“Uh, that’s a good question. I would have to look at the budget to see what we can approve but I think we're definitely looking at having you spend considerable work time on creating a full pitch, on contacting some of these bloggers, and video bloggers, and small eBook outlets, and the larger authors and smaller publishing houses you were talking about. Get them together to talk about some package advertising deals.”
She stood and smoothed her sweater over the swell of her hips, and where her hands were – all he wanted to do was replace them with his. When she swallowed, he wanted his lips on the pulse at her neck and when she smiled he wanted to taste the way that her lips felt right now.
“Thank you,” she said. Her body leaned forward and then she halted herself, as if she were going to touch him. “Thank you. I appreciate the confidence.” Eyes narrowed as if she had a question she was about to ask, but then thought better of it. Instead, she added, “Can I email you some questions to bang out the specifics?”
That’s not what I want to bang out, he thought. “Absolutely,” he said, his mind warring with his solar plexus, with his thrumming heart, and with hands that were a little too untamed for his needs right now. “Absolutely. We’ll talk.” The words came out choked. He felt a cognitive and emotional dissonance that made it difficult to continue and so he didn’t, instead cutting the conversation off in mid word and walking away to find a stairwell to pound this out.
“I don’t know,” Lydia hissed into her phone, curled up in the supply closet. This was the last place that she wanted to be but it was the only quiet, dark little cubbyhole that she could find anywhere. Her office was teeming with too many people and the bathroom – lord! – the bathroom was gossip central. If somebody heard her in a stall whispering into her phone they’d assume she was pregnant or being cheated on or had some sort of a disease.
So, supply closet it was. The problem was that the room seemed infused with Matt’s scent. The darkness was reminiscent of his hands on her, his mouth claiming her, and the room seemed to get smaller and smaller, shrinking to envelop her and take her over even as Krysta screeched, “What do you think is happening, Lyd? Do you think he’s trying to screw you over?”
I think he’s trying to screw me, she thought, then took a deep, careful breath before answering with her actual mouth. “Umm...I don’t know. The idealist in me wants to think that he recognized a good idea, that he respects my intelligence, and that he wants me to explore this option to see if we can get the higher ups to sign off on it, and this is my ticket to becoming a director.”
“And the pessimist in you,” Krysta answered for her, “says that he just wants to get into your pants, steal your idea, take credit, and run away.”
“Pretty much,” Lydia said.
And then Krysta said the words that no one really wanted to hear, including Krysta. “Just like Dave did.”
Ouch. What Matt didn’t know was that Dave had come to the company years ago as a fresh- faced, just as unctuous and oily, upstart. In a position that was then called Communications Coordinator, and that he quickly got renamed and reclassified to Director of Communications.
Dave hadn’t worn his wedding ring when he had first started at Bounrham Industries. It wasn’t until after he and Lydia had gone out a few times, always to quiet, dark little places that were twenty blocks away from work, that he just had to share with her – these little gems deep in the city, far from prying eyes.
It wasn’t until she had come perilously close to giving herself to him, not so much emotionally but physically, that she had found out he was married.
That had ended it immediately. She wouldn’t aid anyone in cheating on their spouse, and even though she wasn’t in a committed relationship that didn’t mean that he was not. He seemed to have no problem, however, with violating his vows. When she’d called him on it he had simply smiled, looked at his fingernails, paused, bought himself a little bit of time and then said, “You’re really not my type anyhow.”
Lydia had spent the last year working under his thumb, fetching his damn lattes and trying to find a way to get a transfer out of there. The romance project had been a big part of that. With Dave gone, though, she had more options. Having Krysta bring up the past with Dave, though, made her cringe. Suddenly Matt’s scent flew out from under the small crack in the door, the tiny closet becoming a great, cold, white light abyss and all traces of intimacy in memory or in real life faded at her sense of outrage and shame.
Shame driven only by her own naivete. How she had let herself fall for so many different lines and for such a jerk like Dave was something that she just couldn’t understand and really couldn’t forgive herself for. But, she wasn’t going to focus on that right now and Krysta wasn’t going to make her.
“So,” she whispered, “the good news is that I’ve got another opportunity.”
“But Lyd, Matt has your job.”
“Yeah, but you know what? I bet Matt is gunning for Dave’s job and then I can have Matt’s job.”
“Matt’s been here a week Lydia – a week. You’ve been here for over two years. Why can’t you have Dave’s job?”
She went silent. How could she have – and then slowly Lydia began to bang her head against the metal shelving in front of her. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! How could she have missed it? Some part of her had become submissive, schoolgirl-like, giddy at scraps. And Matt Jones had been some sort of integral part of that.
“You’re right,” she told Krysta.
“I know.”
“And you’re modest.”