Lie With Me

by Holloway, Taylor

  That shut her up. Her pink-painted lips parted in surprise. I knew her shock would only last a moment, so I pressed on. I stalked forward into the room like I owned it. Lucas following along behind me. Every eye in the room was trained on me and I stood up straighter. My mom would hate it if I had bad posture during my big moment.

  “In this folder I have copies of thousands of emails sent between employees that demonstrate a pervasive culture of sexism, racism, ageism and every other -ism that’s illegal in the state of New York,” I told the men and women around the table. “I know you probably don’t believe me on that, so go ahead and pull out your phones and check your email. You’ve got a message from me, Rae Lewis. I’ve shared them with you to peruse at your leisure.”

  “You can’t just barge in here and threaten—” McKenzie started to say.

  “Um, sure, I can. I’m doing it right now,” I told her with a shrug. “Want to hear a few excerpts of the evidence that I have? It’s really quite fascinating.”

  She’d turned as pink as her outfit. “No, I do not. Miss Lewis--”

  I interrupted again. “Are you sure? I think the board might like to hear it.” My heart was pounding with fear, but I was doing my best Lucas Stevenson impression. I’d told him to project confidence, but he was always confident. He was naturally confident. Me? Not so much. I was faking it. I could hardly contain my fear, but I was unwilling to fail. My voice was coming out smoothly.

  I could do this.

  I would do this. Don’t faint. Don’t run away crying. Keep it together.

  McKenzie laughed a mirthless laugh that was more like a little bark. “Miss Lewis, your behavior is as pathetic as it is appalling. Please leave before you embarrass yourself any further.” Her carefully made-up face folded into an expression of displeasure that I was surprised her Botox and fillers would allow.

  I frowned right back at her. “It’s not nearly as appalling as the evidence I have against Azure Group, and against you. Did you know that over four hundred complaints about employee civil rights have been ignored over the past five years alone? And that you, personally, have prioritized retaining the highly-valued perpetrators over the lesser-valued victims? Or that Paul here—” I pointed at Paul, Azure Group’s head accountant, “has been regularly banging his secretary on this very table during business hours? And that you knew? And that I have the video proof?”

  Everyone looked at Paul, who was bright red and shaking his balding head. Most of the board knew better than to trust him. A few even pulled their hands back from the table in disgust. If I were them, I’d definitely wash my hands. Paul and Stacey had really been rolling all over the place. I had to shake my head to banish the image.

  “Besides,” I continued, “this isn’t even about threatening you. I don’t really want to sue you or embarrass Azure Group. I’m just here to make a deal.”

  McKenzie’s expression, as well as the expressions of everyone else at the table, had turned dismissive. “I’m uninterested in your idle threats. There will be no deals and no discussions. You don’t work here anymore. Get out before I call security. Nothing that you stole from this company is even admissible in court.”

  “I know you’ve already texted security,” I told her. “But if you don’t re-text them that it was a false alarm, just know that my huge employment lawsuit won’t be a lawsuit. It’ll be a viral news story that will make ‘Me Too’ look as relevant as the Harlem Shake. If you give me any trouble, I’ll just publish the email proof I have. Our competitors are very interested in making sure this information gets extremely wide exposure. I can’t imagine your shareholders would like that much.”

  She blanched. I’d just been guessing that she was good enough at hidden texting to do so under the table. Clearly, I’d been right. Either that or she really, really didn’t want what I had hitting the news. As I’d been talking, a few of the executives had taken my advice and checked their email. They’d turned pale behind their phones.

  McKenzie saw their frozen expressions and paused. “What do you want?” she bit out.

  I smiled. “Do you know this man?” I asked, pointing at Lucas. He’d been leaning casually against the wall and watching me threaten the board in silence. At mention of him, Lucas smiled and waved.

  McKenzie blinked. “No. Should I?” She looked at him warily.

