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“You know you’re more than that.” Her voice softened and I take a breath. “You’re more than just a mailman, Warren.”
“I know that.”
“No, I mean it,” she insists. “Those poems, the ones you wrote for me, they’re art. They’re beautiful. Not very many people can write poetry. I sure can’t.”
“I liked the one you picked.”
“Well, Vanessa Benitez knows what she’s talking about. It made me think of you.”
“I made your heart unbend?” I ask, keeping my tone light, but her answer… her answer will mean something.
“You make my heartmove,” she tells me softly, and it’s the only thing I need to hear before I roll over her and show her how much her words mean.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees, but to be quite upfront and completely truthful, you make my body forget it has knees at all.”
-Tyler Knott Gregson
Jane
Game night tonight? Please! You haven’t come yet!I discreetly read the text from April under the table where I sit with the board at the long conference table. They drone on and on and I’m paying attention, but I already know a majority of what they’re talking about anyway.
“We need to get the lawyers on this European deal,” David Crouch, CIO of Leads Energy and someone who really, really doesn’t like that I’m in the position I’m in, says to me.
“I’m already on it. I’ve got them briefed and they’re just waiting for us to move,” I reply, keeping my tone calm and bored.
He bristles and hides his annoyance—barely. I can imagine that being bossed by someone twenty years younger than you is hard, but there was nothing I could do about it and didn’t plan to care. I did my job, and I did it damn well.
I learned early on to keep my emotions buried deep whenever I was in these meetings, showing emotions made the older men think you were ‘hysterical’ even when the men were the biggest bunch of babies in this room.
There were two other women on the board, one much older and one around my age. They weren’t friendly with me, though I wish they would be.
Molly Steinback was the one close to my age and was one of the many directors of the board. She’d worked at the company for many years before she made it where she was. She was smart and cunning, took no bullshit and wore her resting bitch face with honor.
I really liked her but had never admitted it.
Maybe I would make more of an effort.
Since dating Warren—still in secret, for now—I had found myself wishing for things that I never did before. Wishing that this company did things differently. We were a green energy company, but how many people were we helping? How many of the charities we supported were actually getting real support?
I hated charity dinners with a passion, would prefer that our efforts reach the real community instead of just catering to the men and women who could throw money around like they didn’t care about where their next meal came from, because they didn’t have to care. They knew they would eat every day; they knew they would have shelter, knew they wouldn’t be hurt or abused.
There was so much more we could do, and I was starting to—privately—brainstorm these ideas.
I knew who I could talk to about these efforts, as she was one of the people who pushed for specific charities to be funded every year, and she was sitting at this table.
I send April a quick text back,I will be there!And vow to myself to keep that promise.
Finally, we end our meeting and I move fast, cutting Molly off before she can escape the room and say, “Would you come to my office please?”
Molly almost glares but reins it in with a stiff nod. She hates that I was her boss. That we were of similar age, that I had this job because of privilege, as she and many others saw it, not because I worked my ass off for it.
I hated that. Wanted to prove them wrong in more ways than just getting my job done.
Because I did get it done. I did. I worked my ass off and proved it every single day.
Molly follows me to my office, and I give Lisa a wink before entering the room. “Have a seat,” I tell Molly and take the one behind my desk.
