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But to my great surprise, one of the corners of his mouth went up ever so slightly. “How practical of you,” he said tonelessly, his eyes roaming all over my face like he was trying to find something. It took all of the will power I had just to stare back at him flatly until he turned away and kept right on talking.
It was like those dark eyes could look right through me, seeing everything that I fought so hard to keep private and secret. My blood rushed to my ears and for a moment all I could hear was its thundering. I could feel my body trying to lean towards him, pulled by his gravitas which suddenly seemed so inescapable…
“Sir will do. Now, as I was saying…”
I jerked my mind back to attention, blushing furiously. What the hell was that?! But I didn’t have much time to question it, because then he went off into more directions which I jotted down diligently into my phone. But while almost all of my brain power was concentrated on that, the deeper, more subconscious parts were taking in everything about the powerful man in front of me.
His broad shoulders, his deep voice, that salt and pepper hair that spoke of experience and confidence. If he wasn’t my boss, if I hadn’t read horror story after horror story about him, he might have checked off all of my boxes.
Not that I had boxes, of course. I was too busy surviving, then studying, then graduating then job hunting to ever have any sort of romantic boxes.
But if I did have time for them, Mr. Billionaire Silver Fox would totally be in all of them.
Too bad nothing like that would ever happen for me.
“Surprise!”
I nearly dropped the sandwich platter I was hauling up to the meeting room for the little mini-conference Mr. Fitzgerald was having with some other big-wigs that I wasn’t important enough to know the name off. Taking a deep breath, I looked around the tower of food I was holding to see several of my coworkers, including Chris.
“What’s going on?” I asked, worried I had somehow forgotten an important event. I couldn’t have, could I? Sure, I was still figuring out a lot of the kinks of my job to make it perfectly streamlined, but I didn’t think I could do something so egregious as miss an entire celebrat-
“It’s your second week of work!” Helga from HR cheered. “Congratulations, you’ve made it farther than twenty percent of Mr. Fitzgerald’s assistants!”
I blinked at her dully. “How many get through this week?”
She paled at that. “Um, about thirty.”
I nodded, hurrying past them to the meeting room that I was still setting up. “We can celebrate when I make it through that then.”
I felt kind of bad for breezing past them, but I had work to do. And I certainly wasn’t going to make it if I paused in my duties to party like I’d earned something. I hadn’t really earned anything; I was just doing my job. No need for pomp and circumstance there.
Besides, I didn’t want anybody thinking that they could get too chummy with me. I enjoyed my privacy. Hard work had gotten me this far whereas intrapersonal relationships had just taught me from a young age that trusting someone was a bad idea. It would be better off if they just let me go about the day and do my incredibly hectic job.
By the time I finished setting up the food, the chairs, the projector and turning the heated coffee carafes on, there was still a half hour left before things were due to start. Just enough time to check in with Mr. Fitzgerald, who still hadn’t told me exactly what he wanted me to do for the rest of the day.
I had assumed that maybe it was a Monday thing, and that he would have instructions for me after his meeting -which was scheduled to be several hours. But, if he didn’t want me present for it, I could certainly get ahead on a lot of other tasks.
So, I found myself doing something I hadn’t had to do in my previous week of working there, and that was returning to his office for more instructions.
I allowed myself the comfort of wringing my hands while I was in the empty confines of the elevator. Truth be told, I was much more comfortable with the endless running back and forth and fetch quests than spending any time face to face with Mr. Fitzgerald. That seemed to be where most of the previous assistant had made a mistake. The term out of sight, out of mind definitely was a principle to live off of for the job.
But I couldn’t just sit there with my thumb up my butt, waiting for him to get out of the meeting and then find out that I was supposed to take notes or prepare gift baskets for people or, I didn’t know, find a damn unicorn or something. So, seeing him in person was the most uncomfortable, but ultimately most practical decision.
