Hot Boss

by Anne Marsh

  She ignores me and instead inventories my desktop as she nudges the laptop screen closed. “You work too much.”

  Coming from Hazel, that’s rich. She works all the time.

  “Are you trying to tell me what to do?” I cross my arms over my chest and lean forward a little. Yes, it’s wrong to use my larger size to intimidate, but these are desperate times. “Because you’re my business partner, not my boss.”

  “Coleman and Reed,” she points out, not a little smugly. She chugs champagne. “My name comes first.”

  I should never have discussed business with Hazel after doing tequila shots. She’s entirely ruthless and far too convincing. “Because you insisted on alphabetical order.”

  “I’m first. You’re second. If this was a wolf pack, that would make me the alpha and you the beta.”

  “You’re still not the boss of me.” My glass is empty, so I hold it out for Hazel to refill.

  She grins the evilest of Hazel grins. “It’s my month, so technically I am.”

  Right. Fuck. Hazel and I have control issues, which is a polite way of saying we both have a pathological need to be in charge. In our early days, we settled our differences with “rock paper scissors,” but that looked weird once we started acquiring staff. So then we switched to taking turns. Every other month, Hazel gets to be the boss.

  “We’re not at the office.” I feel compelled to point this out because not only are we both workaholics, but Hazel is also the kind of person who gleefully takes a mile when given an inch.

  “You need to get out. No more working this weekend. That’s an order.”

  “Since when do I take orders from you?”

  She winks at me. “You should try it. I’m awesome at giving orders.”

  I’m not sure how to respond to that, but she doesn’t wait for an answer, anyhow. She just nods as if she’s finishing up an argument with herself and then tosses more words at me. “You need to get back out there.”

  That’s alarmingly vague.

  “To the party?”

  There’s a moment of silence, or as near silent as you can get when there are two hundred people crammed into the house next door. Somehow Max always gets away with the most over-the-top parties.

  “Life.” Hazel punches up a finger as she makes each point. “Dating. Casual sex. When is the last time you had an orgasm?”

  I choke on nothing at all. “Inappropriate, Hazel.”

  She grins at me unrepentantly as she sets the champagne bottle on the floor. “Make a dating plan. Go pick out someone fun on the Billionaire Bachelors app.”

  I don’t have to think about it. “No.”

  “I’ve already set up your profile. Say thank you.”

  Jesus. I think I might pale.

  Hazel beats me to my phone, probably because she’s already on the bed thanks to her laptop-slamming move, while I’m an entire room away. She’s such a cheater. She holds up my phone triumphantly as she punches in my passcode. She knows all my passwords, just like I know hers. And like any good friend, she lives to torture me. She starts scrolling and swiping, while I try half-heartedly to wrest the phone away from her. She’s pointed out repeatedly that my gorilla size gives me an unfair advantage over her more petite frame, so I try to be careful. I go for a wrist hold, but she wriggles, my hands slip and we end up twisted together in a Jack-and-Hazel pretzel. Her boobs pop right onto my arm like I’m a shelf or something with way fewer nerve endings. Her tank top gapes and there’s no way to avoid seeing that her bra’s made out of a dark blue satin material. The fabric cups her boobs into sexy little mouthfuls. I shut my eyes, but it’s too late.

  Some things can’t be unseen.

  My brain’s already assessing the new data points and drawing conclusions. Hazel’s got great boobs, two perfect handfuls from the look of things.

  She’s super flexible and I bet she’d look amazing naked, her face all lit up as she comes, her fingers digging into my wrists and holding on to me as she lets herself go while she—

  Cease and desist.

  You do not—not ever—think about your friend and business partner like that.

  “What about this one?” Oblivious to my inappropriate sexual thoughts, she jams an elbow into my ribs as she turns the screen so I can see. I let her go because I need to put some safe space between us more than I need to win this argument.

