Candace blew a dismissive sound out of her mouth, knocking away a loose strand of her short-cropped hair. “You don’t have to like him to sleep with him, you know. You’re a big girl. Sometimes it’s okay to just take it where you can get it. Sex doesn’t have to be some big emotional statement, you know. It can just be fun.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but I had to apologize and rush out of the building when I saw I was already on the verge of being late again. I forgot I had to drive now, so I wasn’t dealing with the at least somewhat predictable subway system. I was dealing with New York traffic.
Bruce was waiting outside his building with a pissed off look on his face. I parked the now-dented company car and waited for him to get in. When he didn’t move, I realized he actually expected me to get out and open the door for him.
Thirty minutes of traffic to travel three miles had me too annoyed to put up with his posturing, so I just reached over the passenger seat and pushed the door open.
He glared down at it, but eventually yanked it all the way open and got in the car.
“Isn’t it kind of emasculating?” I asked. “Riding shotgun like this while your intern drives?”
He gave me a cold look. “No.”
I cleared my throat a little uncomfortably and started driving. He had a way of answering my playful teases with so much hostility that I always kind of regretted it, but not completely. Messing with him was fun. Maybe it was just a natural impulse when somebody came off as so calm and in command. I wanted to see how he'd react if his feathers were ruffled. He was looking down at his phone and doing a pretty good job of pretending I didn't exist, which was going a long way toward debunking Candace's theory that he was actually interested in me.
“What are you up to over there?” I asked.
I felt him glaring at me from the corner of my eyes and decided to focus on the road instead of stare back into that icy heat. “I’m working.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought I saw cat videos on your phone for a second.”
“Do I look like someone who watches cat videos?”
I pressed my lips together. “I mean, who doesn’t? Right?”
“I don’t.”
“I’ll email you some today. Maybe a couple cute cats can soften you up a little.”
He set his phone down in his lap and half-turned to face me. “Do you do it on purpose?”
“Do… what, on purpose?”
“Irritate me. Are you incapable of driving the car quietly while I get work done?”
“I figured the reason you forced me to be your little chauffeur was because you wanted the company.”
“Yeah, well, you thought wrong.”
I stole a look at him. He was focused on his phone again, but the amateur psychologist in me said his posture was a little defensive. Too stiff and rigid. “I see. Then why exactly am I acting as your driver again?”
“I want you to quit.”
"Really?" I asked skeptically. "That sounds thin, even to me. I mean… First, your brother points out your fetish, and then you hire me for seemingly no reason. There's something else going—"
“Enough,” he said quietly. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. You work for me until you decide to quit. You do as I say until you decide to quit. It’s really that simple. You don’t have to understand it or like it. In fact, I hope you don’t like it.”
I pursed my lips but said nothing. Just as someone honked their horn, I could've sworn on my grandmother's grave I heard him mutter, that will teach you to eat something that’s not yours.
I turned to look at him and nearly crashed into the car in front of me. There it was again. That spark of humanity underneath the machinery and wires under his perfect skin.
“Crashing the car and killing us would get you out of the job without technically quitting. But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you just tried to make a joke, Mr. Robot.”
He gave me a dry look. “How about you drive the car instead of trying to figure me out.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing? Trying to figure you out?” I made a pfft sound. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Great. I was worried you were going to start asking about the trauma of my childhood, or the horrible accident I had that led to my stunted personality.”
“I’m not falling for it.”
He shrugged. “That’s fine.”
“You are making that up, right?” I asked a few seconds later, hating that I couldn’t resist taking his bait.
Infuriatingly, he just kept his head down as he typed up something on his phone. I thought I even saw the hint of a smirk on his lips. I quietly fumed the rest of the way to the office, and nearly put another dent in the car when I ramped up the curb and narrowly missed a street sign with the front fender. It had been a while since I drove a car, and despite what people seemed to believe, it wasn’t at all like riding a bike. Then again, I had a long history of bike crashes, so maybe they weren’t entirely wrong.
The first half of the workday went about the same as the previous day. I gathered coffee, no cream, and no sugar for Mr. Sex Robot. I had to go into three grocery stores to find a single banana that had no hints of green and no brown spots. I don't think I'd ever seen him as serious as he was when he was describing the specifications of the banana. At least ten inches. Firm. No bruises. No green. He even made me put my hands together so I had a way to measure the length and be sure it was big enough but not too big. It was more like he was telling me how to defuse a bomb in the basement of a kindergarten.
I came back just before lunch with the banana in hand and set it on his desk. He picked it up, turned it around, and made a ridiculous show of inspecting it. Finally, he nodded. “Hm. Not bad.” Then he threw it in the trash and got up from his desk.
I pointed at the trash can, mouth open in shock. “Do you realize how many stores I had to go to for that stupid thing?”
