My strides long, I cover the distance in no time, ignoring the spinning heads and whispers.
“Jim?” I say, putting a hand on his shoulder.
He spins around, and his face drops when he sees me.
“Ryan!” he says.
“We need to talk.”
He regains his composure. “Back in the office, eh?” he says, chuckling. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Is there somewhere we can talk, Jim?”
“It’s Jerry, actually.”
“Let’s head to the conference room, Jerry,” I say.
He gets up stiffly, holding onto his desk for support.
“Gained a bit of weight over the years, eh?” I say.
“Cubicle life,” he says. “Not all of us get to spend our time on luxury cruises.”
I chuckle. “Same old Jerry.”
We head into the conference room and I close the door behind me.
I pull my laptop out of my briefcase, open it up with the articles already open, and place it in front of Jerry.
“What do you think?” I say, only giving him a minute to read all of it.
“Hmmph,” he says, frowning.
“Hmmph?” I say. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“Well, you know what they say about programming?” he says. “Nothing ever stays at the top. If there’s a better way to do something, someone’s going to find it.”
“That’s not going to be good enough. This is the Sisyphus Algorithm we’re talking about, my algorithm. You helped me with some of it, with the framework. Either this guy’s lying, or there’s a major problem with my code that I didn’t spot.”
There’s a knock at the door, and before I can tell whoever it is to go away, the door opens.
“We’re busy in here,” I say, not looking up.
“Oh,” says Jerry. “This is Lily, our newest programmer. She’s been wanting to start coding. Maybe now she’ll have something to do.”
“Hello,” says a familiar voice… too familiar.
I look up, and get a huge surprise.
It’s none other than the hot virgin from last night, the one who didn’t want my cock inside her just yet, the one who fled back to her apartment.
I look at her, and she looks back at me.
Her hair is hanging down around her face, covering part of it, making her look mysterious and beautiful at the same time.
My gaze finds its way down to her breasts, and to her hips and her long legs.
She’s wearing a professional outfit that can’t do much to hide her curves. It can’t hide the body that makes my cock start to swell, and draws me to her.
But I’m not the type to fall for women.
“Lily, this is Ryan Hudson, the…”
“We’ve met,” says Lily.
“Oh, really? How did you two meet?”
“We’ve had romantic entanglements,” I say.
I can almost hear Lily gulping in embarrassment.
Jerry is silent for a moment, but the awkwardness doesn’t affect me.
“If you’ll excuse us, Lily,” I say. “We’ve got to get back to this. We’re going to be working on some coding…”
“Well, Lily’s a great coder,” says Jerry, apparently unaware that this might put the two of us in a situation we don’t want to be in… typical coder behavior, unaware of many social norms—everything that isn’t written in code.
“I’m new,” says Lily. “I wouldn’t know how to help.”
But I know she’s lying. I can hear the eagerness in her voice. She’s excited about being near me. I can see it in her eyes and in the way her body moves, subtly shifting.
But… she’s excited about the code, too?
“Nonsense,” says James. “From what you were telling me yesterday, you really know your stuff. And you were saying you were anxious to get into coding. Hey, it beats reading that office manual, doesn’t it?” Then he remembers I’m in the room. “No offense, Ryan.”
I shrug. “An office manual sounds boring as shit,” I say. “Is that what they have you doing here instead of coding?”
Lily nods shyly.
“All right,” I say, opening up two more laptops from my briefcase, and pulling up the right programs and code before handing them out one by one to Jerry and Lily. “Let’s get to work then.”
“We’re going to be coding?” says Lily.
“If you can help,” I say. “Then, yeah.”
Jerry is already tapping away at the keys, his eyes sinking into the code. “Wow,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. “This is incredible.”
“I managed to get the source code that Simmons is running,” I say. “An old contact owed me a favor.”
“So we’re breaking industry rules?” says Lily, sounding worried.
I chuckle, putting my feet up on the table, pushing my chair back away from the conference table. “There are no industry rules,” I say. “If it’s too rich for you, back out now.”
“No,” she says, crossing her arms in front of her. “I want to work on the project. I just have to go get my own laptop.”
“There’s a laptop right here,” I say.
“I like coding on my own machine,” she says.
“Ah,” I say sarcastically. “We’ve got a real coder here.”
She turns away without saying anything, and I watch her delicious ass moving back and forth as she walks.
Lily
What a prick, I think to myself, as I head back to my cubicle and grab my personal laptop, which is covered in old stickers, mostly the names of white hat hacking collectives.
He’s got to be the most arrogant, self-assured asshole I’ve ever met in my life.
But he’s also fucking hot.
I can’t get the images from last night out of my head, no matter how much I try to focus on the project at hand. No matter what he says to me, I know I’m attracted to him like crazy.
Must just be my hormones, I think to myself.
I head back into the conference room, but before I enter I take a deep breath, promising myself not to let last night’s little adventure interfere with our work. That may sound like a far fetched idea, but I’ve manage to go 21 years without letting anyone interfere with me in that way, and so far it’s worked. But am I going to go another 21 years, and end up having never had sex with anyone?
