Page 9 of Leverage & Obedience

I’ve also never been more on top of my work, which is its own kind of unsettling. But the really unexpected part? I actually like the job itself.

I prep his afternoon calendar and draft responses to three emails sitting in his inbox. I know his style: direct with no fluff, but there’s always a line at the end that reads like a real person and not just business. He never asked me to draft his emails, but I started doing it, and he didn’t tell me to stop. In Bren language, that means I got it right.

My phone rings, and I walk a confused vendor through an invoice discrepancy. At 11:30, I open the Wexler attachment Bren is sending to a partner at noon and catch a typo—$4,800,000 on a deal that should read $48,000,000. I fix it and email him the correct file.

This is the part of temp life that sucks. Sometimes you land somewhere, and you’re genuinely good at it. I could love this job. The actual work, not just the fringe benefits of fucking my boss. If this weren’t a three-month placement, I’d fight to keep this job.

But it’s temporary, so I shove the thought away.

My intercom buzzes.

“Lily.”

“Yes, Bren?”

“Push my 11:00 to 2:30.”

“On it.”

Two sentences with zero personal undertones shouldn’t make me press my thighs together. My pulse takes longer than the rescheduling does to slow down.

When Rachel leans against my cubicle wall, she’s holding a takeout bag in one hand and grinning. “I got street tacos from that place I was telling you about down the street. Want some?”

“Yes, please. Save me from my turkey sandwich.”

We end up at the table by the window in the break room—the one that has unofficially become ours over the past week. Rachel is exactly the kind of person I gravitate toward and then carefully keep at arm’s length. She’s a junior analyst who’s been at the firm for two years and describes herself as the youngest person in this office other than me by at least a decade. She puts hot sauce on everything, including her salad yesterday. At least the street tacos go well with hot sauce this time.

I like her. That’s also a problem. I’m not supposed to be making friends that I could see myself being sad to leave.

“So you’re here for another two and a half months?” Rachel asks, mirroring my thoughts, and drizzles more hot sauce on her taco, like it could possibly need it.

“Three months. Give or take.” I shrug and flash her a grin. “Just long enough for you to get attached, and then I vanish like a ghost.”

She laughs. “That sounds like a terrible deal for me.” She tilts her head. “Raleigh was the one before this, right?”

“Raleigh, then Atlanta. Before that, an unpleasant winter in DC that we do not discuss.” I take a sip of water.

“How long in Raleigh?”

“Three months.”

“And Atlanta?”

“Four.”

I can tell she is doing the math in her head. Yeah, I move around a lot.

“I’ve been told I’m charming in small doses,” I offer, filling the quiet.

She laughs and launches into the Kevin banana bread saga. Kevin, one of the senior analysts, hit reply-all bragging about his late grandmother’s prize-winning recipe, then went home and grabbed the cumin jar instead of the cinnamon jar. He brought a loaf in the next day, beaming. Half the office spit it into napkins. By 3 p.m., Kevin was wandering around offering seconds, mystified that nobody had touched a second piece. No one had the heart to tell him for weeks.

An hour after lunch, I need more coffee. Right when I’m about to walk into the break room, I hear Rachel, talking to the officemanager, Dana, in low murmurs. I catch the tail end of their conversation.

“...his wife. Almost eight years ago now.”

“Aneurysm, right? Out of nowhere.”

“Bren hasn’t been the same since. Something in him just...shut down.”