"I can imagine. You were gone for an hour and ten minutes. Assuming you walked fast, that gave you time to go to three stores, maybe four if you found the produce sections quickly."
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not helping the case with the whole robot thing. Three stores, maybe four if..." I said in my best robot impression but trailed off when I saw the look on his face.
“I’m precise,” he said with a touch of defensiveness, which was new.
“Well, I’m just trying to figure out how you operate in the same world I do, where not everything goes perfectly. What happens if your train is late, or if you wake up sick one day?”
“I find a way to solve the problem. If I can’t, I make a change to be sure I’m prepared and that I won’t make the same mistake again.”
He made me feel like a teenager, like I had to fight the urge to roll my eyes at everything he said. But I also felt like I was the victim of raging hormones that forced me to keep noticing the places where his dress shirt hugged his tight body in all the right places, and the way his legs looked in those slacks. Sex robot, I reminded myself. I might as well be getting turned on by a sports car. Yes, it was nice to look at, but there wasn’t anything under the hood. Except what was probably a sculpted rack of abs and what I couldn’t help assuming would be a fully functional, extra delicious banana.
There were hints of something about him. I wondered how much of the personality he was showing me was a defense mechanism, and how much was really him. But why was he hiding? What was he hiding? I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that my natural impulse was to head-butt my way straight through the walls he hid behind out of sheer curiosity. I also had a job to do. Maybe he was hiding the evil brain of a corrupt businessman behind those walls.
“So… You don’t make the same mistakes twice? Is that why you have the personality of a washing machine? Did you get burned for being likable once?”
He paused mid-step, gave me a look I’d almost call startled, and then quickly smoothed hi
s features back to neutral. “I was born this way.”
“Right,” I muttered, following after him as he headed to the break room. “So why exactly did you throw away the banana? Worried it was poisoned? Because I did consider it, but I settled for praying that you’d choke.”
He stopped, half-turned his head to look at me, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was fighting back an amused smile. “I threw it away because I already have a banana with my name on it waiting in the conference room. Unless, of course, some clueless intern is devouring it.”
“Is that a common problem for you?” I asked.
“You’re the only one who didn’t see my name written in big-ass letters on the banana. So, no. It’s not a common problem.”
When we walked into the conference room, everyone stiffened at the sight of Bruce. It was easy to forget why I was really here, but at that moment, the reporter in me finally started to wake up a little. I needed to make an effort to find some time away from Bruce soon so I could try to squeeze information from his employees.
“Mr. Chamberson,” said a woman in her thirties with a great body and a pretty face. There was an eagerness to her tone that had desperation written all over it. I folded my arms and watched in amusement from the doorway. Stupid woman. Might as well throw yourself at a bag of potatoes.
He gave her half of his attention while he reached for his banana, which I noted now had his name printed in large letters on every single surface so that no one could miss it anymore. He really did avoid making the same mistakes twice.
“Wait a second,” I asked, interrupting the woman who was trying to explain some kind of glitch in the system that was slowing her department down. It sounded like a bogus story designed to get him to personally come to her desk, anyway. “You sent me on a wild banana hunt when you had one in here the whole time?”
He peeled open the banana and took a bite that I was almost positive wasn’t meant to be seductive, but that only made it send warmth bubbling under my skin even more quickly. He had such nice teeth. And those lips…
“I had to make sure you were capable of getting me something more edible than the cucumber you brought me yesterday.”
“It had a hint of green. If you thought that was a cucumber, you need your eyes checked.”
I was conscious of everyone in the room staring at us with open astonishment. The only exception was the pretty woman, who was definitely giving me the territorial glare women had spent centuries perfecting. It was the glare that said, “you’re sinking your claws into my scratching post, bitch, and if you don’t back off, I’m going to claw your eyes out.”
With effort, I ignored the attention and focused on Bruce. As much as I was tired of his attitude, there was something fun and exciting about trying to keep pace with him. Every word with him was part of some verbal sparring match I hadn’t quite gotten my head around, but I found myself wanting to.
He took another bite of the banana, casually chewing as he watched me, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that the whole break room was staring. It was actually kind of cute how much he seemed to be enjoying his snack. There was a twinkle in his eyes as he chewed. It was the kind of look most people got when they were biting into a luxurious, calorie-packed dessert.
“We’re having lunch with a pair of important clients. Have the car ready in ten minutes.” He finished the last bite and tossed the peel toward the trash can without looking.
“You missed,” I said as the peel caught the edge of the can and fell to the floor.
“Good thing I have an intern,” he said over his shoulder.
I knelt down to pick up the peel in front of everybody, who watched me with a mixture of pity and cruel amusement. It was precisely at that moment when I decided this wasn’t going to be a one-way battle. He wanted to make my life miserable? He wanted to force me to quit? Then I hoped he was ready for war, because I was going to show him I wasn’t too scared to bite back.