I want him, and I don’t know why. Hell, I do know why: his broad shoulders, his jaw line as sharp as diamonds, and the way he looks at me. It makes me shiver just remembering his gaze.
I’m here to work, I remind myself. This is the programming opportunity of a lifetime, exactly what I’ve been looking for. This is an exciting, in the heat of the moment project. It’s going to require innovation.
Ryan just gives me a nod when I come back in.
My cubicle neighbor, whose name I finally learned is actually Jerry, is completely immersed in the code on the laptop Ryan handed him.
“Here,” grunts Ryan, tossing me a USB drive.
“The code?” I say.
He nods, and goes back to looking at his laptop.
A shiver goes down my spine… and he didn’t even look at me.
I find my gaze drifting down his body, soaking him all in.
Work, work, work, I chant to myself in my head. I’ve got to work.
I open up my laptop and plug in the USB.
This is an old machine, but I’ve heavily modified it, and it runs faster than anything you can buy new.
The processor is still one of the fastest, even though it’s a few years old. I upgraded the hard drive from the spinning disk kind to a wicked fast solid state, with the fastest type of connectors. The RAM was already maxed out, but I found a way to rig it up so that I’m running double the official max RAM. The real kicker, though, is the Linux distro I’m running, which uses less system memory, making the whole thing faster, regardless of the hardware.
There’s not much talking for the first coupl
e hours, as the three of us dig into the code.
I get the feeling at first that I’m in way, way over my head. Whichever programmer did this is way beyond my level, and he didn’t use any comments in the code, so half the time I don’t even know what I’m looking at.
But all those hours squirrelled away in my room, examining code, start to pay off, and pretty soon, everything’s starting to make sense.
Wow, I keep saying to myself, marveling at the ingenuity of some of the programming here.
Then again, Ryan’s own code is really good.
There has to be something fundamentally different here that achieves these benchmark scores. Just writing clean fancy code isn’t going to be enough, if it’s still running off Ryan’s algorithm engine, which is the meat and potatoes of the whole program.
“Anything?” says Ryan, after hours of the three of us not talking.
We’re all hunched over our laptops, our eyes getting blurry from the screens.
I’ve managed to go this entire time without so much as glancing at Ryan, but it’s just been a testament to my strong will. Now that I have an excuse to look at him, I do so, and I drink him in. Just looking at him makes my body… respond.
“Nope,” says Jerry, sighing, and pushing himself back away from his laptop. “I mean, the code is good, but I can’t make heads or tails of the algorithm. Everything I’m finding makes it look just like your code.”
“Same,” says Ryan, frowning, somehow looking sexier. “To me, it just looks like he rewrote what I already did. But those little changes aren’t going to improve efficiency by any noticeable degree, and certainly not to the point where he’s getting these benchmark scores. Which makes sense. No one can seem to figure out how he’s doing it… What about you, Lily? Find anything?”
He sort of glares as he says this to me in a vaguely dismissive way, as if he’s sure I’m not going to find anything.
And, damn it, but he’s right. I have to admit that I haven’t found anything either.
“Shit,” says Ryan, checking his watch. I’m not even sure what a Rolex is, but I’m sure he has one, by the way it looks. “This is the most I’ve worked in years.”
“Me too,” says Jerry, chuckling. “It’s fun to be back into it, though. Should we call it a day? Maybe we’ll come up with something if we sleep on it.”
Ryan shakes his head. “No,” he says coldly. “We’re not going anywhere until we crack this.”
“I think I’m getting low blood sugar,” says Jerry. “I need to eat something.”
Ryan taps away at his phone. “I ordered us some food.”
I excuse myself, saying I need a breath of fresh air.
“Don’t take too long,” says Ryan. “We’ve got to crack this.”
I just feign a smile at him.
How can I be so attracted to such an asshole? Doesn’t he have any feelings about last night? If he does, he’s not letting them show, even in the most minimal of ways.
I take a deep breath at the vending machine, and remind myself that this is the programming opportunity I’ve been looking for… for a long, long time.
“Here,” I say, handing Ryan and Jerry energy drinks from the vending machine. “This’ll keep us going.”
I crack mine open and drink it down all at once. Now, I crack open the second one.
Ryan chuckles.
“This brings me back,” says Jerry. “Up all night, working on some code… Of course, back then we had to just use coffee and soda.”
“This stuff is great,” I say, looking at the label. “Three times the caffeine and twice the normal amount of sugar. Gives your brain some fuel.”
There’s a knock at the door.
“Come in,” calls Ryan gruffly.
The door opens. It’s Sheila, looking confused to see the three of us sitting around the conference table, apparently working.
“Uh, Mr. Hudson, there’s a delivery man here for you.”
But it’s not just any deliveryman. It’s not your normal pizza boy, with a scraggly beard and acne, reeking of pot.
This is a sleek waiter, looking like he just stepped out from a fancy restaurant. He’s wearing a black tie getup, and I look down, almost expecting to see tails on his dinner jacket.
“Mr. Hudson?” he says, bowing.
