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1
HENRY
“Mr. Stone? Can I speak with you for a minute?”
No matter what I’m doing, Celeste’s voice always consumes me. I could be lost in the depths of a company-wide crisis and her voice has the power to instantly draw me out. To my ears, her voice is poetic. Symphonic. Angelic. She speaks, and the world glows.
For six years, since the first day she started working for me, I’ve been enamored with her. And for six years, I’ve had to conceal my wild longing. I refuse to be the asshole boss who hits on his secretary.
It pains me, though. I hate that the only way I can survive around her is to be cold and demanding.
“Can’t it wait?” I ask, forcing gruffness into my voice.
There’s a sigh at my door, so soft that I might have missed it if I weren’t so attuned to every subtlety of her existence.
“It’s important,” she says.
“Fine.” The word comes out sharply. “Come in.”
I keep my eyes locked on my computer screen as she enters my office. But the numbers all turn to gibberish. My full attention is on the whisper of Celeste’s heels as she walks across the carpet, the soft blurry curves of her body, and the whiff of jasmine in the perfume she’s wearing today.
She walks up to my desk and waits for me to give her the attention she doesn’t know she already has. Everything in me wants to turn toward her, take in the beautiful sight of her, look her directly in the eyes. But the last time I did that, I had a hard-on for hours.
“What is it?” I ask, still frowning at my screen.
There’s a weighted pause, and then Celeste takes an audible breath. “I’m quitting.”
A strange feeling stabs at my sternum. But I remain focused on my screen. “Quitting what?”
“This job. I can’t do it anymore.”
I tear my eyes away from my computer screen and stare at her. She looks as gorgeous as always, her lips painted mulberry red and her brunette hair pulled up into a neat bun. The thin gold necklace she always wears lays delicately across her collarbone, the miniature charms on it glinting against her soft-looking skin. But the intensity of her beauty is overwhelmed by the rush of panic I’m now feeling in my chest.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, my desperation barely masked by anger.
Celeste holds out the letter in her hand, her glossy nails bright red against the white envelope. “This is my formal resignation.”
I don’t take it from her. I just keep looking at her, the boom of my heartbeat thundering in my ears.
She sets the letter on my desk. “I’ll stay until I’ve trained a replacement.”
“Wait. Hold on. This isn’t—” Fuck. I can’t even think straight. How can she leave me like this?
Maybe you shouldn’t have been such an asshole to her all the time, a smart-aleck voice pipes up in my head.
But I had to be. I needed that protective wall between us.
I grab the envelope from my desk and thrust it toward her. “Think about it some more before you make a decision.”
She shakes her head, her earrings sparkling at me. “I’ve already thought about it plenty.”
Somehow that makes it so much fucking worse. Here I was, oblivious, while she was pulling away.
“I appreciate getting to work for such a successful company,” she goes on, “but I need a change of pace. A change of environment. Something less demanding.”
My chest is burning. It feels hard to breathe. I can’t let her go. She’s the reason I look forward to coming into work every morning. She makes every day better. Without her, life will be…fuck, I don’t even know. I can’t remember what my life was like before she came into it. Colorless. Repetitive. Something like that.
But how can I convince her to stay? What am I supposed to do, promise to be less of a hard-ass? Make friendly small-talk withher every morning? That’s only going to make me fall for her harder.
