chance to shine!
“Shit,” I muttered to myself, and slumped back onto my pillow, feeling as though I’d barely slept at all that night. I’d been dreaming like crazy lately, and I’d read that plenty of other people were too. Something about all the extra levels of anxiety or whatever that were currently floating around, which I guess made sense.
I closed my eyes again, squeezing the bridge of my nose between my thumb and index finger. I tried to remember whatever it was I’d been dreaming about.
Through the darkness, I saw a rock hard body materializing, with something else rock hard standing up between the legs. I saw his piercing white smile, his dark eyes gleaming at me, a come-hither look burning so hot that I could feel my wet clothes becoming plastered to my skin.
He reached out both of his large, solid hands and placed them on my hips, pulling me close. He reeled my body into him, his hot breath burning against my lips.
Our mouths met. Our tongues entwined. His hand slid down the front of my body, and reached into my pajama shorts…
I gasped back suddenly to consciousness, shuddering from head to toe as I forced myself back up from the bed once again.
“Nope! Nope, we aren’t going there today, Annalise,” I forced myself to say, now remembering the dream vividly, and almost ashamed of how excited it had made me.
I rubbed my eyes, and turned to look at the alarm clock on my bedside stand. It was 1:15 in the afternoon.
“Ugh,” I grunted, remembering that I had an office video call about an hour from now. With great effort I managed to lug my heavy limbs up from the bed and traipse off to the bathroom. There really wasn’t any strict dress code for video calls, but so far no one had ever turned up for one in their pajamas, so I figured I should at least try to uphold some standard of professionalism in my wardrobe and appearance.
The pulsing shower jets felt like heaven as they rained down onto me from overhead, steam rising up around me, making me feel as though I might drift right back off into dreamland. There’s a chance I might have spent those minutes lathering myself up thinking about the NC-17 imagery of my dream from the night before, but I’m not going to give any further comment about that here…
I felt at least a little bit refreshed after that, or at least enough to be able to face the day ahead. I slipped into a pretty black floral print dress, something I could discard just as easily for my PJ’s once the video call was over. With twenty minutes to spare I scarfed down a couple slices of toast, checked Goldfinch on my phone to see if there were any interesting news developments (aside from the regularly scheduled influx of new virus cases,) and finally brewed myself a pot of coffee.
I stepped over to my computer, logged in to the video meeting, and took a long, delicious sip from my coffee mug. I nearly spat the hot liquid back out all over myself when the video call loaded, and the familiar Brady Bunch-style grid of faces popped up on the screen.
Only this time, there was one more face present than I’d become accustomed to seeing…
“Hey everyone!” came the voice from a chiseled face, as finely manicured as ever despite the shutdown from the pandemic. “Hope I haven’t missed anything these past few weeks.”
“Malcolm!”
“Hey, boss!”
Lockdown with My Billionaire Boss : Second Chance Office Romance Page 2