“Just bring it in,” says Ryan, barely looking up.
“Do you need help… uh… sir?” says Sheila to the waiter.
“I’ll be quite all right, thank you,” he says, and she retreats, confused, not knowing how to handle this situation.
The waiter wheels in a gleaming cart of silver covered dishes
Without getting in the way, the waiter/delivery man lays out a complicated set of silverware, complete with thick cloth napkins. Next, he starts with the plates, which aren’t disposable in the least bit. They’re nicer than the ones I use at home with Hailey.
It’s almost like being in a restaurant, the kind that’s far too expensive for me to go to.
The food is a light pasta dish with some kind of delicious beef sauce, one that’s not too heavy, just enough to keep us going.
“Anything to drink, miss?” says the waiter, making a small bow towards me.
I almost laugh at his bow.
I feel out of place, underdressed, even though I’m in my own office building. I do work here, after all.
“I’m fine,” I say, holding up my half-crumpled can of the energy drink.
Somehow, I’m outclassed here in my own office, but the waiter just nods politely.
Ryan slips him some bills for a tip and the waiter retires to the hallway, apparently to wait behind the closed door until we’re done dining.
Ryan absentmindedly picks up his fork and spears his spaghetti aggressively.
“I didn’t even know they delivered meals like this,” I say, in awe of what’s in front of me.
I take a bite. Damn, that’s good. I don’t know the last time I ate something this delicious.
Jerry is also admiring his food, and seems a little nervous to eat it. “I normally just eat from the vending machine,” he says, chuckling. “My wife’s going to kill me for filling up before her meals.”
“It’s good for the brain,” says Ryan, without looking up.
The three of us don’t talk through the meal, except to occasionally exchange comments about which part of the code we’re working on.
Eventually, we finish, and the waiter comes back somehow at exactly the right moment and takes everything away, wiping down the table.
Ryan tips him again, and I crack open another energy drink.
Jerry’s starting to look tired, his eyes blurry, and he starts taking frequent breaks because of his back.
“What time is it, anyway?” he says, making a show of checking his watch. He knows damn well what time it is, because our computers, of course, have the time clearly displayed.
“We just need a few more hours,” grunts Ryan, his laser focused gaze pointed at his computer. I do notice, however, that he occasionally looks me up and down, in an appraising sort of way, as if he’s giving me points for my breasts, my thighs, my ass. I don’t like the feeling, and it makes me feel cold. My desire is starting to turn to anger. Why hasn’t he mentioned last night at all? There were numerous opportunities when Jerry left to go to the vending machine, or to stretch his legs in the hallway. Instead, he remained stoic and stony, not saying anything that’s not related to programming.
Meanwhile, we haven’t made any progress, and the atmosphere in the room is getting tenser. And it’s not sexual tension. It’s the kind of tension three exhausted people find themselves in when they’re working on a problem that they can’t solve.
The lights for the rest of the office have been turned off, and now the door is open, the hallway like a gaping chasm. Everyone has left for the night.
Jerry’s phone rings. It’s his wife, and he promises to be home soon.
“Sorry, Ryan,” he says. “I’ve got to go home. The w
ife was worried, and the dinner is cold.”
Ryan grunts without looking up.
“All right,” says Jerry. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
Jerry pads his way down the dark hallway to his cubicle. I watch as he takes his things and walks towards the exit of the office.
My eyes are blurry from staring at the screen, and all the code is starting to seem like the same thing.
“You can go if you want,” says Ryan, still not looking up.
He’s a fucking machine, apparently able to go hours and hours with his laser like concentration.
“That’s it?” I say. “I can go? You aren’t going to mention last night?”
I’m getting angry now. I can feel it rising in my chest. I don’t care if he is my boss. He doesn’t have the kind of power he has over others. Not if I don’t let him have it.
“What do you want to talk about?” says Ryan, finally looking up from his computer.
He stares right at me, his eyes not leaving mine. It seems for a moment as if he isn’t even blinking. His face is unreadable, impassive, set in stone. But… he’s fucking hot. He’s like some gorgeous model, right in front of me. But his body language screams… indifference.
But now he looks me up and down, taking me all in, his eyes lingering on my body. He raises his eyebrows when he looks back at me, not bothering or caring to hide that he’s been so obviously checking me out.
“You don’t want to talk about what happens?” I say, trying to get my anger under control. Am I angry because he seems indifferent to me? His desire for me is still clear, but…
Ryan shrugs. “You weren’t ready,” he says simply.
“But…?” I say, waiting for him to finish.
“But what? What’s there to talk about? If you want me, you know where to find me.”
With that, he goes back to his computer.
I can’t help myself… I’m a bundle of conflicting feelings… anger, lust, desire… but more than that, I feel tossed aside, even though we never officially had sex. I’m still a virgin, just an inexperienced girl, and he’s a billionaire playboy with hundreds of women who would beg for the opportunity to sleep with him. He’s got experience, and I have… nothing. I feel small and insignificant.
Her Boss: A Billionaire and Virgin Romance Page 5