  “He’s Lucas Stevenson. The app developer whose company, Notable Match, you wanted me to purchase for ‘containment’.”

  “He’s the one who helped you hack Azure Group,” she guessed, and I shook my head.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “No. I don’t need any outside help. I’ve got all the help I need inside this organization. Lucas just happened to be here, and I brought him along as an impartial observer.”

  He nodded. “It’s completely true. I have no idea what’s happening. It’s really entertaining though,” Lucas told the assembled members of the board. They looked at him with varying degrees of concern. The fact that he was a relatively unknown witness was a real bonus for me. It helped put them all on edge.

  I pushed on. “In exchange for me not releasing all the damning information that I have on Azure Group, I have a modest proposition. Would you like to hear it?”

  “Can I stop you?” McKenzie asked sarcastically. When the man on her right leaned over and whispered something to her, she stilled. She stared at him for a moment and then sighed. “Fine. Ugh. Tell us,” she amended with a roll of her eyes.

  I grinned. “It’s extremely simple. All I want is for you to leave me and mine alone. That means that you will not retaliate in any way against me, Annie Washington, Kyle Chen, or any of the victims that appear in this correspondence. Next, you will take action against all the perpetrators of harassment in accordance with Azure Group’s policies and the law. All fifty-nine of them.”

  McKenzie looked like she’d swallowed a toad. She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “I can’t just fire half the company’s senior staff. Even if I wanted to do that, I couldn’t. It would be chaos if we decimated our workforce. We’d be totally hamstrung.”

  I smiled even wider. “I understand. In that case, I have a second option that I hope the board will find more reasonable.”

  “You just want money, don’t you?” McKenzie interrupted to sneer. “How much do you want?” She looked at me like I was a filthy gold-digger.

  “No,” I told her. “I don’t want your stupid money. I want you gone forever. Let me rephrase that. I want you to resign. You, Carla McKenzie, are the primary enabler of Azure Group’s polluted culture. Someone with much better values and attention to state and federal labor laws should take your place as leader of this organization. If you leave, I’ll go away forever as well.”

  There, my trump card was on the table. McKenzie was the root cause of the culture at Azure Group. It was because of her tone at the top that people thought their power entitled them to do whatever they wanted. It was also because of her personal agreement with Datability that Lucas’ company was in danger. Getting rid of her wouldn’t necessarily fix everything and make it perfect, but it was a hell of a start.

  McKenzie blinked. The silence in the room was unbelievably thick. Twelve pairs of eyes around the table looked at me and then turned to one another.

  McKenzie might be a shark, but the board members were piranhas. I’d banked on this. They needed to turn on their master and devour her. It didn’t take long before they smelled the blood. Eventually one gained the courage to take a bite.

  “We can’t allow this story to hit the news,” Richard Prince said. He was part of the legal team. “There’s no containing something like this once it’s out there.”

  In the wake of his words there were nods and expressions of general agreement around the table.

  “We also can’t possibly address each of the issues in these emails,” said Donella Antonelli, the director of human resources. She shook her heavy curls in frustration. “It would start a class action lawsuit, not avoid one. I’ve bee
n saying for years that we were going down the wrong road. This moment was inevitable.”

  Her statement was also met with agreement.

  More and more of the board members began speaking up about the unfeasibility and disruptiveness of my initial offer. No one said a word about the second option. They just continued to gab on about how impossible it would be to do anything else. I let it go on for about five minutes. I was beginning to wonder if anyone would ever challenge McKenzie directly. McKenzie snapped before the board did.

  “Fine,” McKenzie finally said, slamming her fists down on the table. “I’ll leave. But I want the full golden parachute.” Her expression held no defeat, only resignation and anger. I’d expect nothing less. I was convinced that she had no conscience.

  I shrugged. “I don’t care how much it costs to get rid of you. I just want you gone.” I turned my attention away from her and smiled at the board members. “I believe your CFO has just tendered her resignation, does the board accept?”

