When I hired her, I confused her fear with respect. I thought she was just being deferential. Turns out, I scare the shit out of her.
Like most everyone else, except my new assistant, who has no problem telling me off right to my face. Or threatening to sue me if I continue to disrespect her.
I think about Shay the entire ride down the elevator to the parking garage.
I think about her on the drive home.
I think about her as I stand at my kitchen counter wolfing down beef stew right from the can.
I’m still thinking about her when I change into a fresh suit, grab the briefcase that contains my weapons, and head out into the night, on my way to make another person disappear.
Shay
I survive my first week.
The job itself is demanding, partly because there’s so much responsibility, and I have to juggle several high-level projects with hard deadlines, but also because my new boss is ready with sharp questions and an unquenchable drive for perfection.
No mistake is too small for his notice. I become obsessed with tiny details, checking numbers multiple times, double and triple verifying statements of accounts, reformatting spreadsheets until they’re so streamlined and functional, they could’ve been designed by a team of Scandinavian architects.
If my work is without flaw, my reward is silence.
If he finds a mistake, even if it’s something so small as an extra space between words in a report, he flags it and requests an immediate revision.
It’s exhausting. It’s also exhilarating. It becomes like a game, one I’m obsessed with winning.
We communicate only via email. His arrive at all hours of the day and night, as if he never takes breaks, even to sleep. We’re both short and to the point, with zero hint of impropriety. Or humor, for that matter. The emails are as dry as bone.
If anyone else were to read them, they’d think we’d never met in person and had no desire to. They’d never imagine how loudly I moaned when he was deep inside me. How I called out his name and scratched my nails down his back.
How hard he made me come.
He doesn’t visit my office again. He doesn’t pick up the telephone to discuss issues. He simply shoots off curt emails, which I respond to immediately, always wondering what, if anything, he thinks of me.
I think of him constantly.
I relive our night at the hotel a thousand times in my head. I calculate the odds of meeting again the way we did, as boss and employee. I wonder what strange forces were at work to bring us together, going all the way back to the first time I set foot into Lit Happens, years ago.
At the end of the week, I realize I’m being silly.
If there’s one thing my disastrous relationship with Chet taught me, it’s that obsessing over a man is a waste of time. Especially a man who made his intentions clear by spelling out the company policy against superior-subordinate relationships right into my face.
As I’m getting ready to leave the office late Friday afternoon, I decide to put the obsessing behind me and move on with my life.
That lasts about five minutes, until someone knocks on my closed office door.
“Come in.”
The door opens to reveal a smiling young guy dressed casually in khakis and a navy-blue polo with the company logo on the shoulder. He’s holding a brown kraft envelope in his hands.
“Hi. Shay Sanders?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Scotty from the mailroom. This is for you.”
He crosses to my desk and holds the envelope out. Now I can see that it’s an inter-office memo, with a grid on the outside to indicate who the contents are for and who they’re from.
On the From section, printed in precise block letters in blue pen, are the words OFFICE OF THE CFO.
Surprised, I glance up at Scotty.
“If you need to return it, just call down for a pickup. We’re here from six to six.” He waves and walks out.
I unwind the string from the butterfly clasp holding the envelope’s flap closed and pull out a single sheet of paper from within. On it is a note hand written on corporate letterhead.
Ms. Sanders,
Thank you for your diligence this week. I appreciate your excellent work and hope you’re happy in the position.
If there’s anything you need, please don’t hesitate to ask me for it.
Yours,
Cole McCord
Flabbergasted, I sink into my desk chair and read the note over and over again, slowly shaking my head in disbelief.
Thank you? Appreciate? Yours?
Everything about the note is extraordinary, but the sign off is a mind fuck of colossal scope. Is it “Yours” as in a shortened version of yours truly, the professional, traditional sign off to a business communication? Or is the omission deliberate, meant to signify something more meaningful, as in…I’m yours?