The restaurant was fancy. I grew up pretty close to poor, so my line of distinction between a fancy restaurant and a normal one had always been whether shirt and shoes were required. Unfortunately, this place was at least a few notches above that, because even my business attire felt far too plain and cheap.
Everybody looked rich or important. It was practically dripping off them, from the glinting white teeth I would’ve needed sunglasses to look at directly to the weird quality I always felt rich people had in their skin. You are what you eat, and I guess rich people ate so much expensive food that even their skin started to look different.
Bruce had good skin too, I noticed. For a robot. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He was so infuriatingly organized that he probably had never touched his face with unwashed hands before, or had greasy fingers. It made me want to fling a french fry at him during lunch, but something told me this place didn’t serve french fries, either. I was probably going to end up stabbing a duck liver with my fork while trying not to vomit for an hour.
We were seated in a corner booth a little separate from the rest of the lunch crowd. It wasn’t busy, but every member of the staff still bustled around the room with a seeming urgency, as if the whole place was packed.
“Maybe your important business partners stood you up,” I said once we sat.
“We’re early. Fifteen minutes.”
“Right,” I said, as if I knew what that was like. One effect Bruce had on me already was forcing me into some semblance of a structured existence. I was still a walking disaster, but he was like a safety harness. Despite the way he could be stifling and obnoxiously distant, it was admittedly a little bit nice to feel like he was able to keep me from the worst of myself.
I still wanted him to realize he made a mistake when he decided to bully me. He wasn’t going to fire me? Good. That meant I had free license to do whatever I wanted without worrying I was putting my real job on the line. And at the moment, what I wanted was a little payback.
His important clients showed up only a few minutes later.
They were a husband and wife team who were trying to set up some kind of expensive marketing plan for a new branch of their tech business, from what I gathered of their conversation. I’d spent my whole professional life trying to glean inside information on upcoming businesses from magazines and second-hand sources, so getting to sit at a table and have information fed directly to me was a rare treat.
Ultimately, they weren’t talking about anything truly newsworthy. We were served drinks, and I helped myself to some of the wine, despite the warning glances Bruce kept shooting me. It seemed like he didn’t want to chastise me in front of his clients, a point which I planned to take full advantage of. I ate crusty bread with crab dip while they talked about the dates they’d be rolling out the first big promotional push. I washed those down with a glass of wine.
We had some kind of green “reduction” from peas with edible flowers sprinkled in next. It looked pretty, and I was surprised to find it tasted pretty, too. Bruce was hardly touching any of his food, and he had only taken a few sips of his wine. He seemed much more focused on making sure the clients understood the business plan.
"...That will be on the seventeenth," said Bruce. "We'll run a few low budget campaigns to screen ad copy through the twenty-eighth of the following month. Once we have the top performers, we can start investing aggressively in the campaign. Just be sure you're prepared to deal with increased traffic on all your existing infrastructure, as well. Your new website isn't going to be the only part of your business benefiting from this. Remember, we're selling your brand."
The couple exchanged a look, nervous smiles on their faces. They liked what he was saying. They liked how he was saying it. I didn’t blame them. Sitting in with Bruce made it clear how he had carved out one of the most powerful and influential clients. He spoke with so much passion and confidence about the marketing plan that it was impossible to doubt him. He looked like a man who had the world figured out, and maybe he did.
“Hmm,” I said, taking another sip of my wine to try to look casual. It was probably a mistake, because my head was starting to spin already. “That would mean your main advertising campaign begins around two weeks before the launch of WeConnect.” I waited for my words to sink in. Bruce had an easy time thinking of me as some kind of bumbling clutz, but I couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when he realized I actually had a head on my shoulders.
Bruce looked like he was using every ounce of his self-control to keep from tearing my head off. It wasn’t exactly the look I was hoping for, but it was satisfying in its own way.
“WeConnect?” asked the woman, saving me from Bruce for the moment.
The man nodded, eyes searching the table thoughtfully. “They’re a startup. I’ve heard the name but don’t remember the details.”
"Every indication says they're going to be huge," I said. "They are completely crowd-funded and their Kickstarter already raised over thirty-five million. Basically, they think WeConnect is going to take everything Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter do and do all of it, but better. And you're talking about putting yourselves head-to-head with that."
They both looked to Bruce, who was staring at me. I tried not to wince for the inevitable explosion of his temper. Instead, he seemed like he was actually thinking about what I said. Finally, he nodded, slowly at first and then with more enthusiasm. “She’s right. Damn. I don’t know how we overlooked that.”
I listened for the next half hour as Bruce came up with a plan to overcome the threat of WeConnect. I kept trying to squash the giddy feeling of pride and the way “she’s right” kept replaying in my head. When I’d earned nothing but glares and incredulous looks from Bruce since starting my internship, the praise felt monumental. Just from a professional standpoint, of course. If I hoped to get any kind of inside information, I needed him to trust me.
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