  They looked around at one another. No one looked particularly disappointed. They were all little sharks in the making, I was sure of it. But none of them were McKenzie. And they now knew that I had shit on them, so maybe they’d watch their backs.

  It was Donatella who finally answered. “We accept your terms, Miss Lewis. Now, will you please, for the love of god, leave?” I nodded, and Donatella looked at McKenzie and shook her head. “I’m sorry Carly.”

  McKenzie’s reply was venomous. “Like fuck you are Donna. You’ve never been happier. You’re finally rid of me.”

  “God, McKenzie, can’t you be gracious for once in your life?” Donna challenged.

  I had no intention on staying for the bloody fallout. I had a feeling a lot of people would want to share their true feelings for their former boss. “Thanks for your time.” I told the room. “I’ll see myself out.” I looked over at Lucas and smiled. “Ready to get out of here?”

  42

  Lucas

  I’d never been as turned on in my entire twenty-eight years of life. Rae had just wrapped the board of directors of a multibillion-dollar company around her little finger like it was nothing and saved my company in the process. I’d never thought that I had a fetish of any type before, but apparently, I did. I had a serious, lusty fetish for watching a beautiful woman stick it to the man (or in this case, woman).

  Outside the board room, Rae sighed and smiled at me in satisfied victory. I extended a hand to her and she took it. We walked back to the executive elevator together. Just as we were waiting for the doors to close, my favorite New York rent-a-cop turned a corner with four or five men in matching outfits. I made double “finger guns” at him cheerfully.

  “We were just leaving,” I called out. “I think the guys you want went that way.” I used my finger guns to point down the hall.

  “You. Stop!” He barked.

  Haha. No.

  I pushed the close button. “Bye-bye.”

  He was nowhere near fast enough to stop us, but he waddled toward us anyway. I waved at him as the doors met.

  “You really know how to make friends don’t you?” Rae said as the elevator dropped. Her tone was dry, but she was fighting a losing battle with a smile.

  “What can I say,” I told her, “I just have a lot of natural charm. I think you made some friends just now too, although I confess that I have no clue what just happened.”

  Rae’s smile won. “I definitely made some new enemies. I won’t be listing McKenzie as a reference on my job applications.”

  “She looked like she wanted to shoot blood out of her eyes like those weird, desert lizards.”

  Rae snickered at the thought. “Gross. I think she’d rather shoot lasers.” She paused. “I see you decided not to attend the closing,” she said.

  “I don’t think I want to sell to Azure Group after all.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure that Azure Group is the right partner for you.”

  “I know who the right partner for me is.”

  Rae’s grin faded. She swallowed hard. The doors to the executive elevator opened on the lobby. “Come on. We need to meet Annie and Kyle.”

  I was now back in the IHOP. I didn’t even like IHOP. Ellen, the waitress that had put up with me for five hours the night before, stared at me without an ounce of recognition. Apparently, I wasn’t worth the investment in brain cells.

  Gotta love New York. Where nobody gives a shit about you unless you’re loitering.

  “Coffee?” she offered Rae and me. Her face was impassive.

  We both nodded. Across from us in the battered pleather booth, Kyle and Annie were vibrating with excitement. As soon as Ellen was out of earshot, Annie started talking.

  “We got it. Nobody even guessed what we were doing. They didn’t even look at us sideways when we started messing with the system. All the data was removed from the servers.” She and Rae high fived and then Rae and Kyle high fived. “How did your part go?”

  “It was pretty epic when I wasn’t about to wet my pants with fear. McKenzie resigned,” Rae said triumphantly. “We did it.”

  Did what, exactly? And why?

  “Can someone please explain what’s going on?” I asked. “I’m really, really confused.”

  Rae grinned at me. “We just saved Notable Match.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  Why? How?

