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“They’re addictive,” I said, then tapped a finger on my chin. “How long do you plan on being here?”
She looked a little startled. “Uh,” she said.
“Because I want you to stay as long as you want,” I said. “Just to be clear. I mean, even as long as it takes for this stuff with Zeke to be over.”
She seemed relieved. “That’d be good,” she said. “I know it’s like an enormous imposition for me to stay here with you, but I feel a lot safer, you know.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re staying here for as long as it takes.”
“You only want me to stay because you hope we’ll get naked and sleep together again,” she said, and stretched out on the couch languidly, like a cat in the sun. “I see right through you.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Can you blame me? We had some very, very hot sex.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m amazing.”
I laughed to cover my relief, grabbed an unopened box of cookies, and joined her on the couch, pushing her feet aside to make room.
17
Jude
Slowly, the office began to fill up with people.
It was almost surreal. One day, I was sitting at the conference room table right in the middle of the room, and the next there were cubicles full of people, with tasks, and ideas, and real lives, and the place began to feel like a place of work, instead of like a mausoleum.
There were rumors. I couldn’t help but hear them. People talked about Hal and the other security guys. They wondered what a cookie company needed with a private security firm—which is exactly what I told Bret would happen. Except nobody seemed bothered by it enough to reject the job offer, and one by one, all my favorite interviews turned into new employees.
Lisa sat across from me in my office one morning. She had a tablet and a notebook filled with scribblings in her basically incomprehensible handwriting. I took a peek once, but couldn’t understand more than every third word, and gave up pretty quickly trying to decipher what the heck was going on. I figured she’d translate the best ideas for me sooner or later anyway.
“I’m thinking soft launch,” she said. “Seed some stories into the local media about the Fluke Company bringing jobs back to America, about how we want to do traditional British biscuits, but with an American twist, that sort of thing.”
“Are we doing that?” I asked, frowning a little. “I thought we were sticking to the original recipes.”
She waved a hand like she was warding off flies. “Immaterial,” she said. “We just want to get some coverage, you know? But we don’t want to become that foreign company, either. We want to come off as a good, old-fashioned factory that’s bringing classic blue-collar jobs back to a region that’s slowly bled all those jobs away over the last thirty years.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “What else were you thinking?”
“Tours,” she said. “Giveaways. We’ll need a digital team, you know, for Facebook outreach. We’ll need a snarky Gen Z to run the Twitter. Brands get ton of traction if they have a crazy social media presence.”
“I’m not sure you know Lady Fluke very well,” I said, trying to imagine the Lady reacting to anything remotely outside the rigid sphere of proper business discourse. She probably wouldn’t like some young girl tweeting about how “thicc” the biscuits are, or something like that.
“Don’t tell her then,” Lisa said, shrugging like it was no big deal, but the idea of not telling Lady Fluke hadn’t really crossed my mind. Everything I did so far was run past her, or at least forwarded to her secretary and her multitude of assistants. She didn’t micromanage, and approved everything I did with a rubber stamp, including whatever money I asked for, but I wanted to make sure she was aware of whatever I did at the very least.
But maybe Lisa was right. The Fluke Company did very well in England, but they wanted to break into a new country, and that meant rethinking the way they pitched their product.
“All right, I’ll think about it,” I said, and shook my head. “We’re still only half staffed at best right now though. Maybe we need to put off any soft launch for another month or two.”
“That’s fine,” Lisa said, “but I still need to get planning. Otherwise, what are you paying me for?”
“Fair enough,” I said, smiling, and stretched my legs. Ever since I moved in with Bret—not moved in, no, can’t think that way, just living with him temporarily for protection—I’ve been sleeping better than I had in years. Maybe it was knowing he was a room over, and could be there in a second if something went wrong, or maybe it was all that pent-up sexual energy and tension that seethed around us like boiling water that made me complete exhausted, but either way, I felt good. I was happier and more content than I had been in a long while.