  Objectively speaking, Hazel’s suggestion is pretty. She has two eyes and two ears, and a happy grin lights up her face. Blond hair spills over her bare, suntanned shoulders. Melanie likes water-skiing, scuba diving in tropical locations and designing jewelry. Wow. Is this what Hazel thinks is my type? I mean...maybe I prefer something less over-the-top. Or blue satin.

  What is wrong with me? “No.”

  There. Two birds killed with one stone.

  Undeterred, Hazel retrieves the champagne and flops back on my bed, swiping left like a madwoman. I can’t remember if that’s the dating equivalent of putting the girl in my shopping cart for later or not.

  “How about this one? Tell me where she rates on the Jack-o-Meter. Better yet, tell me a story.”

  Ever since one drunken, amazing night in a college dive bar, Hazel and I have had a game. When we spot an interesting stranger, we make up stories about who he or she might be. There are no rules other than we use our inside voices—Hazel can get loud—and that we never, ever make up stories about someone we know. The redhead Hazel’s pointing to could star in an ad for curl cream. Bright corkscrews frame her laughing face and a spray of freckles dusts her nose. She’s impossibly cute and happy. I bet her favorite flower is the rose and her closet is full of Victoria’s Secret Pink.

  “Playmaker at a Mexican all-inclusive. Molly Ringwald body double. Georgia homecoming queen who runs an Etsy earring business. It doesn’t matter, Hazel—I don’t want a date.”

  She gives me the death glare. “You do.”

  I steal the champagne from her. Pretty much everyone who has ever worked with Hazel recognizes the mulish expression she gets and can tell a Hazel story. The tenacity that makes her such a brilliant investor and business coach sometimes backfires when she leaves the office. She’s argued more than once that those backfires are an important contribution to the world because she shouldn’t be right all the time (and Hazel absolutely believes she is), and this is just the universe’s way of making sure things come out a little more even for the rest of us. She’s stormed into court over a speeding ticket and outargued the prosecutor. She’s hauled all her clothes to Goodwill in trash bags and started over because she claimed that was easier than going through them and doing a Marie Kondo.

  She shakes the phone at me like it’s a Magic 8-Ball. “Yes or no.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like redheads who might or might not be homecoming queens and talented freelance artists? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Nothing, but I don’t want to date her.”

  Hazel makes Hazel noises and swipes through a gallery of women. I can’t tell if she’s actually looking at the pictures or doing the adult equivalent of spinning a globe and pretending you’ll travel wherever your finger lands when you’re a grown-up and have money.

  She puts down the phone—where I can’t reach it, because Hazel’s smart—and frowns at me. “You’re weird.”

  “Pot.” I swirl my finger in the air, turning an imaginary globe. I don’t usually drink too much, but I suspect this evening is going to break any hopes I had of a sober streak. I know I should care, but the champagne wraps my brain in a delicious fog, so I decide to worry about it tomorrow. “Did you ever spin the globe when you were little and pretend that you’d have to go wherever your finger landed?”

  “No one does that for real,” Hazel says decisively.

  I nod. “People do, too, do that. I was supposed to go to Antarctica because that was w
here my finger ended up.”

  “You fingered Antarctica.” She sniggers.

  “Mature.” I tug on her hair as we lie side by side, staring companionably up at my ceiling.

  Hazel transitions seamlessly from raunchy jokes back to my life. “You know I’m right. You need to get back out there.”

  Despite Hazel’s insistence on always being right, I can’t argue with her this time. I’ve turned into a cave-dwelling hermit.

  “Why do you want me to date so badly?”

  “You need to get laid. I suppose you could hire someone. Or just go to a bar and hook up. Or just use Max’s app.” She frowns at my ceiling. “What about the whole glory-hole thing? Don’t they do that in San Francisco? Isn’t that just sort of like having sex with a sheet with a hole in it?”

  I have no idea how Hazel’s brain works. I choke. “Google that later, okay? But, no. Thanks.”