  Rae took a deep breath before explaining. “McKenzie, our now-former CEO, was the one that promised Datability that she’d make Notable Match disappear. While I was up there threatening her into resigning, Kyle and Annie went to the server control room and wiped all the data on Notable Match. They can’t threaten you now. You’re free.”

  My jaw dropped open. All of that had been for me?

  “What about your jobs?” I heard myself asking. I stared at three matching smiles in confusion.

  Then Kyle made a face. “Did you see the shit in Rae’s file? I can’t believe I made it six months working someplace like that.”

  “We quit,” Annie said, holding Kyle’s hand. “We’ll find something else that isn’t so soul-crushingly evil. I think I’m finished with being used by a company that doesn’t value me as a human being.”

  “Dude, I worked there for three years,” Rae said. “I’m lucky I even have a twisted piece of conscience left.” She shook her head.

  “I knew you couldn’t go through with the deal,” Annie said. “I never doubted you.”

  The deal for Notable Match? I never thought Rae wouldn’t go through with it. She had no obligation to protect me whatsoever. This was a business deal.

  “I doubted me,” Rae admitted. “That was all really scary.”

  “When I saw your message to McKenzie, that was what inspired me to go through all the email servers looking for leverage over Azure Group,” Annie told Rae. “I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t quit.”

  Rae had inspired this entire plot? Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. Her ability to lead people was truly impressive. She knew how to command a board room, too. The funniest thing about it was that she didn’t necessarily seem to know how powerful she was.

  “I definitely don’t deserve the credit here. You do Annie,” Rae replied. “But I’m just so incredibly glad it worked out.” Her smile was big and white and relieved.

  “You three put your careers on the line for me?” I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around it.

  How could I be worthy of such a thing? And from strangers?

  “Notable Match deserves to be seen,” Kyle answered. “I don’t know how you managed to figure out the secret behind those algorithms, but they work.”

  Rae and I exchanged a silent glance. “It’s less exciting than you think,” I told him after a second. “I wish I could tell you it was magic, but it isn’t.”

  “I don’t need to know,” Kyle replied, looking at Annie adoringly. “I have all the magic that I need now.”

  Annie glanced at her phone. “Speaking of which, we have an app
ointment at the Court House with a justice of the peace.” She grinned. “We’re eloping!”

  Rae and I congratulated them, and they dashed off in the direction of the subway. As far as I knew, this was the first match made by my app that had resulted in a marriage. It cut through my confusion and disbelief with a feeling of pride. Kyle and Annie seemed well and truly in love. They’d also done me an incredible favor. I made a mental note to send them a really nice panini press or something. It wouldn’t pay them back for what they did for me, but nothing would. At least they could make some nice paninis.

  “Wow,” Rae said, shaking her head and watching her friends and former coworkers rush off to get married. “That was one hell of a morning.” She laughed a little bit into her coffee. “I can’t believe we pulled that off. I can’t believe you’re here. I can’t believe Annie and Kyle are about to go get married…” she trailed off, staring at her hands. I could see that she was a bit overwhelmed.

  I knew the feeling.

  “You were amazing in that board room,” I told her. Visions of her telling her former bosses to go fuck themselves played before my eyes, more vivid and erotic than any pornography. Rae was truly flawless.

  “I was shaking in my boots.” Her blue eyes were shining, but I hoped that the unshed tears were from joy.

  “It didn’t show.” She’d seemed about as frightened as Wonder Woman.

  “Of course not. I was doing my amazing Lucas Stevenson impression.” She winked at me.

  “Can I do my speech now?” I asked her, hoping that I really seemed that confident to her. I was the one shaking in my boots now. “I had this whole long speech planned and you totally stole my thunder by saving Notable Match.” I sat up straight and looked her in the eye, trying to project something other than vulnerability and fear.

  She smirked, but it was short-lived. “I don’t know if I want to hear your victory speech, Lucas. I can’t stand the thought of you with Victoria. I’m sorry, but it’s true. I do want you to be happy, but I can’t pretend to be happy for you.”