Total pages in book: 67
Estimated words: 61422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61422 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
“Oh,” Mandy said, her eyes becoming suddenly sympathetic, as if she were embarrassed on my behalf, that I had come to see her with something so trivial. “Your email? About Stuart’s calendar?”
I nodded mutely.
“Why don’t you check back tomorrow, hon? I do the calendar first thing in the morning.”
I swallowed hard.
“Thanks,” I told her, because my whirling thoughts seemed unwilling to let me say anything more meaningful. “I…”
I meant to ask, in an acid, even arrogant tone, whether she could do me the courtesy of a quick reply next time. I meant to get the upper hand in the situation, to assert the dominance my whole being seemed to cry out in need of.
But Mandy had swiveled her chair away so that she could start to put another coat of polish on her nails. Distantly, I understood that this provocation corresponded exactly with my last interaction with Mandy. Some part of her—possibly even a conscious part—felt the compulsion to test me. I thought she probably wouldn’t have tested a male executive quite so strenuously, but I also thought that that fact should have challenged me—brilliant, strong-willed Melissa Mitropoulos—to show my mettle.
Instead, I walked away, heart pounding, face scarlet, brain imploding.
Not because I didn’t want to assert my dominance over Mandy.
Because I did want to do that. I wanted to show Mandy that I might not be Stuart, her super-boss, but I was her boss, as a member of Stuart’s team, however junior.
Frankly, I told myself and then instantly pretended the thought had come from some alternate dimension, I wanted to paddle Mandy’s insubordinate backside.
“What’s wrong?” Joe asked as I sat back down at my desk, planning to do nothing but memorize the Selecta employee handbook, in hope of forgetting everything else that had happened today.
“Oh, nothing,” I told him, finding it easy to pretend indifference. Relationships with my peers in the bullpen went just fine. I had learned in my college business program both to talk the talk and to walk the walk. Even in Selecta’s strange, old-fashioned corporate culture, the rest of Stuart’s team seemed happy to treat me like one of the boys. “Fucking Mandy. You know.”
“What?” Joe asked. “She butt-hurt because you asked her to make a few copies of your secret proposal?”
I told him what had happened, carefully not revealing anything about the nature of my proposal. That had been the subject of good-natured jokes among the team as they had watched me working on it day after day, to the point where Melissa’s Secret Proposal represented a riff any of them could tag on the end of a list of just about anything, for a laugh.
Joe frowned as I narrated, and the frown only deepened as I reached the nail-painting, chair-swiveling climax.
“That’s not nothing,” he told me, his voice serious, when I’d finished.
To my dismay, I had to blink back tears of relief.
“Thanks, Joe,” I told him. “I needed that.”
“No,” he said. “I mean, it’s so not-nothing that you definitely have to do something about it.”
Now I had to fight myself not to swallow hard, because to my impossibly mixed horror and delight, I could see where Joe was going. I still felt the need to push the idea back.
“Like what?” I asked, as innocently as I could.
“I think you need to ask Stuart for permission to paddle her,” Joe said, his eyes fixed on mine as if he knew precisely what kind of turmoil his words had just unleashed in my mind, my heart, and above all my body.
CHAPTER 12
Melissa
I caught Stuart outside his office, just as he came back from lunch.
“Melissa?” he said, frowning. “What’s up?”
“I don’t want to bother you,” I began, my heart pounding, “but Joe told me I should probably come straight to you.”
Stuart nodded, and I realized I’d probably been a little foolish to worry about coming to him earlier. Though, to be fair to myself, he had told me to book time with him through Mandy.
“Come on in,” he told me, holding the door for me in a way so gentlemanly I felt a distracting glow in my chest. I told myself to calm down, reminded myself that this arrogant jerk had ‘inspected’ me in the most intimate, mortifying way on my first real day on his team. I pushed away the part of that memory that had to do with my own screaming inner conflict.
When he had closed the door behind him, he turned to me. “What’s up?” he said again. He leaned back against the door, folding his arms across his chest. “How can I help?”
All of the calm I had felt a moment before, when Stuart had been so receptive to my coming to his office, vanished in an instant. I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing heart.
“It’s about Mandy,” I began, my voice sounding small in Stuart’s imposing office, as if the incredible view of the city out the floor-to-ceiling windows had swallowed it up and made it, and me, utterly insignificant.