  Maybe she’s just having me on, because she starts laughing. Hazel’s no giggler. She has a full-blown hyena laugh punctuated by weird, random snorts. It’s impossible not to join in, even if I’m not entirely certain what we’re laughing about. I knew, when I met her—when she took issue with every point in my slide deck, and then bought me cake and cackled with glee over the money we’d made—that Hazel did her own thing, but I respected the fact that she did it loud and proud. Hazel doesn’t accept excuses—when she fails, she bounces back up like a punching bag and keeps going. It figures she’d see marriage the same way.

  “Let me set you up,” she replies when she’s finally got the hyena snort-laugh under control. “I promise to pick someone you’ll like.”

  “What are we? Girlfriends?” I ask. “Are we doing each other’s nails next?”

  She flicks my shoulder. “That’s a stereotype—plus, I’m more of a sheet mask girl myself. I just want to know that my best business partner is okay. Happy also works for me.”

  She winks at me. Despite her well-earned reputation as one of Silicon Valley’s most sharkish VC backers, Hazel’s one of the most generous people I know. She’s also—in a quiet, not-so-over-the-top way—one of the funniest. I’d lay even money that tomorrow or the day after, a Sephora box full of sheet masks will hit my desk.

  “You’re not exactly Ms. Happily-Ever-After.”

  “Are you challenging my dating credentials?”

  “When was the last time you went on a date?” I turn my head so I can see her face. She’s had the same shoulder-length bob for as long as I’ve known her, and her hair is always a well-trimmed, ruthlessly flat-ironed cap. The only thing more meticulous is her makeup. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen Hazel look like a mess. Frat parties, college bars, beach trips, house moves—Hazel’s hair and makeup is always on point.

  “Three weeks ago.” She stretches her arms over her head in some kind of yoga pose. I mimic the move. It’s not bad at all for working the kinks out of my shoulder.

  “And?”

  She flops forward, stretching like a cat. “He wasn’t second date material.”

  Her voice is muffled by the duvet.

  “Did you introduce him to your family?”

  She turns her face to look at me. “Do I look crazy?”

  Three years younger than me, Hazel is twenty-nine, staring down the big three-zero. And while she’s made it perfectly clear that she doesn’t care about this milestone date, her mother, her aunties and her three sisters care. She’s their baby, the maverick and the only one who wasn’t either an English major or a liberal-studies major. The Coleman clan live crammed into a series of small cottages five blocks from the Santa Cruz beach on family land, and in every single one of my encounters with them, they’ve reiterated their desire for Hazel to move home, preferably with a husband and multiple mini-Hazels in tow.

  Once a week like clockwork, someone emails her a link to a small house on Amazon or a caravan that “doesn’t count as a house because it’s on wheels”—think taco truck with curtains. Her mother is a poet, one sister teaches English at the local high school, and another is homeschooling her two kids and leading prison writing workshops. Hazel, on the other hand, doesn’t get nuances, poetry or metaphors and her fridge-poetry-magnet set is used to make shapes. They’re fun, they live life loud and even though Hazel’s a bit of a cuckoo in the nest, they love her back even if they don’t get her. They love me, too, which Hazel claims isn’t at all unexpected as she’s yet to meet anyone who doesn’t like me.

  “If I’d introduced him, they’d have had us engaged by the time we’d finished discussing the weather. If he didn’t sprint for his car by that point, my mom would have booked a nice beach for the wedding. They don’t get that I could just be using the guy for sex.”

  “For a bunch of free spirits, they do have some hard limits,” I admit.

  “There is no casual hookup sex.” She waves a hand dramatically. “They just want me married and settled and that’s the last thing I want.”

  “I miss marriage,” I admit quietly.

  “Molly?”

  “No, not her specifically, not anymore. It’s just...”

  “Having someone?”

  “That,” I agree. “I miss the closeness, the intimacy, the sex.”

  This earns me another snort-chuckle. “You goof. You have two out of three with me. We just don’t have sex.”

  Before I can stop myself, my brain gleefully goes there. To the land of Hazel-and-Jack-having-sex. I don’t care if pundits claim all guys imagine having sex with their best friends if those friends are girls. This is the first time I’ve ever imagined naked Hazel and I don’t like it. Not really. Or maybe I like it too much. I need to be able to work with her.

  Hazel dangles my phone in front of my face. “Pick someone and get laid.”

  “Not a chance.”

  She laughs as I shove the phone under my pillow because I’m not taking chances. Hazel is fully capable of choosing a date for me.

  “We both suck,” she announces. “How can we make so much money but be so bad at meeting people?”

  I don’t budge from the pillow. Hazel plays dirty. “It’s a gift.”

  Hazel, who’s never still to begin with—unless she’s reading, in which case she might be mistaken for dead except for the frantic flick-flick of the pages—bounces to her feet. The mattress shakes. I rescue the champagne just in time.

  “List time!” she cries.

  She produces a black Sharpie from somewhere and writes Jack’s List of Requirements across my bedroom wall.

  “Describe your dream girl. Five adjectives. Go.”

  I take a pull from the bottle. It’s not as cold as it once was.

  “No way.”

  “Don’t make me pick for you, mister.”

  Fine. “Loyal. Trustworthy. Strong. Happy. Honest.”

  Hazel scrawls my words on the wall and then frowns. “Are you looking for a girlfriend or a pet?”

  Holy fuck, I am boring.

  From the way Hazel eyes my bedroom wall, she’s done the same math.

  “You should try something different,” Hazel says. “But we can work on that later. Let’s talk about what you bring to the table.”

  She sketches said table in bold, broad strokes. There’s a Pro column and a Con column, plus my name, JACK, just in case there’s any doubt who we’re psychoanalyzing today.

  Her teeth chew at her lower lip. “First candidate for the Pro column—wildly successful venture capitalist, so excellent baby daddy.”

  She writes BIG in the Pro column.

  “Big?”

  “Shorthand.” She gives me a dramatic eyebrow waggle. “For your...assets.”

  Sharpie doesn’t wash off, now that I think about it.

  And I’m not entirely certain she’s referring to my bank account.

  “You’re not supposed to say those thi
ngs, Hazel.”

  She sticks her tongue out at me. “I’m too old to change.”

  “I don’t think you need to change,” I drunk-whisper.

  “I like me, too.” She nods her head vigorously. “But we’re doing you here.”

  “All yours.” I flop back on the bed. “But be gentle with me. Next point?”

  She holds her hands up in front of her face and squints at me through the opening she’s made. “Let’s add big blond giant with bad-boy hair to the plus column.”

  “Okay. Wait, what’s wrong with my hair?”

  “Nothing.” She scrawls HUGE on my bedroom wall. “But you do realize that you show up at the office looking like a poster child for sex, right? I guarantee half of our employees fantasize about running their fingers through it.”

  I roll onto my side. “Now I don’t feel safe going to work on Monday.”

  Hazel is already busy adding another word to the list. VERSATILE. “You’re equally at home on a surfboard and in a boardroom.”

  “Versatile? Since when is versatile sexy?”

  “Fine.” She scribbles out VERSATILE and adds FIT and RICH to the list. I’d like to argue with her, but both of those things are true.

  “I’m feeling objectified here—these are all outside things. How would you feel if I summed you up as a great pair of boobs and a pretty mouth?”

  “Should I say ‘thank you’?”

  “Not yet,” I say darkly.

  Laughter shakes Hazel’s body. She has a nice butt, which her yoga pants put on display. Not that I’m noticing her butt. Even thinking about my business partner like that is a recipe for disaster.

  SHARK.

  I stare at the new word that Hazel’s just scrawled on my wall. “What?”

  She looks at me impatiently. “You have the killer instincts of a shark for a deal.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a plus in the dating world.”

  Hazel taps the Sharpie against the RICH heading. “Hello. The leg bone’s connected to the hip bone.”